Pan Anthem

There's a good article in the New Yorker's February 1st Edition about Studio Gang's Aqua tower in downtown Chicago. Most notable about the striking new design of Aqua is this…

"And using the curves to dissipate the wind gave Gang a bonus: she was able to put balconies on every floor, all the way up."

That's fascinating. Marina City (in Chicago) has balconies on every floor, but that's only 60 floors. Aqua has 80 residential floors, and the building is right next to the lake. Imagine the odd sensation of looking off from the top-floor balcony, feeling only a normal breeze, and pristinely hearing the city below. It's classifiably an exotic sound.

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In my current line of work, which is acoustical in nature, I often find shortcomings in the english language when formulating written reports.

For instance, if I were to attempt to explain that I had just observed a strange sound, it may be technically correct to use the word “observe,” but it’s not explicitly correct. What I wish to say, is that I had aurally been witness to a strange sound. If “aurally been witness” didn’t make you cringe, then you and I may not have certain things in common.

Toying around with new words is a fascination and hobby of mine, but I can’t seem to come up with a good one here. I’ve considered “aubserve” and “aurserve,” but the former is a risky homonym, and the latter is awkward. Further investigation of the word “observe” shows that the “ob-” syllable is not the offender, but rather the “-serve” is ("to watch, keep safe,").

Another example of this problem is with the word, “appear.” I may want to write (or even say), “It appears to be a pink noise.” This bothers me, as I can easily discern the differences between pink noise and white noise simply by listening, and without the aid of ‘seeing’ a graphic analyzer.

Again, I tried in a similar manner to concoct a new word, such as “auppear.” This suffers the same problems as above (and, consequently, the same verbal problems as the words “oral” and “aural”).

I aim to be succinct. And for the sake of clarity, I wish to have a more acoustically-correct palette to draw from. Worse than having only one word for love in our language, I haven't any words to accurately express certain acoustical data. Eskimos have all the fun.

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A brief note: Mark Beasley, a good friend of mine, and whose work I’m always in awe of, did something pretty cool over the summer. In his own words…

This is made by indexing the signal of every frame/sec of Gordon’s songs, and then doing the same for Tina Turner’s songs. Then, I played Gordon’s songs using Tina Turner’s signal data, effectively calling the equivalent data from Tina’s song through Gordon’s current song. Someone got Tina Turnered!

It’s metallic, unforgiving, and raw. And it’s great.

mark-beasley.com

Patina Turnered

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