168 Hours embraces the necessity of time and duration when listening to urban sounds. As Barry Blesser and Linda Ruth Salter note: Sound is time. Even the way Henri Bergson describes our notions of time and duration are tied to musical analogies.
This interface allows the listener to explore a week’s worth of audio recorded from my 7th floor apartment window overlooking the intersection of Milton and Parc. Each button cues up a different hour, and the knobs at the bottom allow you to select the day. Built around an Arduino Mega, this interface is a custom-built MIDI device, that translates analog (potentiometers) and digital (buttons) information into a standardized computer-music language. Then, each button press is used to either trigger all 12 sounds from both AM and PM for every day of the week, and turning the knobs adjusts the amplitude of the desired day. The way the interface communicates with the loop-based playback software (Ableton Live) disrupts our understanding of time as a linear construct.
This loose relationship to the linearity of time invites a post-structuralist approach to developing place attachment. With this approach, our experience of place is not just a line, but rather a fold or, even better, a crease. Place is not an ‘it,’ but an ‘and.’ With 168 Hours, time becomes an ‘and’ as well.
eric powell 