Listen Now

The Listen Now project is an ongoing series of environmental recordings. They invite a displacement in the act of listening, from one person to another, one time and place to another. Listening always takes place in the present but sounds are also tied to the moment of their making. By now we take the displacements of sound recordings for granted, but there remains something uncanny about them. A sound environment is an unrepeatable composition, continuously unfolding whether we give it our attention or not. [ listen ]

Public Space Series

Strangers gather in the public spaces of a city, and New York is home to grand spaces created out of a soaring utopiansm towards public life. Stations, building lobbies, parks, plazas, museums, echoing with footsteps, often on terrazzo or slabs of stone. A babble of voices rises up, at times blurred by the reverberations until there is almost a continuous tone. In these spaces, strangers mingle, and sometimes meet. More often they are abstractions to each other, a flow of human presence.

The sounds of a city are almost all made by people (even machine sounds: people driving subway cars, holding jackhammers, turning on sirens). Really listening, they are almost too intimate. We are connected to each other by a fabric of sound.

Recordings in this Listen Now series—focusing on the sounds of strangers moving through the great public spaces of New York—were initially created in March and April 2005 for the Stranger issue of Glowlab. During the run of “Synthesis and Distribution” I’ll be adding recordings of public spaces in lower Manhattan, all within walking distance of the Pace Digital Gallery. You are invited to visit these spaces and compare the recorded and displaced sounds with the live experience. Sounds can also be downloaded and carried directly to the sites on a portable music player, mingling real and represented.



Street Series

In this series, each location is marked by a Listen Now sticker, with a number that links to the recording of that location on this site.

The first group of these recordings focused on the streets outside of where my friends live and work. Beginning at my own front door, and spiraling outward, I gathered recordings of street sounds starting in April and May of 2005 for the Glowlab ‘Adjacent’ issue, and for the Provflux in Providence, Rhode Island.