THE HUM AND beeps of traffic. The industrial clunk of construction. The clatter and thump as sneakers and heels hit the pavement.
A walk through any city centre can introduce a riot of sounds to your ears. But when you’re constantly passing through busy intersections and walking down crammed streets, you can begin to tune out these ever-changing sounds.
If you visit Temple Bar’s Meeting House Square from today, you’ll hear the usual sounds. But if you listen closely, you might hear something that sounds rather different. Maybe it’s bird sounds, maybe it’s the soft plink-plonk of industrial music. Maybe it’s a voice intoning the word ‘OK’ over and over again.
Continuous Drift
These sounds are part of Continuous Drift, a sound art project developed by artist Sven Anderson. What marks this project out as special is that you, the listener, can control it.
Even if you baulk at the idea of ‘sound art’, Continuous Drift essentially means you can control the sounds in one of the central parts of Temple Bar, turning the space into an oasis of calm, an energetic centre of activity, or a home to spoken texts.
You can even stop the music someone else is playing, and control the volume.
It’s a democratic process that is controlled via the website ContinuousDrift.com. When you go to the square, you can visit the website via your phone or laptop, scroll through the available songs – which were submitted by 21 different artists – and change how things sound in Meeting House Square.
“The whole idea about it is to get people thinking more about who has control over their sound environment,” explained Anderson.
Generally we walk around the city and we have no say in what we hear, and a lot of people have different opinions about what’s noisy, what isn’t noisy, what should be there and shouldn’t be there.
Anderson has been working with Dublin City Council on the project for the past two years.
“The feeling of standing in the square and turning on one of these pieces is very powerful,” he said. It’s not just about listening, it’s a way to change how you listen.
“It aims to empower people to begin questioning the urban soundscape, and through that, to become more conscious of other aspects of the city that can only be discovered through attention to these more atmospheric or ambient qualities that often escape our eyes.”
The sound is played through speakers hidden in the four canopies in the centre of the square – but the idea isn’t to have sound bombarding the space 24/7.
“It’s not something where you want to immediately make it overly explicit so that everybody tries it at the same time. It should be a slow builder,” said Anderson. Continuous Drift won’t be in operation during events or markets.
“It shouldn’t be active in the space all the time, its not something that I want to be every second of the day; people barraging the system with different pieces – that would drive the people here crazy.”
There are two speakers in each canopy, so some pieces utilise all eight speakers, taking the sound on a journey.
“There’s a lot of different atmospheres here,” said Anderson of the varied music that can be played.
Active since 2001, Anderson is simultaneously working on a separate project in Smithfield.
Of sound art projects like Continuous Drift, he said: “People encounter this, they might like it, they might not like it but they have an opinion and they remember it. Then you go out to the city and you’re more informed when you think about sound.”
Continous Drift was designed and curated by Anderson within Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP), which is a public art project commissioned by Dublin City Council.
It’s part of the council’s Interacting with the City within its public art programme, and is funded from the Percent for Art scheme through the Department of the Environment.
The project was awarded the European Soundscape Award issued by the European Environmental Agency (EEA) in 2014.
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