City Ears, Manca Festival,  Nice,    1996

Odland beaming sound into the MAMAC Plaza for Manca Festival

If "architecture is frozen music"  (Igor Stravinsky) , then how can we hear it?

"City Ears" made architecture shapes observable as music by beaming extremely focused sounds at the Museum of Modern Art in Nice and activating a 3-D soundspace of reflections. 

Each architectural space forms a resonating chamber which reflects and resonates whatever ambient soundscape it is placed in.  The complex wave form is a mix of our culture; is the constant input to architecture's  sound box.  Ordinarily it is difficult to perceive this relationship between the city soundscape and architecture because,  as a survival mechanism, the human hearing protects itself from overload by filtering out the drone of 60 cycle electronic infrastructure, transformers, air conditioners, disk drives, fluorescent lighting buzz, traffic, radial tires, idling busses, emergency vehicles, muzak,  car stereos, helicopters, planes, trains, subways, human voices.

"City Ears"  was designed to quickly overcome those standard hearing filters and allow the audience to use their more sophisticated three dimensional hearing sense; to suddenly hear with an animal sense of hearing even in the city. 

Parabolic speakers were designed and produced by O+A  to send an extremely focused  beam of sound which  can only be heard when it is pointed directly at the observer or through reflections from architectural surfaces.  Like sonar on a ship or like the echolocation of a dolphin, the signal is sent out and a rich information returns in the reflections.  The shock for desensitized urban listeners is to suddenly hear city space with the detailed hearing similar to a bat's.  O+A each performed a duet with parabolic "Planet Speakers".  Specially prepared sound materials were composed to  interact specifically with the architecture.  Different tempos, frequency bands, and stereo shifting were all used in a soundplay that activated the space dramatically. The Nice-Matin described the performance as "Composers playing tennis with sounds on the walls of the MAMAC."