Listen Up

By Nathan Guequierre

Anyone who makes a habit or game of identifying birds by their songs knows that, with a little training, a little attention, the twittering of a house sparrow or the upturned whistle of a cardinal can easily be picked out of the background noise of city life. Amazingly, once your brain is tuned in to certain songs, those songs have a tendency to assert themselves even when you are not paying attention: the shrill kik-kik-kik of a sharp-shinned hawk along the Milwaukee river manages to foreground itself amid the din of car brakes, air conditioners, idling buses and wind blowing between buildings. And in that moment, when an unexpected sound makes its presence known, a little magic happens, and the world, supposedly all known and quantified, becomes larger and less well-limned, encompassing more than we ever thought.

The trick, of course, is learning how to listen. Rob Danielson, a Milwaukee filmmaker, has been learning how to listen to the characteristic sounds of places for more than a decade. He has captured more than 1200 sound files recorded in Milwaukee and in rural LaFarge, Wis., over the last decade, and he has assembled them now in a sound and light installation called "In Thin Air," hearable this week at UW-Milwaukee's Olson Planetarium. Combining dense soundscapes with subtle projected images, "In Thin Air" is an intense exercise in the power of listening, and makes a strong case for the unique relationship of sound to place. Aural geography, it seems, is destiny.

The artwork presents four distinct aural landscapes: urban day, urban night, rural day, rural night. Danielson categorized his sound files into fore-, middle- and background sounds, then randomizes the files and plays them back under the planetarium's parabola in 32 channels of intense surround-sound. The aural landscape is supplemented by images of the places the sounds were recorded moving across the dome. The 25-minute program is immersive and evocative, the sounds approaching and receding, swelling up into the listener's consciousness and then falling back again-the barely heard conversation of passing pedestrians, crickets and frogs, the grumble of machinery, all compacted into a dense web of noise that covers a place like the sky above. It's amusing, for a time, to try to identify the various components of that web, but eventually the overwhelming amount of information contained in "In Thin Air" becomes something else, the individual sounds coalescing into a euphony of noise, a place to get lost.

There are two facets of "In Thin Air" worthy of a close look. The first is the technological aspect of the installation. Danielson has cobbled together a startling array of speakers, projectors, amplifiers, lenses and other geegaws. He has manipulated his sound files, distorted their origins, and compressed their essential nature. But he isn't trying to simulate real life, or just play a recording made in some place in the world. Though it may seem an ironic comment on our level of attention in everyday living, by distilling aural experience and concentrating it into a sound elixir, Danielson forces attention onto this aspect of the environment that otherwise too often goes unremarked. It's the old Modernist trick of decontextualizing the mundane, elevating the everyday and making it a cynosure. In doing so, "In Thin Air" demonstrates that there is no such thing as the mundane at all, that the very idea of mundanity is a characteristic not of the object, but of the observer. We are surrounded by a world of astounding beauty and complexity, but we often fail to remark it.

The second aspect is the metaphor of revolution, the constant circling of sound and image that is at the core of "In Thin Air." There is no beginning or end to the experience, it just is. There is no direct correlation between pictures and sounds, no payoff, because the installation creates an envelope of experience, an immersion into one significant and underappreciated aspect of place. Sound is with us, night and day. The installation doesn't re-create the aural experience of a place, it creates something bigger out of the constituent parts. The experience of sound is intensified in "In Thin Air" to increase its potential for revelation. And that's one of the things art is supposed to do: get us to see (and hear) what we've been missing.