Sonic Babylon

During the past few months Nora and I have planted four sound gardens in Australia. And with each one, we've learned a bit more about both the logistics and the artistry of this endeavor. For example, our intent was always that each garden should sound unique. But we observed rather quickly that visitors to a garden respond best to sounds they know and recognize. So in the same way that all politics are local, the need for the familiar is alive and well, even at the cutting edge of technology, and the operative word for successful sound gardens is local, not unique: a meaningful garden must truly reflect the music, sounds, and stories of its locale. The mitigating factor in all cases is personal recognition, and garden visitors hear differently from that point on. This is true even for the National Film and Sound Archive's garden in Canberra, where the featured sounds are iconic sounds of national significance and thus known to all. This insight into the distinction between unique and local has made us rethink and fine tune the mix of sounds that constitutes a garden. And this, in turn, has caused us to plan and plant the gardens differently. On site, the initial planting of each sound—both the universal ground cover and the local flowers—now takes on the character of Japanese flower arranging. That is, it's a process of transforming a varied collection of sounds into a sonic sculpture, one in which the negative spaces are as meaningful and important as the spaces filled with sound. Our intent is to create a garden where the universal and the local, the unknown and the recognizable, and, ultimately, the history and the present of each locale, take root, intersect, and coincide in sound.