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A beautiful projection installation in the chapel on Governor’s Island, by Anthony McCall.

Act I – The HighLine My father and sister came to visit this week and we spent a bit of time out and about in New York City.  One of the places we visited was the HighLine – a recently opened park utilizing elevated space along the west side of Manhattan that was formerly a railway freight line.  As we walked through one of the more “designed” areas of the park (pictured above) which passes through a building, I heard something which got me thinking about acoustics in a space.  At certain spots in the space, I could hear  music playing and in others, I simply heard the background.  There were also spots where I could hear conversations around me more clearly.  This got me thinking about the role of “obstructions” and surfaces in the context of this installation work. This idea seems to resonate somewhat with Wendy’s last post about focusing sound. What if the space had features which reflected the sound so it could be focused in different ways? Act II – Moveable Type I also revisited the “Moveable Type” installation at The New York Times building on 42nd St and found myself much more focused on the sound of this installation.  In addition to the ambient sound design that accompanies the transitions between the scenes in the work, it seems to me that each of the 560 vacuum-fluorescent display modules also contains a speaker.  This has the effect of providing localization to some of the specific transition sounds.  I have a hard time imagining the installation without these sounds.  While they are almost akin to “sound effects”, they seem to me to add impact to the visual transitions in a way that just feels right.  The little clicks and zaps add dimension and context (perhaps through subtle sonic editorializing) to the information that is displayed.  Without these sounds, the quantity of text is overwhelming. I’m also thinking about the connection  between the movement of the text and the way the sound reinforces the visual effect of that movement.  They’re bound tightly together. Act III – Fashioning Felt The Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Fashioning Felt exhibition gave me an opposite experience from the one I had while walking through the HighLine.  Several of the works in the exhibition were acoustical panels made from industrial felt.  I wasn’t aware of felt’s sound absorbing properties.  Seeing (and hearing) how much the Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed conference room wall divider (a sandwich of clear polycarbonate between two patterened sheets of waterjet cut industrial felt) absorbed sound make me think of how this sort of material could be used to control the acoustic space of our installation.

Laptops are the main tool for now.