Su Rogers, Barbara Goldstein, Dargan Bullivant, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Murray join the AA Radio to share stories of their professional and personal relationships with the late Monica Pidgeon, editor of Architectural Design magazine from 1946-1975, who passed away in September 2009 at the age of 95. Asked by the Radio to each bring 5 letters of the alphabet, each standing for a word and story about Monica, the anecdotes and memories journey from Bloomsbury to Buckminster Fuller to Berlin, Lunches at L’Escargot, St. Anne’s Close, Walter Segal, Jacobsen stools, Saturday afternoon Talks in the garden, Team X and CIAM, Pidgeon Audio Visual, and Monica’s Independence, Dedication, Passion, and Loyalty.

This conversation was recorded on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at the AA, 36 Bedford Square, London. Visit the Pidgeon Digital archive at www.pidgeondigital.com

Curated for Architectural Association Independent Radio by Charles Stankievech. Part of 1 of 3 in the series Sound + Space: Headphones | Architecture | Transmission ——–>   LISTEN TO THE COMPILATION  <——— Headphones are the norm.  The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble.  As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation.  The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening.  Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created—sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product.  While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening—such as intimacy and privacy—are also explored and included.

Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity” in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007.

Image: Sezione di orecchio, Ex Optimis Neotreriocrum Operibus  1804.  Archivi di San Servolo. This compilation should be listened to with headphones.

Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity” in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007.

Image: Sezione di orecchio, Ex Optimis Neotreriocrum Operibus  1804.  Archivi di San Servolo.

3M’s demonstration sound recording for instruction in the use of the stethoscope for cardiac auscultation (heart sounds). With Laennec ‘s invention of the stethoscope we have for the first time in history where a sound object is place between the ears and not external to the body.  One body cavity is mapped to another: heart chamber to cranial cavity.

Interior space metabolized.  Interior space punctured.  Laennec revisited.

Kirkegaard working with an audiology laboratory attempts to self-reflectively turn the organ of the ear from receiver to transmitter.  Embedding tiny microphones into the ear canal and playing two specific frequencies with a ratio of 1.3, a third frequency is generated in the ear.  The sound source sound for Kirkegaards record literally comes from the interior of the body.  This recording presented here is documentation of his process.