Two
Sundays before Make Music New York, the Brooklyn-based venue Issue
Project Room, an indispensable site of offbeat programming, organized
its own sonic jamboree. Twenty-one musicians led groups on “soundwalks”
around Brooklyn and other boroughs, treating the city either as an
audio source or as a stage for their work. (The term “soundwalk” was
popularized by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who, in the
spirit of Ives and John Cage, has long blurred distinctions between
composed music and ambient sounds.) Two dozen people signed up for a
soundwalk with Betsey Biggs, a young Princeton-trained composer and
interdisciplinary artist who often creates site-specific performances.
Beforehand, Biggs directed participants to a Web site where they could
download “Detox Project,” an electronic piece that she had assembled
for the occasion. It consisted largely of sounds recorded in and around
the murky old Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn: machine noises, trucks
backing up, the bell of a rising drawbridge, sirens, pedestrian
chatter, and, for a long while, a voice softly humming a childlike,
three-note melody.

Late in the afternoon, we met at a
boarded-up house at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue and
began following Biggs’s lead, listening to “Detox Project” on
earphones. The streets were deserted, except for a few hipsters pushing
strollers. It was unsettling to hear loud sounds without seeing their
source. Conversely, certain noises that seemed to emanate from the
soundtrack actually came from real life: I was surprised to see live
birds in a dead tree. The experience proved to be psychologically
complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears. And, as Biggs
notes in her Princeton dissertation, this kind of work plays off
Internet-era listening habits—the use of manicured playlists to create
what she calls a “cinematic lull,” a “solitary dream state.” When the
walk curled through the quiet streets of Carroll Gardens, the collage
of noises subsided and the human voice took over. Biggs began banging
on a tin drum that she’d brought along, and a friend played an
accordion. An electronically mediated experience veered toward old-time
music-making. At the end, we stood on the Third Street drawbridge and
applauded the composer, who smiled bashfully, nodding toward the
strangely beautiful ruined landscape behind her.