Daniel Biro

Just saw an OK BBC documentary on Brian Eno. Must say I’ve always been a big fan of his and the whole Ambient philosophy.

And yet it’s interesting to note that very little of his ideas have had much effect in the real world. What has become the ‘ambient’ music of our lives (shops, restaurants, cars, lobbies etc) is the restless beat of dance music, and not the slow ever-changing soundscapes that Eno advocated more than 20 years ago. ‘Music For Airports’ never ended up in airports or anywhere else apart from art galleries and installations.

Nevertheless I believe there is still a huge untapped potential for intelligent tailored sound-design for public spaces that would truly reflect the nature and functionality of each individual environment. It’s just that designers still have no or very little understanding of sound and what it can do. Architects rarely think acoustically which why so many buildings and rooms sound awful when you’re in them. Sound is always an afterthought and usually means putting up a few speakers and buying the latest compilation CDs.

So many bold architectural concepts have materialised in our cityscapes but sonically nobody seems to want to push the boat out. Why don’t famous architects like Foster, Liebeskind, etc ever include sound sculptures or some of the generative methods developed by Eno into their work? Is it lack of understanding or is it they fear it would impose too much on the users? Maybe sound is ultimately too ‘penetrative’, too disturbing if different from the completely mundane. Maybe the reason we have so much dance music in our public environments is because it is so dull we don’t really notice or care about it anymore.