A Consequence of Sounds
20210404 - Band Practice
There’s one saxophonist who usually shows up first. I first heard them a year ago, when they started popping up on the bleachers beside the baseball field in the park at the end of our block. We had just opened all the windows in our apartment for the first time with that jolt of optimism that comes from the first day when the temperature rises above 50 degrees in New England – practically shorts weather. At some point another saxophone joined them. By mid-summer they lost some of their shyness and gained a larger brass section, part of a drumline. Having outgrown the bleachers, they stand in the flat expanse of the playfield now. Adhering to what I am sure are particularly-researched COVID guidelines for their specific instruments, they draw an aural crop-circle in the park. The drummers (between one and three, usually) cluster together, the horns and other brass drift further apart. If the other park occupants have started to cluster less cautiously as the months have passed, the band kids have held tight in formation. They show up every Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, around three or four pm and play for hours. I’m pretty obsessed with the band kids.
Cities themselves are often compared to music. Jane Jacobs famously described what happens on city sidewalks as a form of dancing [1]. My personal favorite version of this argument comes from Vijay Iyer, who says:
Cities exist because we – that is, “humankind” – are able to build things together, and music was among the first things we ever built together. The capacities to coordinate and synchronize our actions, to incorporate each other’s rhythms, to make choices together in real time – to groove and to improvise – these are human skills, not merely musical skills. [2]
Iyer goes on to point out that music is really just the sound of ourselves in un-silent interaction with each other, something we keep doing not just because we can (or we must), but because we like it. The polyphony of life and music translates to the language of cities not because places have singular soundtracks but because of the way the designed (composed?) spaces of the city are met with the improvised behaviors of people who occupy and pass through them.
Basic jam session schematic
It’s a good metaphor, but it’s also a very visceral reality. Take the band kids as an example. We can look at the sites they have played - the bleachers and the playfield. The bleachers were planned and designed for observing the baseball field they face, but in the eyes of our saxophone friends they also roughly approximate a practice room during a time when the more purpose-built (though probably still somewhat multipurpose) rooms in schools have been closed for months. As someone who isn’t terribly musically inclined, I can’t say for sure what makes the bleachers a good practice room. I can imagine part of it is as simple as them being large furniture in a park mostly oriented towards more active forms of exercise. It might be that their stepped forms let players stagger themselves in a way that helps them see each other better. It also might be that they don’t want to get hit by baseballs or volleyballs. On the playfield, the clear advantage of the siting is space - it takes a decent amount of room to distance each player from the other, and there’s a notable zone of emptiness in the middle of them all that no one else in the park really tries to cross. At the same time, I doubt that the multiuse playfield was particularly designed for this type of playing.
Which leads us to another reading of sounds and space - the band kids playing jazz in the park changes the park. The way they play - how many of them there are, where they situate themselves - has some visible, physical impacts of course; but more interesting is how the presence of jazz music played by (high school?) musicians on certain kinds of days at a specific time alters the ways that the park is experienced. The band kids aren’t the only musicians at the park. Lately there’s a persistent hum of pick up basketball, little league baseball, intramural volleyball, and general sitting chatter. These activities and the soundscape they produce can sometimes feel like a perpetual motion machine, stirring the neighborhood up into a flurry of activity.
20210418 - Band Practice
The cacophony of the park feels healthy despite the ongoing public health crisis. It’s a great example of how sound can be attractive, and how many intersecting uses can share a programmed space. It is also interesting considering how often music is deployed to do the opposite. Some of these aural hostile architectures are purpose built - like the high pitched noises deployed to keep teenagers away, tuned to a frequency only young people can hear [3]. Others are adapted to new uses: classical music is blasted as an anti-teen tactic, “baby shark” is played on a loop to keep absolutely everyone moving as quickly through space as possible, but especially to harass unhoused residents [4]. These are the more passive examples of the weaponization of sound, which takes a more active and literal form in the deployment of long range acoustic devices (LRAD) by the police against protesters last summer [5]. If the physicality of public space isn’t hostile enough to deter people from gathering, sound is an easy addition.
This plays out at a number of scales - we all have different affinities for levels of ambient noise and preferences when it comes to music, but while we might like living within walking distance from our favorite bars, we don’t particularly want to live above them if last call is at 4am. It is no accident that communities of color were historically designed into adjacencies with loud, dangerous industrial uses and transit lines with trains outside of bedroom windows and airplane flight paths overhead. Sound is a natural byproduct of living together, but who gets to call the shots on what’s acceptable or even livable has everything to do with power tied up in design and development. While the band kids in the park have fans in high places (me, in my 3rd floor apartment), music has been a flash point in conflict between residents in changing neighborhoods, as was the case in Washington DC with go-go music at a corner cellphone store, or more broadly with 311 calls for noise complaints and loud music in NYC [6][7]. The stakes of sound in cities feel high because they constitute music. There is no way to be together without sound, and whether it’s the running of a neighbor’s kid that filters up through your walls or the sounds of a wild party filtering through your windows, it can be both profoundly comforting and tremendously annoying to be reminded that we’re never alone. But there’s magic in the perfect harmonies, the way that the beat of the basketball court matches the bassline of the trombone, the rattle of the bus with the chatter of a school field trip, the wind in the trees outside your window and the traffic on your street. It’s about - it has to be about - balancing those moments, designing for them, even. What a lonely place the world would be without other people’s noises.
[1] Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, 1993.
[2] https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/05/new-york-stories-vijay-iyer
[6] https://www.theroot.com/d-c-fights-back-against-colonizers-who-want-to-ban-go-1833913541
[7] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lamvo/gentrification-complaints-311-new-york
