Transects

Transect: London

John F. Barber
2017, London, England

00:00 Charing Cross Station announcements
00:54 Fakto singing in Westminster underground entrance tunnel
02:12 New Gate rail station ambience
03:43 Goldsmiths University soundscape
03:56 Tiny Sounds performance, Goldsmiths University
07:43 Steelyard Passage sound installation, Southwark Bridge, Thames River
08:28 Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich
09:17 Pageantry at Buckingham Palace
11:19 Hyde Park soundscape
11:43 Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park
15:06 Abbey Road crossing soundscape
15:43 Prime Meridian, Greenwich, soundscape
16:33 London Underground toward and arriving at Victoria Station
18:03 Southbank soundwalk
24:00 Now Play This computer art exhibition, Somerset House
34:17 Concert, St. Martin's in the Fields
36:15 Sunday morning machine noise outside hotel
37:04 Southbank soundwalk
37:40 Now Play This computer art exhibition, Somerset House
47:20 Violin tuning in the distance
47:36 Ubiquitous black helicopter
48:34 Horse Guard, Buckingham Palace
50:18 Millenium Bridge, underneath
54:22 Millenium Bridge, walking across, north to south and back, meeting Vera Chok, soon to be famous actress
54:22 Prime Meridian, Greenwich
56:48 Pub bell, last call

Metadata

Object: audio file
Format: MPEG audio
Bit Rate: 320 kbs
Sample Rate: 44,100 kHz
Duration: 57:00
Created: 2013
Creator: John F. Barber
Original/Edited Files Available: Yes
Rights and Status: All rights reserved. Available for broadcast, installation, exhibition, and/or publication with permission.
Image: ***

Background

I have created several episodes for Framework Radio, an international showcase of field recording, phonography, and sound hunting, curated by international sound, performance, and radio artist Patrick McGinley (aka murmer).
#829 Southside Soundwalk, 22-29 January 2023
#808 Dawn Birds, Light Traffic, Melodic Machines, 3-9 July 2022
#738 COVID Dreamscapes, 13-19 December 2020
#711 Coho Crossing, 26 April - 2 May 2020
#658 Rainstorm Reveries, 21-27 October 2018
#623 In Progress, 17 December 2017 - 13 January 2018
#583 Transect: London, 29 January 2016 - 4 February 2017
#542 Water, Waves, Dreams, 31 January - 6 February 2016
#433 Between Sleep and Dreams, 9-15 September 2013
#405 Ambient Pulsations, 6 February - 6 March 2013
#389 Tell Me A Story about Meditation, 23-30 September 2012
#386 Meditation, 2-8 September 2012
#381 Contact, 12-14 July 2012

Other Transects

Transect: 9/11 Air Traffic Control

John F. Barber
2016
This transect follows civilian and military air traffic control the morning of 11 September 2001 as four airplanes were hijacked and turned into terrorist weapons. As you listen, note how unprepared everyone was for this event and how the air traffic control system struggled to deal with the challenges. A full transcript is provided by Rutgers University Law Review. LEARN more.

Transect: Airport

John F. Barber
2015, Multiple airports
This transect follows a line through a collage of international airports, from arrival via light rail, through the concourse, through security, and to the waiting area for a departing flight.

Transect: Asheville

John F. Barber
October 2014, Asheville, North Carolina
This transect follows a line through the center of downtown Asheville, North Carolina, sampling the Bascilica of Saint Lawrence clock, Scott Knickerbocker, in town for an ethnomusic conference, playing banjo in front of the Flat Iron sculpture, the violin loops and drums of To All My Dear Friends, the jugband sounds of The Carolina Catskins, the Asheville Gay Pride Festival, street buskers, and the spontaneous drum circle in Pritchard Park.

Transect: Copenhagen

John F. Barber
August 2014, Copenhagen, Denmark
Walking through Copenhagen. Playing with a set of automatic doors and a corrugated cardboard wall covering, with a broken alarm in the background. Wheeled suitcases on cobblestone streets. A street crossing alarm. Automobile and horse carriage traffic. Metro announcements. Pedestrian ambiance around the Vor Frue Plads fountain, street sounds, a marching band and squad of soldiers passing on their way to a guard changing ceremony at the Odd Fellows Palace, the tinkling of a bicycle bell.

Exhibitions
Transects. DivFuse Gallery, London, 4-6 February 2022

Transect: Jardin du Luxembourg

John F. Barber
August 2013, Paris, France
Created beginning in 1612 by Marie dé Medici, Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden), Paris, France, features statuary, fountains, terraces, gardens, tree-lined pathways, tennis and basketball courts, brasseries, bands, and boles. All can be heard in this transect.

Exhibitions
Transects. DivFuse Gallery, London, 4-6 February 2022

Transect: Maker Faire

John F. Barber
September 2014, Portland, Oregon
This transect of the Portland Mini Maker Faire includes a railroad line, a two-deck flyover for Interstate Highway 5, and sounds created by the various makers and their artifacts.

Transect: Milwaukee

John F. Barber
June 2014, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
A rhythmic escalator in the Boston Store, a bridge lifting over the Milwaukee River, and a thunder and lightening storm with rain on my hotel window.

Transect: Paris

John F. Barber
August 2013, Paris, France
This transect follows a line from inside Cathédral Notre Dame de Paris to a neighborhood bordering the Panthéon.

Responses

I saw an announcement about your exhibit in London, looked up Transects, and started listening, and wow, these are so cool . . . I love "Transect: Paris," and got riveted by "Transect: 9/11 Air Traffic Control," and there went the morning! Your audio work makes me feel like wanting to pay better attention to sound and recording it to make sound narratives like yours — just like some people's photographs make me want to take better pictures. Anyway, congrats on the exhibit and on all this terrific work.
—Richard Holeton, author of Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

Artist Statement

Transects are lines drawn across some area along which counts are made, generally of plant or animal life. I am indebted to Belfast sound artist Kate Carr for adapting transects to provide access to soundscapes. See for example, framework:afield #536 (6 December 2015).

In my practice, I use transects for recording interaction with soundscapes. But, rather than record everything, I sample sounds along the transect as ear witness to the site and journey. I use the transect to investigate sonic flows and mixing, changes in the soundscape, and to document particular or characteristic sounds, all with an ear to the narratives they may promote. The resulting sound collages are worthy of close listening.

My practice of creating transects draws on the features and affordances of soundscapes, soundwalks, and sound maps. Soundscapes are the multiple, overlapping, sounds one might hear in an acoustic environment. Soundwalks promote listening to a soundscape by walking to sound sources. Sound maps plot sound sources at specific locations and promote listening to targeted sounds within a soundscape. Transects sample particular or characteristic sounds along a path through a space or place, which, when combined, provide a mix or collage of the soundscape. LEARN more about soundscapes, soundwalks, and sound maps.

A common theme is walking, which, according to French sociologist Michel de Certau is a pedestrian activity described as or compared to "enunciation" of "statements" and "stories." "[T]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered" (de Certeau 1988, 97). The story of spatial practices "begins on ground level, with footsteps" (de Certeau 1988, 97) and "the art of turning phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)" (de Certeau 1988, 100).

"The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmnner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the "geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (''ways of operating"), to "another spatiality,, (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city. (de Certeau 93)

The practice of soundwalking relates directly to this idea of a narrative potential embedded in moving across a space, both in the classic methodology of acoustic ecology (See Hildegard Westerkamp 1974) and current re-examinations by Andra McCartney and (Paquette & McCartney 2012, McCartney 2012). "Soundwalks take the everyday action of walking, and everyday sounds, and bring the attention of the audience to these often ignored events, practices, and processes." (McCartney 2014, 214).

Works Cited

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. 1984.

Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Soundwalking." Sound Heritage, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1974, pp. 18-27.
Available "Soundwalking,"
Republished 2007 in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Edited by Angus Carlyle. Paris: Entendre, pp. 49-54.

McCartney, Andra. "Soundwalking: Creating Moving Environmental Sound Narratives". The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 2. Edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek. 2014, pp. 212-237.