Sirens’ Song

The dominant sound here is the sweep and swoosh of traffic — and SIRENS.*

Each siren pushes the air towards me shortening its wave so that its pitch increases, air pressure intensifying. As it arrives where I am there is, perhaps an infinitesimal moment, its true pitch — the pitch at which the siren emits at its stationery source. 

But is there any point in this statement? What is the point of a true pitch if the pitch that sweeps towards and away from me is different.  Moving away from me, the air is sucked leaving pockets of sparser inhabitation (this is probably not scientifically correct terminology).

Sound as a shifting relativity and an illustration of a wholistic system —  you cannot have a push without a suck, an in-breath without an out-breath. Things must move and vibrate in causal relationships with each other…

O’Callaghan uses doppler as the ultimate justification of sound as  event that occurs between the object and the listener. 

Schaeffer wanted to break with causality —  or rather to break a linguistic or semantic sense of causality — a naming — a kind of branding that limits the imagination to the container called “bell”, “dog”, “car”. But he is not opposed to making new containers. He is in fact incredibly committed to categorising, schematising, using language to name other aspects.

So I’ve been sitting here trying to capture the sirens. It is no longer the sirens themselves that are driving me crazy, it’s my need to capture them. My ears reach out into the distance to hear them approaching so that I can get the entire sweep, the whole gesture. 

Here I am succeeding in thinking of the sirens as sound, only partially attached their significance. That is, I am choosing to ignore that each of these sirens is a crisis or potential tragedy in someone’s life. I can’t actually let myself think that or I would go crazy. Crazier than I already am listening day and night to the qualities of the sirens, the way they overlap, the stereo pan, picturing the sound waves as convexities and concavities, sweeping arcs preceding and receding. The sense of understanding the physics of something — I like this feeling. It doesn’t diminish the wonder of phenomena it heightens it somehow. 

The law of field recording is that if you hear something and grab your recorder, by the time you turn it on the sound will end. I use this unwritten immutable law to make sounds stop. And so often it works, or I convince myself it does. Here there are so many sirens it doesn’t make them stop it just makes the good ones — multiple cars going in and out of phase — slip through as my fingers grapple to hit the record button in time. As multiple sirens, ambulances, police vans, motor bikes, the gendarme, the local police (whatever they are called) and the sapeurs and pompiers (firemen**) come past, each one I don’t record I think is the perfect combination.

The fate of the field recordist is that you are always in the moment and aware of missing the moment — missing the capture of that moment…. It’s addictive. Just one more recording, maybe this will be the ultimate. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and there are a few recordings I have that are favourites, but nothing is an ultimate recording. Am I searching for the ultimate recording that can say everything about the world in one go, everything about a place, everything about a moment that can be communicated to others?

* And piano practice – maybe a tirade on that latter

** That sends me on a mission to know what a “sappeur” is and I get the very handy “sapper” which also means nothing to me. But it turns out a sapper is someone in warfare who builds saps. Or rather digs them, trenches that in the medieval days would undermine the city walls. Sap from Italian “zappa” or spade. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sap