Acousmatic Mapping of the Neo-Metropolis Shanghai Metro Residency Nicholas Maximilian Dreyer
As long as I have been alive, I have used forms of public transportation – public buses in the small town I come from, and metro systems in any larger cities I’ve stayed in. Somehow, the route of a public transport re-maps the consciousness of space, and ascribes to the terrain a network of places, staggering what might have been a fluid existence into a network of ideas. These routes could be considered to be almost primeval imaginings of what the city is – a recent experiment showed that slime molds, when giving a terrain that modeled that of Tokyo, re-created the subway map quite precisely*. City planners might think that their decisions are based in structure and study, but clearly the way we move through space follows some more ancient, almost cosmic pattern, the origins of which we cannot know.
During a year of living in Shanghai, I have focused my efforts on a study of the metro system (one of my personal favourite subways,) and a composition to describe the innumerable and frankly ineffable feelings it evokes in me. Called simply ‘地铁’, it is a six piece song cycle, in which each song represents a certain section of the train line. Originally I had plans to compose a piece about every station in the metro, but I realized that this would be Sisyphean task, due to Shanghai’s schedule for additions to the metro. Instead, I focused on a few specific sections with what I found to be particular emotional import. Currently in the editing and production phase, I’ve ridden those lines while listening to the corresponding pieces, and been happy with how they work; you may find rough drafts of the songs at http://www.tmrcresearch.com/2011/03/shanghai%E2%80%99s-ouerve-max-dreyer/.
I plan to debut the completed album in July 2011, watch www.dreyerprojects.info for more information.
During this project, I envisioned another, much more complex project, that would perhaps truly achieve my original goal, and which would, if implemented, evolve with the train lines themselves. I would write a piece of software that would map the city onto a grid (which could be expanded to compensate for growth, and refined to compensate for line expansion) and map sequences of sonifications to the grid. Working as a resident artist of the metro, the software would be installed to train announcement systems, and the sounds would replace normal ‘door opening’ and ‘door closing’ sounds.
The fact that this project is unrealized lies primarily in the artistic inaccessibility of the medium (the speaker system in the trains,) rather than the execution, which would be complex but doable, perhaps taking a two or three weeks of dedicated work at composition and programming.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/01/22/brainless-slime-mold-builds-a-replica-tokyo-subway/
Acousmatic Mapping of the Neo-Metropolis Shanghai Metro Residency Nicholas Maximilian Dreyer
As long as I have been alive, I have used forms of public transportation – public buses in the small town I come from, and metro systems in any larger cities I’ve stayed in. Somehow, the route of a public transport re-maps the consciousness of space, and ascribes to the terrain a network of places, staggering what might have been a fluid existence into a network of ideas. These routes could be considered to be almost primeval imaginings of what the city is – a recent experiment showed that slime molds, when giving a terrain that modeled that of Tokyo, re-created the subway map quite precisely*. City planners might think that their decisions are based in structure and study, but clearly the way we move through space follows some more ancient, almost cosmic pattern, the origins of which we cannot know.
During a year of living in Shanghai, I have focused my efforts on a study of the metro system (one of my personal favourite subways,) and a composition to describe the innumerable and frankly ineffable feelings it evokes in me. Called simply ‘地铁’, it is a six piece song cycle, in which each song represents a certain section of the train line. Originally I had plans to compose a piece about every station in the metro, but I realized that this would be Sisyphean task, due to Shanghai’s schedule for additions to the metro. Instead, I focused on a few specific sections with what I found to be particular emotional import. Currently in the editing and production phase, I’ve ridden those lines while listening to the corresponding pieces, and been happy with how they work; you may find rough drafts of the songs at http://www.tmrcresearch.com/2011/03/shanghai%E2%80%99s-ouerve-max-dreyer/.
I plan to debut the completed album in July 2011, watch www.dreyerprojects.info for more information.
During this project, I envisioned another, much more complex project, that would perhaps truly achieve my original goal, and which would, if implemented, evolve with the train lines themselves. I would write a piece of software that would map the city onto a grid (which could be expanded to compensate for growth, and refined to compensate for line expansion) and map sequences of sonifications to the grid. Working as a resident artist of the metro, the software would be installed to train announcement systems, and the sounds would replace normal ‘door opening’ and ‘door closing’ sounds.
The fact that this project is unrealized lies primarily in the artistic inaccessibility of the medium (the speaker system in the trains,) rather than the execution, which would be complex but doable, perhaps taking a two or three weeks of dedicated work at composition and programming.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/01/22/brainless-slime-mold-builds-a-replica-tokyo-subway/