Noisy Neighbors

Paris treats its musicians well, and every day I'm starting to memorize these different sound environments. The musicians here perform in the same way that one uses icons and landmarks to navigate through the city. Each musician creates a sonic neighborhood, which offers new avenues for mapping out urban experience in cities similar to Paris. Not that I ever get tired of drawing Nolli plans... Did he just say urbanism? I could hear the same studies being done in London, New York, New Orleans or Barcelona. In addition to music, sound promotes urban experiences through relationships between pedestrian protection, scale, green space, wet space, transportation, and even temporary events such as flea markets or art exhibitions.

Back in Los Angeles, a mentor of mine told me he always found transitional spaces to be key players in design, and after having gone through maybe 400 or so sound recordings, I couldn't agree more. The way the sound behaves when transitioning through space is gradual. It never turns itself on or off like an ipod. It just fades into an echo. In fact, most times, I feel that the city sounds and the music I hear is even more beautiful when you hear it from a distance reflecting off of the facades a million times a second. It definitely adds to the quality of life index to the life of Parisians.

Usually design wants to stop sound from coming in. It may pertain to the sound of a local train, or an airplane landing just down the bay, or the infamous noisy neighbors... here, at least for me that's definitely not the case. De-De-Definitely.