Dan Hill part 2 - Sound of Cities
Dan Hill is Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova - Sweden’s Government Innovation Authority - where he continues to invent the future of cities. His background as Head of Arup‘s Digital Studio, Head of Interactive Technology at the BBC, Director of Web and Broadcast at Monocle, CEO of Fabrica and much more has led him to think about design, sound, space and the future of urban environments in unique and insightful ways.
This is the second in a two-part interview in which Dan explores the history of the future of digital music, the cultural and sociological context of musical experience, the designer’s search for identity at the birth of online interaction, the idea of speculative design for cities.
This extended interview with Dan introduces the upcoming Industry Commons Ecosystem (ICE) Labs in Mannheim in April, focusing on Urban and Industrial Sound Design with a particular emphasis on sound in public space.
The ultimate goal of the ICE Labs Mannheim is to bring together the realms of technology, music, design, art and culture, blockchain, architecture, urban planning, mobility, life sciences and industry - and Mannheim is the perfect place to do that, with a brilliant startup ecosystem that is going to help support the projects that emerge out of that 5-day labs experience.
Music: reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
writing, people, city, music, bbc, design, sound, places, future, ninth symphony, talk, culture, absolutely, thinking, tech fest, record, piece, interesting, happen, playing
SPEAKERS
Dan Hill, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, let me see if I can bring you up to speed real quick. This is part two of a two parter. But this is the internet. So you just feel free to consume whatever media you want in whichever order you choose. And that’s still all absolutely fine. But for context, Dan Hill is the director of strategic design at Vinnova, Sweden’s government innovation authority. Before that, head of interactive technology and design at the BBC, Director of web and broadcast at Monocle, CEO of Fabrica, a professor at RMIT, university, design advocate for the Mayor of London, Executive Director of future cities catapult, author of a book about strategic design. As part of designing websites for super famous bands and a prolific track record of long form blogging, and serious international thought leadership on the topics of innovation, culture, creativity, and design. He was key to introducing podcasts to the BBC, he invents entirely new kinds of cities. And if you’re ever putting together one of those old time dream dinner guest lists, make room for down at the table. He’s one of the more fascinating people you’re likely to meet on a whole range of topics. So this week, we’re going to go with part two of my interview with Dan, and we kick off with his history of the future of digital music, the cultural and sociological context of musical experience. The design is search for identity at the birth of online interaction, the idea of speculative design for cities, and how the future is not something that happens to you. It’s something that you make, and also our creative cultural production needs to be right at the centre of that process. Now, Dan’s intensely interested in space, as in the space around us, rather than outerspace in particular, though, presumably also, the environment we inhabit and sound. And particularly the question of why don’t we think about sound enough? In that context, this has become central to his understanding of the city, how we can design places, and also to a large extent, the health choices we make around mobility. So it should be pretty clear why I’m interested in what someone like Dan has to say about all this. But if you want to know why we’re so focused on the relationship between sound and the city, right at this moment at MTF, you’re going to hear something about the Industry Commons Labs we’re going to be running in Mannheim in April this year, is that the ice labs in Mannheim will focus on urban and industrial sound design, with a particular emphasis on sound and public space. The ultimate goal being to bring together the realms of technology, music, design, arts and culture, blockchain architecture, urban planning, mobility, Life Sciences and industry. And Mannheim is the perfect place to do that with a brilliant startup ecosystem that’s going to help support the projects that emerge out of that five day deep dive labs experience. More on that pretty much everywhere you hear about MTF, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, the newsletter, the blog, and right here on the podcast, but to introduce some of those concepts, and really contextualise them, let’s hear from the person who spends large parts of his career thinking deeply about cities of sound, and the sound of cities music fan, and vinnova is director of strategic design. Dan Hill, enjoy. I’m gonna pull up the article you wrote in 2005, which is essentially, you know, given where we are, as, you know, a sort of musings on the future of music. Yeah. We’re 15 years down the line, the future of music turned out the way you fought my
Dan Hill
yes and no. There are things that we were dealing with there again, because we’ve done this was when I was writing at the BBC, actually, and just given a talk at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, funnily enough, I was invited there by the British Council. And so Bailey’s Academy is very kind of classical music sort of in its proper like, high culture territory, which is great. And then it was delightful to go therehaving not seen much like they in Britain. So but what I talked about then was things that I knew that they couldn’t catch me on. Because I’m not that much to either end classical music necessarily but but was around the context of music experience, not as an interaction design, it was very much my work. It was you know, the the early the first iPod, and previous to that the Rovio mp3 player, and previous to that, some semblance of playlists, and mp3 isn’t real audio streaming and all of that stuff that we were wrestling with back then. And then people making playlists themselves and as you said, making your own music and, you know, what then became things that you know, a lot more about, like bandcamp. You know, you could sort of see, like the almost like the urge to do that in those days. And any other music industry was not really reoriented fully around that at all. You could see that that was going to be a huge issue. I knew that from working with Virgin and I for a long time at that point. And then the BBC again, I was in the middle of all of the battles there about this is the death or for this is the future of the waves full on. And then just then there’s doing this research and really for me understanding again a sort of slightly more user centred or sociological approach, remember literally drawing cartoon strips of the time to get across to people how music experience might play out whereby someone wakes up in the morning and starts listening to something in their bedroom. As they walk into the kitchen, the same track is playing on a totally different device, continuously in the house, an idea how that was going to happen, because before ZigBee, and things like that, and then they would walk outside and then I was doing it based upon my Manchester experience. I remember drawing this guy in a hoodie walking past Cemetery in Salford, and then something pinging in his ear. Theoretically, saying, The Smiths cover for the Queen Is Dead was a photograph, right? where you’re standing right now, you know, would you like to listen to the queen is just sort of playing those themes out again, understanding that this is maybe where things are going. And now all of those things, as you know, more or less technically possible, but they’re still they don’t quite exist like that. So this is always the danger with that kind of prediction, you can predict the easy stuff. But then technically, it’s incredibly hard. And then sometimes things are just a really bad idea anyway. So do you really want to be walking along listening to what could be the most meaningful music that you’ve thought? And then someone paying in a year and said, Oh, did you know the Smith cover Queen Is Dead? was for short right here is like a No, I don’t want that right now. So we weren’t really, because they didn’t exist. We weren’t really capable of thinking through things with that level of detail. But we knew that exercising these muscles was speculating about the future would be massively useful. So that piece is full of those speculations. It’s looking at really crunchy stuff. Like, why the hell is the iPod Shuffle, not let you copy a track onto it when the track name is longer than 12 characters. There’s no technical real reason for that, right? It’s just that someone hasn’t thought through, they thought all tracks are, let’s say the longest track name they can think of would be I don’t know, please, please me by The Beatles, because that’s what’s on the thing when they’re writing that code. Yeah. It’s just amazing. is a Sufjan Stevens track name, which is 172 characters? Not? Exactly right. And you’re saying that you can’t listen to that track on your iPod Shuffle? For what reason? So yeah, so it’s pointing to like these absurd things, which, frankly, would take two lines of code to fix and they were fixed within six months of me writing the piece. And then much, I think, maybe more interesting stuff was like flipping over a vinyl record in my hand and looking at the amount of what we might call metadata on that. And if it’s coming from the late 50s, I was a jazz fan. And on so many other things that I had happened to have, I think it was probably a lawsuit premium or something like that. And you’re just looking at Okay, like that’s got all the technical stuff, like who played what all the engineers names, producing names, where it was recorded, What day? And then there’s like an essay from someone they’ve written whilst listening to, you know, some weird like late 60s, Bogdanovich
Andrew Dubber
actually wrote an article about how landing notes on jazz records in the 50s were the precursor to the internet, because that was my hyperlink to this person plates. Excellent. That was really great. What else can I find?
Dan Hill
Totally, and really, really diverse, weird writing, as well as some really like, you know, spaced out beat poet stuff, through two very technical things. So yeah, super interesting. And then, of course, the artwork, the certain scale of the thing, the physicality of it, you know, so I was looking at all of that stuff, your interaction with it as a physical object, which still play that that played out in way to my career has told us the relationship between digital and physical and your interaction with it. When it became IoT in cities, all of my early thinking was based on stuff like vinyl records, and iPod some that relationship between those two, when much later on, it became about how am I going to call an autonomous shuttle from this building in Melbourne, you know? Yeah. So. And then I was looking at the time, iTunes, as a counterpoint, and that the paucity of metadata you could bang into that thing,
Andrew Dubber
despite it being basically a spreadsheet.
Dan Hill
Yeah, but the spreadsheet where the fields have been delimited by an apple engineer. So you could Yes, there was a notes field and you could write down Wayne Shorter played sax, but no one did.
Andrew Dubber
And certainly, they didn’t arrive with that.
Dan Hill
No, it wasn’t their intent. And so so I was writing about that. And I still I still find that fascinating looking at Spotify now say and you can see kind of chunks of metadata coming and going as they iterate the platform and video, like elements being introduced into the music experience, even when you’re listening on your phone, it might be in the pocket, you know, sort of, how’s that working and why and, but
Andrew Dubber
is that glanceable I noticed that the Billy Eilish album is, you know, animated as exactly
Dan Hill
glanceable on Hopkins and the new science stuff, you know, there’s like these little mini loops playing which in that case in 2005, you can see me trying to get to that Though some of them are also sketched out, why isn’t there like a little projector for your room like a mini iPod projector or a mock up in Photoshop, where you just plug it into the iPod? And it would say, it would just project onto the wall behind you, you know, you could project it, let’s say two metre square, even Beyonce crazy on you noticed. So you can see from the other side of the room, because you’re plugging into your hi fi Yeah, why would you have to walk over? You know, with a vinyl record, you can have the record on the record deck playing over there and have hold the thing on sitting on your couch, seven feet away. So a lot of that stuff still hasn’t been figured out, I think for is being toyed with or experimented upon. And so there’s stuff in that piece that is digging way back into the history of buying old transistor radios. What became ghetto blasters in the 80s? Like, you know, the culture around music production through to music experience? And how do you sort of take the themes and thinking behind it as a cultural thing, and then drop it into what’s basically an interaction design or technology. And some of that got wildly wrong, because it was just like I said, I got obsessed about the sufjan. Stevens title, tracks, and again, fixed within six months. But other stuff was much more exploratory. And I think it’s still interesting to me. How do you? How do you handle visuals and music simultaneously with a phone? How do you how do you convey, as you said, all of that, metadata is not quite the right word, or no, but the halo of information around was basically a bit of audio. And, you know, how do you enrich people’s experience?
Andrew Dubber
And to be fair, that’s where a lot of the sort of cultural meaning is situated?
Dan Hill
Yeah, completely. Exactly. And how do you know that you order is interesting, in a way that some other band from Manchester the time wasn’t. And some of that is, this is a long debate and music, of course, it’s like, does it have its own intrinsic qualities as a piece of music, and like, literally, as you have to be a musician to understand why john Coltrane is good saxophone player or not. And David Bowie is a bad saxophone player, you know, that both saxophone players write in their own way. And, and
Andrew Dubber
this idea of the phrase that I always took he was with was the music itself. And we’ll talk about the music itself. What do you mean, what
Dan Hill
exactly so, so as a as a non musician, and again, you know, and I was sort of a musician, but never in a meaningful way at all. So understanding the difference between let’s just talk about john Coltrane, Kenny G and David Bowie. They all play the saxophone, right? For me, john Coltrane was interesting and clearly like a genius. The others aren’t. Right, but but how do I reach that conclusion? Because it’s not a question of examining the spectrum of the WAV file. Really? No, sure. It’s other stuff. And other stuff means I’m about to read about Coltrane, and then understand a bit about what happened in jazz before and after, and then what was going on with him. And then maybe it has to do with then free jazz. And that’s that, and then Black Power, and then Detroit, and then, you know, sort of incredibly rich and then you look at Kenny G. And then Bowie. Massively interesting, but not because of saxophone.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, I, I used to divide that up and being articulate and having something to say and not the same thing. Some people are articulate with nothing to say some people have lots to say in our data. salutely. And some people have both.
Dan Hill
Absolutely. And you can be you know, you could you could argue Kenny G is technically a better saxophone player in many respects. Certainly, David Bowie. Probably not Coltrane.
Andrew Dubber
Miles Davis is a really good example. There are lots of more technically professionally,
Dan Hill
exact rocker play. Exactly. And that’s why when a sudden, you know, New Order blue one day or something, why is that interesting? It’s not necessarily because of its intrinsic musical content is a very simple piece of music. But the context of it is massive, you know, massive, massive, massive, and that is what I was, again, maybe it’s my weird like sociological, cultural, more design led background, unpacking all of that stuff,
Andrew Dubber
is a really interesting thing for me is that you took the time and the energy to unpack all that stuff. And what was essentially a piece of long form journalism. Did you think of yourself as a writer, because you go on to write a book,
Dan Hill
I write a lot and that but it’s always, I never know, I never know, you know, when someone says you are writing, I’m not really a designer. And then why the hell am now I’ve written a lot, continue to write a lot, but books, journals, and then stuff on the blog. And at that point, I really had been writing I suppose, again, because I’ve written a shrine, my master’s degree and all the way through that was a lot of writing there. But I started writing I suppose in the 99 2000, because when blogging became a thing in order to understand what the hell I was doing, so it’s like a self reflective mechanism as it was often with blogging in the early days, or a way of pointing at the world and finding things interesting and it must be enough ego in me somewhere to say that Put, I think then about this Japanese avant garde architecture exhibition I just went to, even when there are only 200 people on the internet, and part of that was building a community at the time as well, as you probably remember, I can find people like me that are in Auckland that are interested in the same kind of stuff that’s interesting to live to write something for him or her to respond to me. And then. So it was a bit of that as well. And I was entering an interaction design. Remember, in the web, when there was a tonne of basically existential debates about Why’s this is what is design is interaction design, like industrial design, or HCI. You know, that was constant search for identity, which, frankly, was incredibly dull. But, you know, we were sort of breathing life into a new discipline. And part of that was through writing. And so at that point, the the 2005 piece was really beginning to move gears into another mode, where it was, I think, I now have something to say about this based on 510 years worth of work in music and into it. And people are now inviting me to come and speak at conferences about this. And also, the work we were doing in the BBC was clearly beginning to transform the way that that thing works, and therefore the industry worked or the culture worked, you could see that happening. So I started to realise the writing had some responsibility to it as well. So it was also their way of kind of still very much sharing with the community of practice. I remember writing about the mp3 thing with them in our time the podcast, I remember writing as well as gummies, hot water. Radio three, we dropped BBC recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in mp3 s onto the internet directly for free download, with no real I mean, we had some conversation with mcps, then rights collection agency and prs, the equivalent and the record label was, and it was a BBC orchestra. And the Ninth Symphony is in the public domain. 200 years old or whatever, still cause huge problems. You have the record industry basically funding BBC Three, radio three The next morning, so what are you doing? Like you just made the Ninth Symphony available for free online?
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, and we are recording of it now. We can’t sell our recording on it.
Dan Hill
That’s what they were thinking. And we would be saying, of course, you can, like you know, is the this is a kind of this is very much. We are stimulating people’s interest in the Ninth Symphony. And if you have a fantastic recording of that, it’s going to be worth way more than in this case. Actually, the BBC phonics recording of it good as it is. People don’t, you know, they’re not trying to find the cheapest available Ninth Symphony. That’s not really what they’re motivated by really sure. If you’re into the Ninth Symphony. Yeah, you know, you might actually even go the other way. And so on the best version of it. Sure. So anyway,
Andrew Dubber
and Ninth Symphony, presumably a gateway drug to other synchronically,
Dan Hill
which we of course, the BBC with at the time was very much all about, we’re never use gateway drugs. Obviously, that’s not in the BBC charter. But educate, inform, entertain. Absolutely. We are leading you into that stuff. So and we had endless amount of means for doing that.
Andrew Dubber
Speaking of drugs, had this concept and what do you post about slow release culture drugs? Yeah. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that? Cuz I thought that’s a really
Dan Hill
well, in a way, metaphorically. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to that using, like, even an iPod projector Photoshop mockup. This became what became years later was known as speculative design, or design futures, and ended up doing a lot of that many are in cities again, and they submit to thousands through to 2018, or whatever, our future sort of Casper and others where we would be asked by people, like clients, had some cities have Google or whatever. So tell us tell us what’s going to happen, you know, tell us what’s going on with technology in cities and stuff, you know, people are going to get autonomous shuttles, or they’re going to have the parcel delivered by drones, or they’re, they’re going to talk to each other ever again. You know, what’s Amazon Alexa gonna do to communities? I don’t know. Depends what you do, right? So So we started sketching out his two or three kind of variations on that, here’s a mock up of someone riding a bike using an augmented reality helmet. So they’re doing kind of this sort of Wayfinding going on, but it’s overlaid onto the city. And really, we’re not seeing that that’s a product that you need to make right now. It’s a bloody expensive bike helmet. But maybe there’s something you want to make wishes a lo fi device that could sit on the handlebars that would guide people through a city in a way that a cyclist navigates. And we had the server search for that. But we would mock that up because I can describe that to you now. And you’re not because you get what I’m saying. But as many people elsewhere do not as well. So we had to design these things, as bits of culture really, like make a short film or something was quite often I’ve written a short story to describe his Melbourne or a bit of Melbourne transformed in 1015 years time. I’m not saying this is a prediction at all. I’m not William Gibson, anywhere near but we can use the same tropes to say it could be like this, or it could be like this
Andrew Dubber
provocation that
Dan Hill
takes people in a particular direction. Exactly. And I do it. I do it. You know, more or less as a proper story. So, not necessarily plotlines with selling with characters. And so it was using culture, that’s what I mean by using a, you know, culture. And the nice thing is kind of it because we’re not, what we’re then doing is saying, well, to make that happen or to or to think about that, or to make some variation on it, or if you didn’t like it, maybe the opposite of that happened. Now we’re in a slow release mode, because now we please change the organisation, when I need to change the law, I might have said this, and so on. So you’re kind of dropping these things out there. And you know that it’s not going to happen like that, even though, as with my cemetery gates example, you can absolutely imagine that thing, you could more or less, build a bit to make it work properly. That takes a long time. And you figure out if it’s the right thing to do after much prototyping, and so on. So it was it was really a case of how do we use a cultural artefact like that, in order to stimulate all of the actually relatively slow patterns of activity that might make that happen in a good way? Right. So that’s what I mean by this kind of slow release idea, you’re dropping into a pond and then slowly, again, ripple its way through nothing.
Andrew Dubber
It’s just occurred to me, and occasionally, while you’re talking, is that I haven’t seen the word futurist apply to do the same kind of fraught relationship with it. I do
Dan Hill
know, it’s been applied many times now, you know, throw off like a, like an unwelcome guest immediately, because it’s, yes, has been applied to me frequently, and I and I can immediately say, I’m not I, you know, I refuse to imagine that you can predict the future in any meaningful way, as a designer, my work is all about the future, by definition, you know, I’m making something for you, that doesn’t exist yet. Therefore, you’re gonna be using it next week, or in two years, it’s about the future, or in 20 years as a city, right. But it isn’t a prediction, it’s or rather the Alan Kay or variation on that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And then therefore, what I’m trying to get across to people is this sense of agency, it depends what you do. And particularly now my work is in government, and I’m often working with city governments and others, when they say to us, you know, is our autonomous vehicles going to change the way that people move around us? Depends what you do. If you make it more likely for that, then it is more likely to happen, and therefore it probably will, or it could it could do you’re in charge, because you’re actually the Department of Transport for the cities, right? You have a lot of agency there. But it’s funny that they don’t really consider that sort of asking you to give them the answer. And then they know what to regulate around. I’m trying to go the other way and say, No, let’s sit down. We can quickly sketch out a few scenarios here. And then we can talk about the value they might generate. And then you can then have a pop out the one that you think is the most preferable and that’s
Andrew Dubber
that does sound a lot more sensible. I almost got into a fistfight with Gary Leonard once, because of the number of times he just kept saying in the future, we will and I just didn’t save the future. We weren’t all anything we’ve all exactly. So yeah,
Dan Hill
exactly. You know, we haven’t all end up driving a car, but we’ve rebuilt the city around that. And it’s, and that’s the danger of it, again, goes back to the Cedric price thing, you can’t make that statement, because the impact of that is in the US most obviously, throwing away perfectly good tram networks in Los Angeles, the biggest tram network in the world in the late 50s. And rebuilding them freeways, right through the middle of communities, you know, literally displacing people from their homes, because actually turns up or in the future will be a minority of people might end up driving on that thing ended. And that was the mistake of saying we will all do this. cannot do that. Yeah. So yeah. Um, I have a fraught relationship with the future in that sense, because it’s often us. And so now we need to do we need to do the hard yards on what do you want it to be?
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, you can take a responsibility now.
Dan Hill
Exactly. And actually, often, this is the funny thing about politics and policy. People kind of employ you, for that reason. Yeah. You know, sort of your job to figure out how that’s
Andrew Dubber
going to happen to us because
Dan Hill
of the future. Exactly. Your representative democracy leads, you’re supposed to be figuring out with people. Absolutely, sure. But it’s not an it’s not like, it’s an a priori fact that I can throw at you, which is, anyway.
Andrew Dubber
So I’m going to finish with the relationship between the city and sound and because that’s something that you’ve kind of almost badged yourself with those two words, suddenly, yeah. I have that happen to be one of those things connect.
Dan Hill
Um, so yeah, I mean, I ended up having a blog called city of sound, actually now most of my writing medium, and the various publications that have different names based around why then I’ve ended up doing more so there’s one called a chair in a room. Which is right interaction design and objects and places. And there’s one called Trojan horses or bilateral Trojan horses around strategic design and so on. But still, my username is attitudes and a medium, I can’t really shake it off. Because my name is Dan Hill, that name is very common, and it goes very quickly.
Andrew Dubber
If you Google Dan Hill music, you get
Dan Hill
some songs when we touch, yes, it’s only five wishes, I will never be number one on Google. So I have my own hit record in Canada. Anyway, um, but where that comes from was that I, when I was doing state 51 stuff in this specialised record shop find, and especially with bookshop finder, I actually had an idea for what we would now call a start up, and those who just call it a small business called city of sound, which would be a guide to the music scenes in cities all over the world. So you’d be like city of sound slash Birmingham, City of Lisbon, and so on. And it would be the best record shops, but the most prominent musicians, the best clubs, probably the history of the place, and so on knowing that there were people like me around the time that when I was going to Barcelona, or whatever, I would want to pop into the record shop. So it was the idea of that, and I actually sketched out a business plan with some people at the time, more or less, and then it just went nowhere, because I realised, actually, I’m probably gonna join the BBC. Much bigger beast. So it sat in an envelope literally for a couple of years. And never got taken out of that and don’t really, and by the name, I’d register the domain to give a shout out, calm down, some point assuming would have slash Lisbon, slash Milan or whatever, slash Sheffield. So when I started blogging, and has borrowed that, because it was the domain that I happen to own, and my stuff at the time was really about them, it was about cities a lot. And it was about sound a lot, sometimes the intersection between the two because this is maybe the more interesting that was the way that I’d started to think about technology and the internet and cities was using music as a sounds nanog a lot as in when you’re walking through the middle of a city, you can really perceive the internet, he really couldn’t in, you know, 1999, but it was it was humming there, you can’t really see it. So but it’s pervasive, and it’s there. And I was raised with an ambient music and so on. And they get tubes writing, and of course, you know, stuff and a couple of very good mates of mine publishers, Simon Hopkins, and others been making work in that area. And this relationship between space and environment and sound was very much part of my thinking and world at the time. And so I would sometimes be writing about the relationship between literally music and sound, music, concrete, and you know, then the sound of cities themselves and in the world of cities, It then became about why don’t we think about sound enough. And then when I got more into architecture and design years later, there’s this lovely book by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, called the eyes of the skin, which is about not preferencing sights, as much as the other sounds, obviously, with architecture, the visuals are very dominant, that he was writing about how you know, touch, and actually even taste, you sometimes recommend going and looking at building. But certainly the sound of things that are absolutely fundamental, to the way we experienced it. So that became a very strong ritual thing for me to write about, Well, certainly
Andrew Dubber
working spaces, how they sound, what the acoustics are, like, those things are really super
Dan Hill
holy, and still, you know, came like came through my work much, much later. But then I was also using a sort of metaphorically as a way of understanding or the sort of invisible forces or conditions that apply in places. And you could think of the internet networks as those sort of things, you can’t perceive them, but they’re absolutely shaping the way that things happen and became a sort of an interesting thread for me to unpick when I was then thinking about places and or media. So music and sound is very useful, obviously, when it starts when you start thinking about intangible at least in a visual sense, or ephemeral, or things that carry cultural meaning, that are not frozen in the architecture or not frozen and text, but the you know, living and time based, something that you interact with, that can change in response to your interaction, something that you as a listener, have a very subjective relationship to, like, you might listen to Coltrane and have something totally different. So that immediately straight away is a useful thing to think about in the context of cities. So yeah, it was one multiple levels as literally writing about the music scene in Manchester, or Milan, I was also thinking about music, correct and ambient music and close to that scene. also thinking about it metaphorically, and this more looser sense. And so it did. It’s still pervades the way that I see and think and hear The world and interact with it, I think it’s just that it’s kind of it’s been shaped as a kind of a wave form over time just in terms of how I I’m not sure how high it is in the mix comes and goes, right. Like it’s come back more actually, at some point it’s just so you know, for the recent years have been very much about government big picture challenges citizens on and yes, I’ve been bringing culture and subjectivity and all those things into it. I haven’t really engaged with music or sound as a practitioner at all for a long time now. And while it’s been when I was involved more in designing spaces and buildings than ever will be something I’ll be bringing on into the picture quite often. Because I’m not a musician or a sound designer. I then throw Arup’s sound team at the time who are extremely good, so they knew what they were doing with it. And I’d be unusually putting them in front of people in a way that often one but um, yeah, my relationship with music now is very much just as a listener. I’ve got kids um, you know, maybe I’m playing a bit Oregon with them. Like that’s, you know, I bought my son a teenage engineering modular, well, not modular. The Okay, go to synth pocket. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we’re just fooling around that day. And it says, Now I’m sort of vicariously living through him, and my daughter as well. And they’re beginning to sort of poke buttons and make noise. Yeah. Which is super nice. I hadn’t personally thought about it. I realised that oh, my God, it’s been quite a while since.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. Well, interestingly, we are one of the things that we’re doing in 2020 is as MTF as we’re running labs and Mannheim with the city of Mannheim, which are about sound and urban environments, and particularly when you’ve got things like autonomous vehicles that are essentially silent. Yeah. But all IoT devices mean everything in my house and beeps. Yeah, you know, the washing machine finishes, the dryer starts or you know, whatever. But we’re gonna have a lot more of that and thinking about how sound affects that from a safety perspective, or from a navigation perspective or so there’s the opportunity in April to sort of get involved.
Dan Hill
Oh, let’s see, it’s super interesting. I remember writing again, songs, you know, about this a bit, because he again, I think it was in his Swollen Appendices book, like a long time ago wrote about, wouldn’t it be nice if car horns, a bit more character? Yeah. So like, you know, if you saw me driving past, you’re on the opposite direction, you could, like, press the horn in a certain way. And I’d like to to look kind of personal. Hey, how you doing? As opposed to? So and then, obviously, then with the autonomous vehicles, or at least electric vehicles, yeah, as you say, I remember writing again, when we realise that that’s going to be a big deal and writing about building on that idea about how this is an opportunity to actually shape the sound of the environment environment a lot. But why should an engines and they will like a petrol diesel thing? There isn’t at all, technically. And so I wrote a piece about that about 10 years ago, I guess, which I kind of republished again, recently, when the there was a sense that in British law, at least, there would be a diktat saying that an electric vehicle needs to be able to make a noise about like a petrol or diesel engine. That just seems doesn’t seem right. That’s to me again, it’s not asking the question.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. And there’s a difference between noise and sound. Yeah, that’s what they made sound
Dan Hill
totally. And so so And now some of our work here, particularly the street stuff are referred to right the start of our conversation is beginning to get into the health impact of the choices we made around mobility. Yeah, and some of us do with air quality. Absolutely. But I think we’ve underplayed the impact of the sound of cars and trucks on the environment, or I live in Stockholm with some there’s a bloody great State Road kind of carved right through the middle of it was supposed to be a garden city when it was planned in 1915. And 1958. People in the planning office thought what this place means is an eight lane highway through the middle of it, right? They dropped in, and I stood on the bridge there recently, I downloaded something for my phone, just recording the decibel level, and it’s you know, 75 decibels up to 80. And that’s like, you know, living next to a washing machine constantly running all day and all night, which isn’t ideal. Not ideal. No, anybody would have wanted from a garden city know for sure. So, but it’s something that’s become normalised and we’ve just sort of not done the
Andrew Dubber
hence the popularity of noise cancelling headphones, which is weird,
Dan Hill
really, I mean, you shouldn’t have to walk again, this goes this goes back to your question about why why have cities become places that can’t have the conditions of, you know, like a smaller scale and a lower density environment? Again, technically, no reason why we’ve just accepted that. Cities should be noisy, dirty places because we put cars and sand through the middle of them. We don’t have to have that. Certainly in the future. Yeah, at all. So then they can be places where you can have birds and coffee machines and the sound of people talking and so on practising the violin or whatever you want to hear you know that that’s actually lovely.
Andrew Dubber
We had BBC presenter, LJ rich, who’s from BBC click, she was the first guest on the podcast, from a thing that she recorded at Music Tech Fest in stock on 2018. And one of the things that she talks about is because she has very pronounced synesthesia, so to her, she hears music when she tastes things. Yeah, right. But cities are in keys. Right? So for us, the stock might be in B flat. For seven. Well, I just thought that’d be really lovely. If that was literally the case. Yeah, if you could actually go to a attuned city and all of the devices were completely
Dan Hill
in harmony. No, it’s amazing. I mean, that, again, was something I wrote a piece once about the well tempered environment, which was you know, sort of based around that idea, again, using this musical analogy in the context of something completely different about the way that the environment, what work in the city, but I love the idea of having a sort of at least a sonic character or a musical character, really, I mean, that’s, again, what I was, that’s what I was interested in, even back in a BBC stuff, or at sketching someone walking through Manchester. Manchester has a very rich history as Detroit as this many places, obviously, that you would want, in a way if it could be expressed in environments in the way that it works, and just be fantastically powerful and interesting, what makes places different. So yeah, and I’m hoping that in a funny way, I’m using the kind of the Trojan horse of electric vehicles. And the fact that they don’t have to make exactly the same noises, they still got car tire noise, and other matters. Let’s assume that some nanocellulose thing fixes car tire noise. But anyway, you still have that possibility to either take the volume of cars down and therefore mix the volume of the city up, according like the real city, people making coffee and chatting or birds or whatever. Or you have the opportunity to make some other noises there. So you know, when you drive as you drove your Tesla through Detroit, as it will get during May, all of a sudden, as you drive through Sheffield becomes human leading,
Andrew Dubber
showing my age, I’d be happy with that. Finally, I guess if people are working on music and technology projects and sound design, those sorts of things, what would you want them to be thinking about?
Dan Hill
I mean, for me, I mean, I love the world of teenage engineering, and technology will save us and those sort of, you know, really nice examples of Internet of Things, multiplied by music, tech, and, you know, different devices for that stuff. And I don’t, it’s not that I like all of that, you know, I have a relatively scathing review of the Rolly blocks. thing that came out a while ago, just because if you didn’t have the affordances of even an electric guitar or something, you know, the richness of that as a physical interaction, but still, I applaud them for basically having a crack, you know, like saying, Okay, what would we do give them different
Andrew Dubber
mega piano out of a wetsuit?
Dan Hill
Exactly. So, but because that’s a thing that could be explored now, then, sure, you know, and so I love all of that experimentation. I’m very happy that that’s happening. Even as a non musician. Most of my interest is more about this kind of everyday sound stuff. And whether it’s got this kind of cultural historical layer about the stories of places and the way that music has interwoven with the the wider culture, whether it’s Detroit or Manchester releases like that, and how that could manifest itself. And then, related to that, I suppose, yeah, this kind of understanding of sound as part of the environment to be designed with underground Institute. And just going again, back to this johani pallasmaa point about how, if you think about, again, the way that a new city block is portrayed when it’s put in front of citizens, or is even thought about To be honest, the visuals are overloading it always is here. It’s it’s Oculus centric, as in, it’s just you know, about the eye. Yeah. And I’m trying instead, sort of its way to use these different narrative forms, like writing a short story or making a short film. say that, you know, these are cities or things that move through time with different senses triggering at different points. And sound is a very profound part of that. And it’s something that can affect our health, detrimentally, or could increase conviviality in the other direction. So massively interested by sound in the urban environment still, in that way, wanting to find ways of bringing up in the mix to use a musical metaphor. When we’re talking about designing or co creating cities in urban environments, that’s that That to me is really interesting. And weirdly, tech because why IoT and other stuff gives us some, as you said, with ralina, we can make a piano out of a wetsuit, well, what what could we do with the urban environment given the way that we can use to tech now, it’s a very rich open field, only if we bring that to the table in the right way. So that’s what’s that’s what I find interesting,
Andrew Dubber
then it’s been absolutely fascinating. I feel like we’ve just skimmed the surface. And there’s a whole lot more to say. But as it is, I think we’re looking at the data.
Dan Hill
You’re already looking at a difficult editing job.
Andrew Dubber
Exactly, but really appreciate your time.
Dan Hill
Thanks. I’m so really good. Thank you.
Andrew Dubber
That’s Dan Hill. And that’s the MTF podcast. If you’re interested in hearing more about the ice labs, we’re going to be running in Mannheim in April, about urban sound design in an age of AI, blockchain and IoT devices. Well, the best place to start is probably the MTF newsletter, go to Music Tech fest.net slash newsletter, and we’ll take it from there. If you like the podcast, this would be a good moment to hit that star button and the overcast player. Write a quick five star review on Apple podcasts, click the Thumbs Up heart or other iconography with overwhelmingly positive connotations, share, like rate or send it to someone else that you think would like it. We’d really appreciate it. As always, you can get in touch and we’d love to hear from you were at Music Tech Fest on Twitter, Music Tech Fest on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn Music Tech Fest dotnet on the web. You get the idea. I’m Andrew Dubber, at Dubber on Twitter. I’ll catch you next time. And in the meantime, have a great week. Cheers.
