Covert Acoustics
Thursday 8th June 2023 | Urban Room Gallery, London
On Thursday 8th June, SONCITIES researchers Ruth Bernatek and Matilde Meireles made their way from Oxford to London, to link up with UCL’s Urban Room for the sound workshop, Covert Acoustics. For this event, we were joined by a generous group of artists, researchers, local residents, and members of the public, and together we explored urban sounds in the context of surveillance and surveillance technologies that are knowingly and unknowingly encountered daily in urban space.
The theme of the workshop was conceived in response to the exhibition Testing Ground, showing at Urban Room from 31 May - 21 July. Dedicated to the work of artist-researcher duo Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards, Testing Ground uses immersive audio-visual works to interrogate contemporary and historic acts of surveillance and aerial knowledge. Tracing a through line from the Babylonian Map of the World to aerial surveillance of Belfast and Iraq by British Military, and the intensive helicopter observation now familiar across London. As the gallery is located within a site of heightened control in the city, we were frequently reminded of our own surveillance during our activities, hearing countless helicopters pass overhead!
Most powerfully, Williams and Royaards’ mix of archival footage and spatial sound, used in the series of installations, created a powerful sense of ‘being both complicit in and subject to aerial surveillance’, and it was this dynamic experience of being observer and observed, or in our case auditor and audited, that underpinned discussions throughout the day.
After brilliant talks from the gallery curator Dr Kara Blackmore and Henrietta Williams, we started off by getting to grips with acoustic ‘ways of knowing’. Matilde Meireles opened up by introducing participants to key themes and practicalities around phonographic methods and critical modes of listening, inviting us to think about how different devices such as field recorders, geophones, and electromagnetic sensors can expose the different inaudible and audible sonic layers embedded in our urban environment. At the same time, bringing our awareness to the microphone as an instrument of power, that should be used with care.
This was followed by a short interactive listening activity along the East Bank, an urban promenade near to the gallery that runs beside the water, and which is partially inaccessible to the public. We let ourselves be guided through the space by a short spatial audio work comprised of field recordings that captured both the permitted and forbidden areas of the bank. We listened to the audio using personal headphones, letting the sonic details of the track help us to critically attune our ears to the surrounding environment.
Matilde recorded the area using plural field recording techniques — binaural microphones, a geophone, a hydrophone, contact microphones and an electromagnetic sensor. The result was composed binaurally and experienced in-situ by the workshop participants. Participants were also given a script written by Ruth which augmented their experience of the site by both follow and complements the audio.
This location is already talking to you in multiple ways with multiple voices …
[00:00]
Tink, tunk, tung, tin, tin …
Crawling groan and high whine of a helicopter
circling a roundabout
[01:59]
trains inhale tracks like vacuum cleaners, expelling the excess air with bursts on horn on
direction of travel across the bridge is north to south.
[02:20]
helicopter mingles with the microenvironment of a flag-pole.
flagpole- mingles with a helicopter. Gentle whirring of a bicycle hub.
[03:08]
Squeal
[03:17]
Extraterrestrialelectromagneticinterference
[03:54]
‘sociology’
helicopter scudding heart beats
Its windy today, almost too windy to record – you don’t know it but can hear the wind blowing against my ear, outside the cup of the headphone.
[05:29]
Laughing. In front of you are two colleagues lying on the wooden steps, maybe they fancy each other.
Or is it a baby?
[06.27]
You are inside a water tank listening - to motorbikes near the kerb - through a static body of water encased in a grid of steel wire, becomes deep fast flowing water.
[08:18]
automatic warning: bollards in motion
I don’t even register the helicopter now
The man on the scooter, who plays music from a potable speaker attached to his hip is also wearing polarised pink sunglasses
Is it leaves or flags that tinkle like boats?
[09:07]
This is when we got stopped by a security guard. It's the second time today that we've been asked for identification the first was so that we could reach the waters edge
The bankside behind you is padlocked, you can't really access, but we found a way in. You can listen to its edges.
First there is a railing, then there is a path, then there are the reeds, then the wet.
THE END
From listening to East Bank, we moved on to (covert) acoustic monitoring of the same space. It is forbidden to make audio recordings on site, so we disabled the zoom recorders and used the stereo microphones to extend our natural range of hearing. Roaming independently, we documented the sounds that we heard through drawing, text and annotation but without capturing it in audio form. Back in the exhibition space, we set about collectively constructing a soundscape using the material we had gathered on site. Taking inspiration from Constructing a Soundscape, an attentive listening methodology and remapping exercise developed by Matilde Meireles, we added our sketches, texts and descriptions of distinct sound events to corresponding photographs, producing an alternative sonic mapping of the area that reflected our experience of being both complicit and subject to auditory surveillance.
Covert Acoustics was designed by Ruth Bernatek and Matilde Meireles and delivered as a response to Testing Ground by Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards, on show at UCL Urban Room. Our sincere thanks to Kara Blackmore, Henrietta Williams, Sophie Mepham and Jaye Abhau for all their much-appreciated contributions to the day.