library's keynote

In a delightful essay on pneumatic tubes accessible from the media studies scholar Shannon Mattern's website, she writes of her memories of pneumatic tube systems in libraries:

The hiss of the tubes – although not quite as immediate as the whoosh at the bank – is, to me, the library’s keynote, as the composer R. Murray Schafer might call it. It is the audio track over which the building’s other sounds – heavy wooden chairs scraping across terrazzo floors, books thumping on tables, whispers ricocheting off hard surfaces – are laid (author’s emphasis)

I don't have any sound recording of library tubes, but I do have this great picture above, from 

John Caserta's lecture notes on Serendipity in the Digital Library. I also love the image in this wonderful essay of the newspaper readers. I still remember reading newspapers in the Tasmanian Public Library this way, complete with rulers and string. And more recently, looking for medical textbooks through the card files in the basement of my medical library, where old journals are stored in compressed stacks.

Libraries have not turned completely digital. While the pneumatic tube systems for sending books may have largely disappeared (except for a few places such as the Law Library Reading room at the Library of Congress), look out for the old card files, newspaper strings and compressed stacks, and when you find them, be careful - unlike compressed files, these places do have their dangers of getting squashed!

Mattern, S. (2010) Puffs of air: Communicating by vacuum In John Knechtel, Ed., AIR, Alphabet City #15 (Cambridge: MIT Press), p43. Accessed from http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Mattern_PuffsOfAirFINAL.pdf (thanks to David Holt for recommending this to me)

Card file image my own, from recent fieldwork in medical libraries in Melbourne, Australia.

sounding infrastructure

Pneumatic tubes have often been a source of inspiration for artists, such as Serge Spitzer, Niklas Roy, Yvonne Lee Schultz and Vittore Baroni. The other day I came across another pneumatic art installation: Playing the Building by David Byrne.

In this stunning looking sound installation, a retrofitted organ becomes connected to a building's infrastructure, playing it like an enormous instrument. Through pneumatic tubes and wires and cables, the organ is attached to metal beams and pillars and heating pipes, causing them to vibrate and resonate in order to produce sound. 

The installation was first exhibited in Stockholm in 2005, then later in New York City (2008), London (2009) and Minneapolis (2012).

Images from Flikr, used under the Creative Commons lisence, from Quinn Heraty, Russ Garrett, JellyBeanz, and Chris Guy.

hospitals at night

Hospitals are one of those buildings that, like the patients inhabiting it, never really falls asleep. Around the clock there are blood samples taken, observations recorded, new patients admitted, emergency operations performed. Pneumatic tubes remain in constant use throughout the night, part of this nocturnal activity, moving matter around the place, part of the activity.

While life goes on in the hospital, something changes at night. I remember as a patient being terrified of the night-time, feeling so particularly lonely when the lights went out (but never all the way out). Sounds* play a part of this changed atmosphere. I have just finished reading Tom Rice's rich ethnographic account of sounds and listening in hospitals called Hearing and the Hospital, where he documents the nocturnal soundscape of this institution.

Rice describes how on the cardiothoracic wards at St Thomas' hospital, where he conducted his fieldwork, the lights were dimmed at around 9:30pm and there was a corresponding effort to lower sound levels. Nurses spoke in gentler tones to one another and to patients than they had during the day. Curtains were pulled in such a way that the hooks did not scrape too loudly along the rails. He also describes being a patient at night himself, hearing the distressing cries of an agitated patient nearby. The patient was given a sedative to help maintain calm, a form of what Rice describes as "auditory surveillance".

Pneumatic tube systems are also part of this night-time noise, as capsules rattle around into baskets on wards. Adjustments are constantly being made, in regards to new inventions and tinkering in the hospital, to make these systems quieter.

Night-time in hospitals not only sounds differently, but looks differently too. This week a photoessay that I worked on with Thomas Fuller about The Night-side of Hospitals was published in a wonderful journal called Places, in the Design Observer Group. The essay follows the traces of migrant doctors who are delegated to the margins of Australia's healthcare system, witnessing their movements photographically through a hospital at night. It was an absolute pleasure to work with the editors of the journal, Nancy Levinson and Josh Wallaert on this piece, and to see it published in their journal, which focuses on contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism. The essay fits within their current interest on public-private spaces.

*On the topic of sounds I can't help but here also mention my collaborator on the photoessay Thomas Fuller's terrific recent series of blogposts on love your bicycle, about bicycle sounds, here, here, here and here.

Image by Thomas Fuller