Sarah Matheson, “Projecting Placelessness: Industrial Television and the ‘Authentic’ Canadian City,” Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 117-139, 113.
This essay is revised and expanded from material first presented at the Music and the Moving Image conference at NYU in 2021 and in the conclusion to my book Acoustic Profiles: A Sound Ecology of the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
For a comprehensive historical overview of the work of the WSP, see the timeline in Sound, Media, Ecology edited by Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
R. Murray Schafer, The Book of Noise (Wellington: Price Milburn and Co., 1970), 2.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961/1992), 241.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 9.
R. Murray Schafer, Voices of Tyranny, Temples of Silence (Indian River: Arcana Editions, 1993), 71–73.
Ibid., 73.
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 117.
Ibid.
Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in North America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 209.
Ibid., 228.
Originally in French as “Bellevue, mais mauvais son." R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 222.
Here we find a measure of sonic homogeneity to match the borderless feeling between inside and out afforded by the transparent walls: whether inside or out, the steady flow of moving air through ventilation shafts is always nearby.
Notes on these recordings are available here, ➝.
Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 43.