Posts tagged maps

Field Recordings for the Five Points

From the Tenement Museum comes this great audio exploration of the former Five Points area in Manhattan. (Actually, it’s a few years old, but new to me!)

You have five points to drag around the map and select from a variety of field recordings, folk songs, spoken word (interviews, sermons, etc.), and some music made specifically for the project. Once you’ve found sounds you like (like “steam through a manhole cover” or “seafood salesman”), you can adjust levels and panning and then save your mix for others to listen to!

Clicking directly on the dots brings up a little info pane so you can find out more about what you’re hearing. This is sort of a complementary project to the Ohio Is a Piano project. Instead of focusing on a data-centric correspondence (88 keys, 88 counties), Folk Music for the Five Points takes a cultural/historical look back. They justify the inclusion of new music by saying that the composer is taking the perspective of a “new immigrant” (although it seems just like a way to make the project more conventionally musical), and their interest is thematic: the daily experience of immigrants in a particular section of New York.

I wouldn’t want to judge one kind of approach superior to the other, but it is certainly interesting to see the different kinds of results that arise from the two approaches.

Ohio is a Piano?

Andy Woodruff, upon realizing that Ohio has 88 counties and a piano 88 keys, made a flash toy to explore the coincidence. You can play the counties manually one at a time, play an actual song to see which counties light up, play demographic data, play metro areas as chords (!), or play the route between two cities as a string of notes. The notes are assigned in alphabetical order by default, but you can change them to reflect a particular demographic data set.

Andy seems to think that “most of it sounds like crap,” but when you’re playing the route from Akron to Zanesville with notes assigned by percent of the population over 65, I’m not sure that traditional musicality could ever really be your reference point.

Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG takes it his usual step further:

Perhaps the penultimate scene in some unreleased Alfred Hitchcock film, buried in a voice-encrypted vault outside Los Angeles, involves the playing of a sinister piano tune – slow, atonal, and non-repetitive – which our hero soon realizes is, in fact, a coded spy’s map of Ohio: inside the song are directions, forming a county by county guide to how to smuggle nuclear secrets through the Buckeye State…
A new form of paranoia arises, in which you think that all songs are actually maps. Even that burst of bird song that you hear in the alley behind your house at 3am is, you conclude, an unacknowledged spy’s cartography, full of secrets to those who can decode it.

It is an entirely delightful little application (especially the metro chords and route melodies), so you should go and play with it.

(via BLDGBLOG)