Arts This Week: Author Talk at New Dominion Bookshop
By Ben Larsen
Ella Powell:
On Friday, January 16 from 7-8 pm, join Karen Van Lengen and Jim Welty at New Dominion Bookshop for an author-talk on their newly published book, Soundscape Architecture.
Karen Van Lengen:
This is Karen Van Lengen and I am professor and dean emeritus of architecture from the University of Virginia. I have always been interested in sound. For example, I can remember the sound of my childhood home just as much as I can remember what it looked like. And then I spent 30 years in New York, and there are so many interesting sonic experiences of iconic buildings of architecture, for example, Grand Central Terminal.
So if you’ve been to New York, you’ve probably been to Grand Central Terminal, and it has this amazing oceanic sound to it. So, I can’t really think about Grand Central without hearing the sound of it. And so this has been part of my understanding of architecture, and yet we don’t really focus on sound in the development of architectural projects, either in school or in offices. The perception of space is based on, not only a visual understanding of space, but a sonic one as well. And fast forward to this time of Soundscape Architecture. I received a fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Technology and humanities from UVA. And it was a two-year fellowship, and I began working with the director then Worthy Martin, who was amazing and just really helpful. I was out of my element. I didn’t know how to address a project on sound in architecture.
Why? Because we don’t really do that in architecture. And he was amazing. He said, “just start and I’ll see you next week.” In the course of these two years, we managed to put together a really interesting interactive website that’s still up. The interactive part doesn’t work as well, but basically everything else is still there. And we developed a street of iconic buildings in architecture that have very specific sounds. I was trying to figure out, how do I record the sounds, create new compositions for that space, and then animate the sounds in the compositions? And he entered the project at that point and has worked ever since, collaboratively with me on these projects. And he did the animations. I draw the sound objects, and then he would do the overall ambiance of the space, and then we would put the sound objects into the animations.
The final part of this is that Jim would take the animations and pull out from the animations, basically the ambient backgrounds, but then would reconfigure the sound objects so that we had digital paintings of the memory of that long process. And they’re quite beautiful. We had an exhibition of them in Richmond a couple of years ago. They really represent the process of listening to space. It recalls that process, and I think, hopefully encourages people to begin to take off their headsets, etc, and listen to the space around them. I studied for my architectural licensing exam in New York Public Library on 42nd street. I was sharing this space in the world with all these other people doing different things. And in today’s world, the sharing of public space and being together is really important. Loving to go there, it’s not deadly silent. It’s filled with people coming and going, and it’s reassuring somehow.
Ella Powell:
When you hand drew the sounds, does it take the form of a wave, like how you would typically see a sound recording, or did you kind of have more agency in how you depict it?
Karen Van Lengen:
So that’s a really important question. With sounds, it’s completely interpretive. It’s an art form. Then it’s your art form. There’s no set way to do it. I would listen to those sounds, four or five seconds of a particular sound, over and over and over again, until the idea of where that sound came from, almost disappeared, and it just became a sonic piece. And I would just draw it and draw it and draw it and draw it, and then I’d stop and I’d look at the drawings, and something would come through in each one of the drawings, even if they were a little bit different. Parts of our first website were done as if to do the analysis. So, we would say, how big is the New York Public Library? What is the volume? How many people were in the room when I did the recordings? What time of day did I do the recordings? And what are the materials of the space? Because those are the contributing factors to the kind of soundscape you are going to hear.
Ella Powell:
So, I guess these exercises that you’re describing, is that something that you would often share with a lot of your classes at UVA?
Karen Van Lengen:
I taught a seminar on sound in architecture for several years, and I also was a design studio teacher, so I introduced different things in those two different courses with the design students. We would start studio with a 10 minute moment of silence. They could listen and draw. They could just listen, but they couldn’t use their iPhones. They couldn’t put headsets on. And interestingly enough, a lot of them just loved that. For me, and I think for other students as well, it stops the day. You know, we’re all in this enormous flow, and we’re flowing at a very fast rate compared to 100 years ago or 50 years ago, and everyone’s multitasking, etc, listening to this, listening to that, in a way, stopping for 10 minutes and just listening to the space around you is really helpful. It puts you in the space that you’re in, and it has become more pronounced than ever that we are a visual art and we don’t have to be digital. Technologies could sponsor the soundscapes of architectural projects, but they just don’t. And so this is a push to include it, because it’s really important. We’re having a book signing at the New Dominion Bookstore on the Mall in Charlottesville, and so it’s just coming out right now. For a long time, we believed that the only way to present this work was in a website, because you can hear, see the animations, you can listen to different compositions, and so a book doesn’t as easily lend itself to that, even though we have QR codes to get to the animations in the book. So we decided to do the book when we thought it would be appropriate to show that entire cycle from listening into the visual arts. In the book there are several essays by me and by other authors that comment on this work, and so it’s really interesting to have their voices as well.
Ella Powell:
Is there anything else in particular that you’d like to share about this project, or just the message behind Soundscape Architecture?
Karen Van Lengen:
I would just say that I hope the work is important for people to begin to think about how listening in the environment is really important, particularly in today’s world. It affects how we communicate. It affects if we’re present in the world. It affects what we can discover. And there are many ways to get at that, but I’m sort of hoping that by reading the book, one can get more excited about that idea. I would kind of end by saying there are two heroes. John Cage, who was a very experimental artist and musician of the mid 20th century. And he developed a very famous piece called four minutes and 33 seconds. And he performed it in 1952 in Woodstock, New York, he walked up to the piano, closed the piano, and for four minutes and 33 seconds, the audience listened to the ambient sounds. The other person who I think is worth noting is Helen Keller, because, as you know, she was born with hearing and sight, and then was very ill as a very young child, and lost both of those senses. When she was asked at the end of her life if she could restore one of the two senses, she said hearing and she said hearing because it’s the sense of communication where thoughts can be discussed and heard.
Ella Powell:
New Dominion Bookshop is hosting an author talk with Karen Van Lengen and Jim Welty this Friday, the 16th from 7-8pm on their new release, Soundscape Architecture. The talk will be followed by a Q and A. For more information, visit Soundscapearchitecture.com.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu For WTJU, I’m Ella Powell.
