Joel Chadabe

Photo by Marc Battier
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About New York Soundscape

Joel Chadabe


At this time in history, more than 50% of the world's population lives in cities. It follows that an understanding of cities, and of the nature and quality of life in cities, is an essential part of an understanding of the ecology of the world as a whole.

Our idea is to understand cities by listening to them. Our immediate project is New York Soundscape, launched during the Ear to the Earth festival in 2008 as a panoramic portrayal of New York City's personality and urban ecology in sound.

We view New York Soundscape as a major artistic and preservation activity. For Ear to the Earth 08, we commissioned Alvin Curran, Marina Rosenfeld, Michael Schumacher, Miya Masaoka, LoVid, and Richard Lainhart to create new works based on New York sounds. We invited other artists, among them Walter Branchi, Francisco López, Agnieszka Roginska, Paul Geluso, Robert Rowe, Tom Beyer, Joel Chadabe, Andrea Polli, and Charlie Morrow, to participate in recording, composing, and presenting. We involved students at NYU, among them Izzi Ramkissoon and Sandeep Ravindranath. And like the city itself, the many works, all of them based on New York sounds, contained myriad variations in technique, sound, and presentation.

We also view New York Soundscape as a possible social experiment in bringing people from diverse backgrounds and with different perspectives together in a common creative civic project. The question is: Can we interest a great diversity of New Yorkers to work together in documenting their city?

We also see educational possibilities. We ask: What is the learning potential in creating digital art based on environmental issues?

Ear to the Earth 08 included other concerts based on other soundscapes, with music by Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Ezequiel Viñao, Helen Fisher, Matthew Burtner, Charlie Morrow, Orlando Garcia, and a powerful ending to the festival with John Cage's Lecture on the Weather.

But New York Soundscape will extend beyond the festival to evolve and develop as a multi-year project, culminating in a comprehensive collection of documentary field recordings, music and sound art compositions, and multimedia, created by artists, students, and New Yorkers from all walks of life. It is likely to exert a far-reaching influence as a model for similar projects in other cities. It will constitute a historical document of our time, providing material for future students and historians. And it will be an essential cultural resource, telling us, and telling the world, what this incredible city and its inhabitants sounded like at the beginning of the 21st century.