Rutger Zuydervelt’s Take a Closer Listen: Experiencing Sound

For his new project Take a Closer Listen, Dutch graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt asked different people to describe their favorite sounds. The answers, that ranged from a short “rain falling on a tent’s roof” to long, descriptive passages were documented in a booklet, Take a Closer Listen.

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG posted a few samples from the booklet on his blog and we found this one by Felicity Ford on “the clunk of a cooling paint can” interesting:

I love the sound of paint tins in an outside building responding to shifts in temperature. When they get warm, the air inside the tins expands, and then when they cool down again, the air contracts, pulling the metal lids down with a subtle, percussive clunk. I love how it sounds a little bit like a steel drum—sort of musical and metallic. And I love how the sound always comes as a surprise.

Manaugh, while praising the project, says that Take a Closer Listen forces us to wonder if there’s a relationship between sound and memory.

The assumed ephemeral nature of these found sounds becomes readily apparent after reading Zuydervelt’s edited collection; but is the intangible, nostalgic, beyond-grasp nature of sound inherent to the sonic experience, or simply an artifact of the rhetorical tone most often used in today’s writing about the acoustic environment?

In other words, are sounds really the disappearing remnants of a world that we are always trying—and failing—to reassemble? Is there really always a connection between sound and memory or sound and nostalgia—not sound and physical experience, say, or even sound as a subset of astronomy?

Take A Closer Listen

BLDG Blog: “Sound not as memory but experience”