Five Sound Questions - Sarah van Sonsbeeck

Sarah van Sonsbeeck is a Dutch artist working mainly with sound. The above picture shows her new work Machine for my Neighbours. Read the answer to question no.4 for an explanation. For more great projects like this one visit Sarah’s website: www.sarahvansonsbeeck.com.

 

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

I don’t like Beethoven anymore than I do a lot of other music. But if I hear his music, for instance if I take my father’s iPod by mistake, it sends me back to being seven, sitting behind the family sofa and listening while leafing through a book. The stillness of this memory is overwhelming; Beethoven represents silence for me, a silence with firm walls.

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

The notion of background sound, already has something spatial about it, like a kind of environment, a private room you can always – when it is quiet – take with you. (Certain people might feel exactly like this about a lot of sound, which is then their ‘background’ and perhaps they feel uneasy when it is missing).

 

Unexpected noise is saying that this private space doesn’t exist, especially noise from which you can’t escape and about which you can’t do anything. A dripping tap is less frustrating as I know I can also switch it off, but the neighbour’s noise is uncontrollable. The only thing I can do is adjust to it, or phone them up and hear my phone upstairs, or have the music very loud, which gives a kind of temporary satisfaction. If my upstairs neighbours are unexpectedly quiet, something strange happens. The quietness drives me mad.

 

It is like a story I read about a man who every night was resigned to hearing his upstairs neighbour throwing off his shoes one by one. One night, the upstairs neighbour, in a sudden fit of awareness after having taken off one shoe, thinks the sound is antisocial. He is overcome with guilt. With the precision of a moon landing, he then places the right-hand shoe next to the other. After fifteen minutes he wakes up with a start. He hears a voice crying: ‘For goodness sake, take the other shoe off, then I can get some sleep!’ 

 

I am now so used to my neighbours’ routine sounds that they’ve become almost my background noise and indeed I now notice when they’re missing. 

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

If you sit under a blanket when you are four you are invisible. It ‘feels’ logical but it isn’t, you don’t see anyone and so no one sees you. There is something fundamentally instinctive about this. Pedestrians can become catatonic in the middle of the road when they see traffic approaching. It is animal instinct, felt by the body but not by common sense, that if you remain still you are not there, such as deer caught in headlights? 

 

Sleeping comes closest to the archetypical ideal home. It is frustrating if you can’t sleep at night. You are driven out of the illusion of peace and quiet that is your home. When I am asleep I am not aware of my sleeping body. Everyone knows you remain lying in your bed and that it is only in cartoons you go flying out of the window. If the body is free of consciousness, how do I know what my body does when I am sleeping? I have an idea, but I can never know. This uncontrollability, the state in which you are hardly aware anymore, is reassuring. My private space can expand so much that I have no knowledge of this myself. When I sleep I am invisible, just like my small nephew. 

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

I am working on new project titled Machine for My Neighbours. It is a democratic tool made from everyday equipment: the neighbours noise is recorded, amplified and sent back into the wall with a small delay. You can go outdoors and have a coffee, while the neighbours are impeded upon their own sword. I do realize it’s a rather cruel concept, but at least the possibility to use their own sound against them, gave me a sense of power within a frustrating situation, and made me laugh about the idiocy of this vicious spiral of annoyance. 

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

Silence, revealing birds chirrup and the sound of coffee in the morning.

 

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

Comments

[Marco Nisbet]

At last! An installation and environmental regulating tool combined!
I'm sure that the commercial possibilities for the 'Machine for my Neighbours' would be huge.
I would certainly buy one, but of course, in time, I'm sure my neighbour would too.
In view of this, I would suggest that the device be prohibitively expensive, otherwise a race could ensue, each to rise earlier than the other, to feverishly activate our machines after minutes of night time sleep and vacate, so that our surrogate sound remonstrators can start a pitch battle for us in our absence.
With no occupants, the machines would initially have to hand only the light artillery of ambient murmurings; the coming and going of insects and the sounds of expansion and contraction as the sun warms the walls. But this would soon be reinforced by a thunderous swell of windblown paper, crisp packets and drink cans.
Before long the machines would locate and appropriate the most destructive sounds of all; the tormented cry of bus brakes, the robotic whining of "This vehicle is reversing!" the machine gun fire of plastic footballs on concrete walls, screaming babies and the deafening cacophony of their fawning mothers, amplified and layered over and over.
Soon enough, in a terrifying sonic Armageddon, two sound tsunamis would collide, either side of the lath divide.