The conservation of vintage wallpapers lies rather outside my own areas of expertise, but I am very interested in maintenance tasks and also in the secret life of material things, therefore I learn from - and enjoy - observing how the important objects and materials at MoDA are maintained and conserved by the Staff there.
In selecting wallpapers to show to the public in the Sonic Wallpaper exhibition, it is essential that what we choose can withstand the pressures of being framed, travelled around, and exposed to light. Emma Shaw discussed with me last week how inherently ephemeral and fragile wallpaper is, and explained a bit about how samples must be prepared for display.
Some sections of wallpaper in the MoDA collection are still in rolls and need to be flattened. These include a design which features stone arches in a kind of faux architecture pattern, and a flocked paper.
The flocking process is apparently very involved, and results in many delicate fibres poking directly upwards from the paper. These fibres can be easily crushed or damaged, so it is important that if weights are applied to the surface, that this is done carefully and that something is done to protect the flocking.
To flatten the flocked wallpaper I am hoping to include in the Sonic Wallpaper project, Emma Shaw - who is the Preventative Conservation Officer at MoDA - laid 2 heavy sheets of blotting paper on top of it, and then a thinnish sheet of glass on top of them. The resulting "sandwich" now sits on a worktable in the conservation room, where Emma will periodically check up on it, until it is flat.
The other design will be flattened by applying through fine misting using a dahlia spray. The moisture will cause the fibres in the paper to relax, so that it will flatten out easily.
What I especially liked about watching Emma fix up the papers - and listening to her speak about the process - was the sense of methodical and necessary labour. These kinds of tasks are absolutely essential for the preservation of anything old or delicate, and experts all over the country right now are performing routine tasks of maintenance and conservation on things so that we may continue to enjoy and see them long into the future.
The sounds in the recording I have published here are of myself and Emma discussing the conservation work; of the hum of the air-conditioning in the conservation room; and of the materials involved in preserving the wallpaper. I like the recording for its quiet sense of industry, and for the way it evidences materials and tools and the preservation of the past.
In this post I would like to respond to some of your wonderful comments on my own blog relating to this project, and also on some of the sound descriptions and images that you have added to the Sonic Wallpaper Pinterest board.
Mikal wrote about the soft patter of rain dripping on leaves as a kind of aural equivalent for this delicate, silvery pattern.
There is something understated about the idea of this sound... it is a gentle sort of sound sonically resembling the muted palette of the paper's visual design. (Click here to see.)
Reading Mikal's words made me think about the sounds of water, and of this paper in the MoDA collection, which somehow suggests to me the gently humming drone of an aquarium.
I also enjoyed Mikal's comment about the added tactile dimension of flock wallpaper (image can be seen here). Flocked, Sonic Wallpaper could be heard, touched and seen.
It was interesting to try and imagine in my mind's ear what a brassy and bold sonic equivalent to this flock paper might be, and I kept thinking of long, sustained, shifting chords played on brass instruments. What do you think?
Tom left an amazing comment on my blog, regarding the idea of meta Sonic Wallpaper; i.e. Sonic Wallpaper which references the intended use or functions of a room;
I was thinking about meta-sounds: e.g. for the kitchen, you’d have the kettle coming to the boil, something simmmering on the hob, the chopping of vegetables, the clanging of utensils. For the lounge the rustling of newspapers being turned (although, when was the last time I read news in the PAPERS? I get it all from the interent now), some music in the background. Sitting down into that sqeaky chair. At dusk, the swishing of curtains closing.
But trying to expand this into other rooms would perhaps not always work. Who would want to go into the smallest room and then you’d hear the noises of somebody “doing their business”? (this reminds me: when I lived in a shared house as a student, we taped Beavis & Butthead episodes onto cassette tapes and we wired a walkman with speakers into the light switch, so each time you switched on the light you heard “huhuhuhuh. hey beavis. huhhuhuh. cool. huhuhuh”. Our own sonic wallpaper!) And let’s not even begin pondering the bedroom noises.
On the other hand, you could turn things upside down by playing the sounds you’d associate with one room, in another room. A surrealist decoration!
This is interesting to me in many ways - firstly, who doesn't LOVE the domestic creativity involved in rewiring the lights?! Secondly, the idea of surrealist sonic home-decoration is most intriguing; what bizarre play could be had by exporting unexpected sounds from one context into another? For instance, what would it be like if opening kitchen cupboards resulted in the sound of a swarm of bees rushing across some carefully placed speakers, panning from left to right, as if moving? Or if you installed the sound of some pigs grunting deep into a dark corner of the house?
I also love the amusing way that Tom describes the intimacy of home spaces and refers to the kinds of sounds which we would rather keep private, or not hear, and certainly not record.
The sounds Tom has focussed on as being the sounds of domestic space are lovely in their details - a curtain closing; a newspaper page turning. And many visually designed wallpapers work like this, echoing details of domestic life in imagery. How many kitchen wallpapers have you seen for instance depicting cookware or food items?
Why not create an audible equivalent? It might be confusing to distinguish between the recorded sound of the toaster and the actual sound of the toaster, but maybe this is part of the domestic play and creativity inherent in the idea of Sonic Wallpaper. Perhaps it will be possible in the future to buy Sonic Kitchen Wallpaper featuring - as Tom suggests - the sounds of slicing, dicing, bubbling, boiling, and perhaps the merry whistling of a contented chef. Or perhaps my own favourite kitchen sound - the climactic bubbling of the stove top espresso-maker.
Echoing the delicate soundscape of Mikal's imagined Sonic Wallpaper, Emmylou described how some of her favourite sounds involve rain;
I like the sound of rain; on tents or on my glass skylights, especially in the dark and warm. It also smells good so that is an added bonus.
Emmylou also raised some important points about how the context in which we hear sounds is a huge factor in how we experience them. Discussing a motorcyclist who travels around the Reading IDR very fast late at night, she mentions how the sound - in her words a good noise - induces a feeling of panic in her when she hears it in the context of the late night, dangerous driving. This reminds me of when I interviewed Motor cyclists at the H Cafe for my radio show about the A4074 road and found that the sound of one's engine is a source of pride and interest to bikers, but that in some other contexts - such as the one Emmylou describes - this same sound has different, darker connotations.
...he elaborated on a correspondingly playful and exuberant accompanying soundscape;
sounds of a school playground at lunchtime, the rustling of beasts in the undergrowth, things falling to the pavement from the canopy above.
I like the specificity of lunchtime playground sound - a sound which often drifts across from schools at around midday, and which is filled with excitement, outrage, chattering and squealing. The idea of rustling and things falling to the pavement is also nice - especially if what is falling is fruit. The luscious depictions of fruit in Victorian wallpapers, for instance, have a grandeur and a silence which would be very much undermined by the unserious squelchy noises of a kiwi fruit splatting onto the pavement, or the dull thud of a melon splitting open.
before the war - the pipes and drums of the parade, cheering crowds, the buzz of anticipation, clip clop of hooves on cobblestones, orders barked and obeyed in unison, the sounds of control...
It's interesting to me that some of the sounds in that list seem slightly old-fashioned, like the horses' hooves on cobblestones. Perhaps this mirrors in some way the vintagey, old-timey feeling of the visual design of the paper...
Finally I want to thank Chris for this lovely description of the sounds of a rookery;
There is a rookery in the beech trees here. They have their routines but craw time about an hour before sunset when they return home in commuter uproar and later when they are settling down in drowsy conversation are both full of reassuring sound. They seem to like having humans around the place.
The word "craw" is so descriptive of the dark, throaty sounds a crow makes, don't you think?
What is especially interesting in Chris's description is the allusion to time. While printed paper wallpaper is static, and while its design does not change, sounds do shift, change and develop over time. Like the crows whose sounds have a distinctive sequence, so too does the rain on a tent; the march of a band; the buttering of a piece of bread; and so on. They are all sequences of events and this leads me to wonder what the timescale of Sonic Wallpaper could/should be. Should rolls be an hour, a week, a day, a month, a year or a minute long? I guess it depends on who is decorating.
Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed already to Sonic Wallpaper! You can follow the project on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and if you want to join the Pinterest board, leave a comment here and I will make it possible.
Sonic Wallpaper explores wallpaper from auditory and social perspectives, asking what would it be like if we decorated our homes with sounds? The main concept is that while we talk about the way our rooms will look when we are consulting wallpaper sample books or looking at shade cards, we do not often talk about how they will sound. Extending the familiar rituals of browsing wallpapers and talking about likes/dislikes and the effects of the wallpapers into sound-pieces will hopefully invite people browsing the collection to imagine what it would be like if rolls of sound could be acquired for papering our living spaces with audible content, as well as with colours, pictures and textures.
To begin with, a selection of MoDA wallpaper samples will be presented to a series of invited guests, whose conversations about those samples will form the basis for a series of innovative audio works. Willing volunteers will be encouraged to imagine different wallpapers in their homes, and to think about the effects the wallpapers might have in different rooms. Their responses – “no, too loud,” “too bright,” “too busy,” “I love that, it’s very calm,” “I love the birds on this design,” etc. – will then be sensitively edited, and sounds will be collected and added in so that it seems as if the discussions relate to an imaginary, Sonic Wallpaper, as well as to the wallpapers in MoDA’s collection which can be seen. For an audio glimpse of this idea, please check out the Audioboo that I made, describing the project:
In the trailer I used recordings of:
applying wheatpaste to wallpaper and newspaper and smoothing paper - literal sonic wallpaper Brenda's beach at Amroth rain on our tent at Rannoch Moor Sarah's chickens a car alarm on our road - loud The sounds of The Sonic Picnic at BEAM festival - busy crickets and aeroplanes - calm birds - the songthrush at Brenda's - nice birds my harp - the sounds of fantasy wheatpaste and wallpaper - textures
I had a lovely discussion with Mark when he got in from work last night and listened to the audio trailer for Sonic Wallpaper; I had previously been using the sound of water gushing out of a lock gate (to me, a lovely splooshy sound) at the stage where I say "I love that, it's really calm and relaxing" and Mark said it wasn't very "calm" to his ears. This got me thinking about how subjective our relationship to sounds is. Mark suggested that I instead pick out some of the cricket recordings I made when we walked along the A4074 at night-time together. I specifically remember that he was crashed out on the grass when I was making my cricket recordings, and so the sound of crickets has very mellow associations for him, which I found interesting in terms of his categorisation of that sound as a "calm, relaxing" sort of a sound.
Many exponents of John Cagean thought are against placing any kind of value judgements on sounds, because the idea that some sounds are more worthwhile or beautiful than others leads in many cases to a kind of dichotomy where what is generally categorised as "Music" is considered more worthwhile than what is generally categorised as "noise". The outcome of such dichotomies is that we miss the music of life itself, and in dismantling the hierarchy of sounds, Cage sought to elevate all sounds to the status of Music, thus celebrating everyday sounds.
In music, we should be satisfied with opening our ears. Everything can musically enter an ear open to all sounds! Not only the music we consider beautiful but also the music that is life itself…the more we discover that the noises of the outside world are musical, the more music there is… in the case of sound, whether the sound be loud or soft, flat or sharp, or whatever you like, that doesn’t constitute a sufficient motive for not opening ourselves up to what it is, as for any sound which may possibly occur.
John Cage, For the Birds, 1981
I love the ambition and the celebratory aspects of Cage's vision but I believe too that it is possible to celebrate everyday sounds whilst also exploring our subjective and personal feelings towards them. This is especially true in the context of domestic spaces which are shaped so deeply by our individual needs and tastes.
Many sounds which I love in other contexts might not be easy to live with as wallpaper... but then I feel there are also many sounds which I may not have considered, which might add amazing imaginative qualities to domestic spaces. Sonic Wallpaper is about discovering such sounds together and creatively playing with the idea of sounds in the home - as we play with moodboards and swatches for colour.
What would it be like to fill a room with the periodic sounds of whispers? echoes? bells? To paper the bathroom with the sounds of the beach in Miami? Or to paper the bedroom with the sounds of sighing trees or distant motorway traffic?
There is a subjectivity to domestic space - its close connection to our needs and feelings - which makes the study of sounds therein particularly potent. So I do not mind at all allowing taste to enter into the discussion, because I think that there are enough ways to celebrate sounds without having to pretend that we could live with all of them all of the time.
What sounds would you describe - personally - as being too loud? too busy? calm/relaxing? fantasy-inducing? especially textural? favourite birds? What sound would you like to hear when you wake first thing in your bed? What Sonic Wallpaper to wake up and hear?
Sonic Wallpaper explores wallpaper from auditory and social perspectives, asking what would it be like if we decorated our homes with sounds? The main concept is that while we talk about the way our rooms will look when we are consulting wallpaper sample books or looking at shade cards, we do not often talk about how they will sound. Extending the familiar rituals of browsing wallpapers and talking about likes/dislikes and the effects of the wallpapers into sound-pieces will hopefully invite people browsing the collection to imagine what it would be like if rolls of sound could be acquired for papering our living spaces with audible content, as well as with colours, pictures and textures.
To begin with, a selection of MoDA wallpaper samples will be presented to a series of invited guests, whose conversations about those samples will form the basis for a series of innovative audio works. Willing volunteers will be encouraged to imagine different wallpapers in their homes, and to think about the effects the wallpapers might have in different rooms. Their responses – “no, too loud,” “too bright,” “too busy,” “I love that, it’s very calm,” “I love the birds on this design,” etc. – will then be sensitively edited, and sounds will be collected and added in so that it seems as if the discussions relate to an imaginary, Sonic Wallpaper, as well as to the wallpapers in MoDA’s collection which can be seen. For an audio glimpse of this idea, please check out the Audioboo that I made, describing the project:
In the trailer I used recordings of:
applying wheatpaste to wallpaper and newspaper and smoothing paper - literal sonic wallpaper Brenda's beach at Amroth rain on our tent at Rannoch Moor Sarah's chickens a car alarm on our road - loud The sounds of The Sonic Picnic at BEAM festival - busy crickets and aeroplanes - calm birds - the songthrush at Brenda's - nice birds my harp - the sounds of fantasy wheatpaste and wallpaper - textures
I had a lovely discussion with Mark when he got in from work last night and listened to the audio trailer for Sonic Wallpaper; I had previously been using the sound of water gushing out of a lock gate (to me, a lovely splooshy sound) at the stage where I say "I love that, it's really calm and relaxing" and Mark said it wasn't very "calm" to his ears. This got me thinking about how subjective our relationship to sounds is. Mark suggested that I instead pick out some of the cricket recordings I made when we walked along the A4074 at night-time together. I specifically remember that he was crashed out on the grass when I was making my cricket recordings, and so the sound of crickets has very mellow associations for him, which I found interesting in terms of his categorisation of that sound as a "calm, relaxing" sort of a sound.
Many exponents of John Cagean thought are against placing any kind of value judgements on sounds, because the idea that some sounds are more worthwhile or beautiful than others leads in many cases to a kind of dichotomy where what is generally categorised as "Music" is considered more worthwhile than what is generally categorised as "noise". The outcome of such dichotomies is that we miss the music of life itself, and in dismantling the hierarchy of sounds, Cage sought to elevate all sounds to the status of Music, thus celebrating everyday sounds.
In music, we should be satisfied with opening our ears. Everything can musically enter an ear open to all sounds! Not only the music we consider beautiful but also the music that is life itself…the more we discover that the noises of the outside world are musical, the more music there is… in the case of sound, whether the sound be loud or soft, flat or sharp, or whatever you like, that doesn’t constitute a sufficient motive for not opening ourselves up to what it is, as for any sound which may possibly occur.
John Cage, For the Birds, 1981
I love the ambition and the celebratory aspects of Cage's vision but I believe too that it is possible to celebrate everyday sounds whilst also exploring our subjective and personal feelings towards them. This is especially true in the context of domestic spaces which are shaped so deeply by our individual needs and tastes.
Many sounds which I love in other contexts might not be easy to live with as wallpaper... but then I feel there are also many sounds which I may not have considered, which might add amazing imaginative qualities to domestic spaces. Sonic Wallpaper is about discovering such sounds together and creatively playing with the idea of sounds in the home - as we play with moodboards and swatches for colour.
What would it be like to fill a room with the periodic sounds of whispers? echoes? bells? To paper the bathroom with the sounds of the beach in Miami? Or to paper the bedroom with the sounds of sighing trees or distant motorway traffic?
There is a subjectivity to domestic space - its close connection to our needs and feelings - which makes the study of sounds therein particularly potent. So I do not mind at all allowing taste to enter into the discussion, because I think that there are enough ways to celebrate sounds without having to pretend that we could live with all of them all of the time.
What sounds would you describe - personally - as being too loud? too busy? calm/relaxing? fantasy-inducing? especially textural? favourite birds? What sound would you like to hear when you wake first thing in your bed? What Sonic Wallpaper to wake up and hear?
