film | sound | performance   

                                                         



essays


2    Between City and Self


ghida anouti
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American University of Beirut * Spring 2019

Auditory Escape





Collaborator: Ralph Karam
Location: FS1 building fire-rated stairwell
Advised by Rana Haddad



By manipulating the physical properties of two random ready-made objects, a broken cassette tape and a latex prophylactic, an interesting variety of sounds emerges. Following an interest to generate new functions from seemingly mundane, manufactured and mass-produced objects, the discovery of the sounds of non-musical objects becomes a point of investigation. By stretching, pulling, scratching, rustling, snapping, rubbing, flicking, squishing, tapping and shaking the ready-mades, varying frequencies and tonal qualities of unique sounds emanate. The objects oscillate, crack, vibrate, clink, jingle, ring, collide, expand, slip, tear, twist, bounce, pop and rustle.

The acute aural attention to what most would normally deem mere ‘noise’ transforms into an extensive experimentation with sounds as instruments and components of musical compositions. Adopting unconventional methods for creating sound opens up an unlimited world of musical experimentation and composition, one that utilizes random methods of extracting sound to make a deliberate, determinate and specific musical score. In the attempt to record these sounds, we find ourselves in search of silence, which seems to be an almost unattainable feat in the context of the city. Even in the most secluded of spaces, the hum of an electric generator does not fail to pierce the search for silence. Ultimately, two spaces present the suitable conditions for recording – a bathroom and an emergency staircase. Accordingly, the ready-mades are recorded between a bathroom floor, a tub, and an insulated stairwell.

The process of recording provides insight into the auditory landscapes of the city upon our quest for silence. Following the recording comes the arrangement of the sounds in processes of mixing, splicing, dubbing, rerecording and manipulating pitches, amplitudes, timbres and durations. The final five arranged tracks each attempt to retrace and echo a personal memory in the city through a methodological sequence of sounds. Bringing back the sounds to a recording space with favourable audial conditions, the tracks are exhibited in an emergency stairwell. Arranged to entice the stair users to stop and listen on the route to evacuation – a perilous affair in juxtaposition with an intimate, introspective act of listening – the recordings brings memories of the city into the space, creating a soundscape of auditory connections between individuals and the objects that equally inhabit their city spaces.