MRO

Site:

Manhattan Ave Street End Park is a quiet waterfront at the northern end of Greenpoint on Newtown Creek, and estuary dividing Brooklyn and Queens. The park serves as a refreshing touch to the expansive and dilapidated industrial scenery along the waterfront. Newton Creek, once a  prosperous ecosystem, has recently been designated as a Superfund site after a 30 million gallon oil spill.

This video is a somewhat melancholy (understatement) depiction of Newton Creek, culminating with a hopefull vision of the future.

The City Concealed: Newtown Creek from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

What I Will Be Making:

I am proposing a sound awareness project that employs the natural sounds of the area, creating an extended and subtle sonic environment. I find myself attracted to the inevitable synthesis of natural and industrial sound. Even in seemingly natural and remote environments, one can often hear the ambiance of industry, be it a jet, a bridge, a tunnel, etc. Manhattan Ave Street End Park, displaying a more extreme version of industry, is a prime example (both sonically and visually) of this synthesis.

The goal of the installation is in two parts:

1) to highlight the transition from natural to polluted

2) to blend natural and synthetic sound

As a devout San Franciscan, I am using the Wave Organs (an Exploratrium installation) as inspiration for my project. The Wave Organs are pipes coming up from the bay that project a number of “bandpass filtered” water sounds.

A gate/fence, comprised of a series of hollow pipes, surrounds Manhattan Ave Street End Park. My goal is to turn the hollow pipes into speakers, projecting the amplified sound of the polluted water.

I plan to use this section of the gate for the installation (excuse my drawing skills):

The pipe on the left will play the signal coming directly from the water. A microphone will pick up that sound and relay over to the next pipe (1), and a microphone on pipe (1) will relay the sound over to pipe (2), and so on and so forth (think Lucier and Tudor). At pipe (5), the fully saturated sound will be mixed with the fully saturated sound of a Buchla Synthesizer sample (a patch made to sound similar to the filtered water sound). The original Buchla Sample starts at the right and works its way up to pipe (5) in the same fashion.

There are spaces between each pipe where the listener can observe the transition, pollution, and transformation of the sounds.

How I Will Make This:

I will use a hydrophone to pick up the sound of the water.

I will use sound exciters to convert the pipes ito a series of speakers. Below is a picture of a past project I installed using these devices. Sound exciters are transducers without a resonating body. They turn whatever object they vibrate into the speaker itself.

I will need 2 6 channel amplifiers to power the sound exciters.

To power everything I plan on using something like a car battery.

Bootleg Version:

I did a mock up version of the installation in my living room. I taped together a series of copper pipes, attached a sound exciter to the center, and projected amplified water sounds. I recorded the sound through the resonance of the pipe, put that recording into my computer, and played back the recorded version (again, think Lucier), until natural resonant frequencies of the pipe emerged. I find this process especially interesting in conveying the “pollution” of the natural water sounds; as the sample becomes polluted, it inversely takes on the natural sounds of the pipe. Below are the recorded and re-recorded takes (organized respectively):

And here is the orignal Buchla Synthesizer sample (that would undergo the same process):

Conclusion:

I am motivated to pursue this project for a number of reasons. My primary focus, which has long been a personal creative pursuit, is to provide a sound environment that combines the natural and the industrial. In past projects I have recorded the sounds of creeks under bridges and tunnels and combined those soundscapes further with mechanical sounds (mixed into the preamp input of a Buchla synth). I am particularly excited in using Newtown Creek, which has over time become  a synthesis of the natural and industrial via pollution. Life has almost ubiquitously become a combination of these experiences, New York City being the shining example. The purpose of this project is not to “save” Newtown Creek, rather to highlight these experiences. And who knows, maybe 50 years from now the hollow steel gates will open up to a diving board.