Five Sound Questions to Enrico Ascoli

Enrico Ascoli is an Italian sound designer, music producer and psychologist working in contemporary art, advertising, museum sound installations, theatre and cognitive research. He creates sound and music for advertising, and as we can see on his Vimeo page, he likes to experiment as well.

Apart from his applied and autonomous work Enrico Ascoli is a professor in sound design and music at the European Institute of Design (IED) in Milan. There is much more to know about this talented man. Find out by visiting his website www.enricoascoli.com. These are his answers to my questions:

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you? 

I can’t talk about just a sound but about a mass of  perceptions, feelings and emotions that in me form the first synesthetic idea of perfect harmony and amazement. In this first memory of  my life, there is a strong sun backlight, stacks of books on the wood floor, Baroque shapes on the open window and two clear sounds: the high peep of the swallows and the quiet and melting drone of a sitar.  

 

Years ago I asked my mother about this memory and incredibly she could remember that day! I was three years old and on the turntable she was playing the duet between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin (“Shankar meet Menuhin” del 1967).

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

I particularly love when the world reveals itself in a way invisible and untouchable because it connects me with the sense of mystery and unexplored. I usually feel what is around me as an acoustic archipelago: islands of intensities, timbres, and rhythmic clusters interacting in a random way in a intense harmonic bubbling.

 

I love to land on these ephemeral territories and discover a way to use them in my works, especially in the commercial ones trying to go against every  mannerism and cliché. Sometimes while walking in the street I close my eyes to be driven by an acoustic drift supported only by the ability of my interior ear to create, from this faint magma, sound swarms with meaning. 

3. Which place in the world do you favour for its sound?

I would like to answer with a long list of places and everyday life moments that I love, like the protagonist in the Peter Greenaway movie “The Pillow Book”…. but of course I can’t.

I love the quiet Amsterdam soundscape, formed by sea gulls and bicycle chains, as much as the powerful rusty roar of New York bridges at the passage of a metro train. The soporiferous drone of many washing machines in laundromats, is good for meditation and I usually harmonize and modulate my voice to their tone and rhythms.

 

If I had to think about a very special place, it would be Porta Palazzo street market in Turin, Italy, from 5 a.m to 8 a.m. In those hours you can listen to this progressive soundscape, made by silent people producing wood and metal sounds while building the stalls. You can hear it grow from silence of night to become one of the most lively, noisy and biggest European street markets.

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

Our contemporary society is focused on what is visual; we are lost in a retinal paradigm. We talk about how to increase the role of sound because we are sound designers but, from an hermeneutic point of view, we have five senses that should contribute to give meaning to the world. So for me the question is: how to design sound in order to obtain its balanced role in this synaesthesia? This only occurs in projects in which there is a team with different and complementary skills.

 

I’m interested, for example, in architectural projects in which sound is used in its capability to give sense and social meaning to a territory. An interesting example of this is the Sea Organ, by architect Nikola Basic, located on Zadar, Croatia; it turned war-torn shores into a sonic dialog between inhabitants and the sea. Urban monuments like this change not only the quality of life but produce in people a new way of considering sound as an important and poetic element of their environment.

5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

The best is the “smack” of my love and her singsong voice that says “It’s time to wake up, lazy boy”. The utopian one is the horns of apocalypse just because I want to sample it ;)

Also read the answers of other artists in the Five Sound Questions section.