This week’s five sound questions are answered by Stephen Cornford. On Everyday Listening we have seen his Three Piece and many of his art works have a similar character. Stephen is a sculptor using existing objects and sound as his source of inspiration. He transforms objects into instruments and instruments into installations, creating wonderful, evocative soundscapes.
Visit Stephen Cornford’s website at www.scrawn.co.uk
1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?
Honestly, probably the sound of my parents arguing downstairs. I am slightly suspicious of the biographical style that says, for example, La Monte Young developed a fascination with sustained tones from listening to the wind whistle through the slats of his childhood home. I was a late comer to the world of sound, mostly things clattered by me and I never developed much fascination with how they sounded. Having said that I do remember one particular music lesson at school where the teacher played a bass note on the piano with the pedal down and asked us to raise our hands when we couldn’t hear it anymore and I remember most of the class had their hands up and I could still hear this note gradually dying away. I think the richness of that note made an impression on me.
2. How do you listen to the world around you?
This varies so much from moment to moment. There was a time a few years ago when I used to make a lot of field recordings, and my ears were so switched on every time I left the house. To be honest it was exhausting and it started to annoy people that were close to me. I realised that you can’t live your whole life in an urban environment listening to everything so closely.
Now there are occasional times when that focus returns, but for the most part I choose to listen more casually. In the last few months I have started commuting a lot, and for the first time since I was a teenager I listen to music on the move. I used to expressly not do this because I found the world interesting enough aurally, but when the sounds just remind you of the routine drudgery of doing the same journey there’s no fun in it.
I also listen to the world around me socially, other people fascinate me and so I often find myself habitually eavesdropping – but maybe that’s listening to the world anti socially?
3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?
The most awe-inspiring sound experience of my life was spending a week in the Central American rainforest, the area was crammed with howler monkeys who make the most incredible sounds I’d ever heard, but that experience seems so far removed from my reality and so exotic. I think my favourite sound world exists on the outskirts of the inner city, in areas where the traffic sounds distant but the landscape is still resolutely urban.
I used to spend days sound hunting in such areas of London. The stretch of the Thames between Canning Town and Woolwich was a particular favourite then, it had the feeling and sound of abandonment, the clanking of a scrapyard would carry through the air half a mile and everything had been left long enough to settle into a rhythm of its own, helped of course by the fact of being next to the river and therefore much more exposed to the elements. Areas like this don’t display any of the paranoid fixity that tends to pervade our cities, it was more like an urban wilderness.
4. How could we make sound improve our lives?
By having less of it. The UK is so obsessed with signage that not only are we surrounded by visual reminders of where we are, where we should go and how to do it, but increasingly signage takes over auditory space as well - every moving object is attributed it’s own bleep and announcement combination. London buses emit a shrill, ear piercing beep and then tell you to stand clear of the doors. Common sense and association are things of the past, we aren’t expected to be able to know that a certain beep means a lorry is reversing, let alone be able to see it, now it tells you that what it’s doing while beeping. And of course the beeps aren’t allowed to be tones that are easy on the ear, they have to be of a pitch and volume that causes you to wince. No thought is put into the sound design of our environment, which isn’t to say that I want Scanner to knock out some expensive ring tone for Transport for London. I’d be more interested if a mechanical engineer came up with a way to make the vibrations of a pneumatic drill destructively interfere with themselves. It’s not that I want to live in a silent world, but I do think that if people weren’t so bombarded with noises all the time, then they might take some time to wonder at some of fascinating sounds that are around us.
5. What sound would you like to wake up to?
Also read the answers of other artists in the Five Sound Questions section.To go back to your first question, when I was younger I used to sometimes wake up to the sound of the children at the primary school at the bottom of the road running around in the playground, that was a good way to wake up, it sounded innocent and optimistic. Nowadays I wake up to the news on Radio 4, which is kind of the opposite: worldly and depressing, but it works for me. Listening to music, or any sound that you want to attend to as music, at that time of day is horrible. After very few days that sound becomes so tainted with your experience of waking that you can’t even hear it for what it is anymore.