cityofsound

Jobs at BBC Radio and Music Interactive

Several new jobs in our team available now! Closing date soon! We're looking for Technical Project Managers, Software Engineers, Information Architects, R&D types, a Senior Software Engineer and a User Experience Manager. Here's some of what we did last year. For more on the jobs and all information on how to apply, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/rminteractive/.

Closing date now past. Thanks for your attention.

Work: quick review of 2005

Please excuse a lengthy, self-indulgent post (unusual, huh) in which I take stock of the last year at work. Partly this is public thank you to the teams I work with at BBC Radio & Music Interactive; our own excellent Technology & Design team in particular (take a bow!), and the many teams around the organisation who support and enable our work. But this is also me using the blog as the proverbial 'outboard brain', the notebook-cum-scrapbook-cum-sketchpad with the web attached. So excuse the inward focus and switch channel if you like, but I figure some people might find the dispatches from the front line of the BBC interesting, given how little info actually makes it out of large organisations. So here's a (currently flu-ridden) design manager's view, as I see it from our third floor haven at Broadcasting House, overlooking the new building rising from the ground. The Technology & Design team I run is responsible for designing and building the BBC's interactive services around radio and music ...

Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture

Modernism? Check. Improvisation? Check. Jazz? Check. Architecture? Check. Modern art? Check. Grand unifying theory attempting to draw the aforementioned together, possibly with profound/hilarious/unintended/all-of-the-above consequences? We'll see. This new book - Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture, by David P. Brown, associate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago - looks so up my strasse it's ridiculous.

"In this lively book, David Brown locates jazz music within the broad aesthetic, political, and theoretical upheavals of our time, asserting that modern architecture and urbanism in particular can be strongly influenced and defined by the ways that improvisation is facilitated in jazz."

"Improvised music consists of diverse properties that fail to register in the object-oriented understanding of composition. As a result, it is often dismissed as noise—an interfering signal. However, Brown asserts, such interference can bear meaning and stimulate change. Noise Orders identifies how architecture can respond to the inclusive dynamics of extemporaneous movements, variable conceptions of composition, multiple durations, and wide manipulation of resources found in jazz to enable outcomes that far exceed a design’s seeming potential."

"By exploring overlapping moments between modernism and the cultural dimensions of jazz, Noise Orders suggests that the discipline of improvisation continues to open and redefine architectural theory and practice, creating a world where designers contribute to emerging environments rather than make predetermined ones. Comparing modern and avant-garde artists and architects with individuals and groups in jazz—including Piet Mondrian and boogie-woogie, John Cage and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Le Corbusier and Louis Armstrong, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)—Brown examines how jazz can offer alternative design ideas and directions, be incorporated in contemporary architectural practices, and provide insight on how to develop dynamic metropolitan environments."

"Interdisciplinary in its approach, innovative in its methodology, and unexpected in its conclusions, Noise Orders argues for a deeper understanding of the infinite potential inherent in both music and architecture."

Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture, by David P. Brown
[Amazon UK|US]

More recent music about place and time (with a particular nod to Manchester)

Following on from my previous post on Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine, I thought I'd post a few more recent examples of music about a specific time and place, released or re-released in the last year.

Prefabulous London exhibition, London

With startling serendipity, less than a month after posting on recent prefabs in Australia whilst asking after prefabs designed to fit into the dense urban environments, around the corner New London Architecture unveils a new temporary exhibition on just that matter.

Sketchbook: Two possible Google Earth extensions: time and sound

Descending through the artifacts, Powers of Ten-like, we pause finally, hovering above the city, rapt with attention. I could spend all day exploring this Google Earth, but it strikes me that there's a couple of extensions I'd like to see. Neither of which are easy, but why should that stop idle speculation?

Whilst pawing Barcelona around - incidentally, what an awkward combination of movements Google Earth engenders? Grabbing, dragging, clawing, zooming, revolving, tilting. A haptic interface would seem more suitable to the object - I realised how well the application describes the form of the city. The beautiful, rigorous grid of the Eixample is clearly discernible, block after block interlocking neatly with those unique chamfered corners. At street level, the variegation in architecture and generous spacing disguises this economic, adaptable layout. In Google Earth, the traces of ancient city walls are perceptible too, a serrated edge separating the density of the Ciutat Vella from the Eixample.

My overwhelming sensation at this point was a desire to slide the city back through its development, to watch the port developments shrink back on to land, to see the Eixample retreat block by block, to watch the city walls rise up again ... And then slide it forward. I'm still reading Joan Busquets' Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City which is no doubt influencing my thinking. Combined with Barcelona's expressive form, it's too compelling a desire.

Tales of two cities imagined in music: Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine

A long overdue mention of Chavez Ravine in a moment, but one of my favourite music items of last year is an 'audio film' on the Winter & Winter label called Metropolis Shanghai - Showboat to China. In the style of an earlier favourite - Uri Caine's Sidewalks of New York, which re-imagined the sound of popular song in the bars and pubs of 1900 New York - it's an ersatz aural recreation of 1930s Shanghai, comprising historical recordings, re-recorded songs and sounds originating from that time, and original music inspired by the particularly fascinating cultural collisions in the city leading up to World War II. Here's the context of this new re-imagination:

Map of Europe in which real distances seem shorter thanks to the high-speed train

From Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City, by Joan Busquets, published by Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Guardian team up for Designer of the Year

The team behind The Guardian's redesign has been nominated - and how nice to see a design team being recognised - for the Designer of the Year award (The Guardian redesign was covered here at the time). Congratulations to all involved. For all the flaws or oversights, it was/is a cracking piece of work, and they'd certainly get my vote (other nominees are Jamie Hewlett, Cameron Sinclair and Tom Dixon). Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum and chair of the jury notes:

"The team behind the Guardian redesign set out to create a model modern newspaper - and they succeeded. Unlike some other newspaper format changes, this was not just a shrink-to-fit. Every aspect of the paper was revitalised and reinvented. This is an extraordinarily innovative and intelligent way of addressing the commercial challenges of the newspaper industry."

Aside: Interesting how Sunday's redesigned Observer didn't create half the stir. I'm yet to really formulate any coherent thoughts, but other than a lot more colour, it doesn't feel as radical a step as The Guardian felt it needed to take.

The Guardian: Guardian on shortlist for top design award
cityofsound: Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde (aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun)

Edward Hopper's Manhattan

Julie Lasky writes a gentle, reverential piece on Edward Hopper's studio, at New York University, over at Design Observer, complemented beautifully by Duane Michals' photographs.

Hopper is one of the key 20th century artists when it comes to representing the modern American city, of course - we included him in the Urbis Imagining The Modern City exhibit. And I like Lasky's reflections on his imagined Manhattan:

"The Manhattan that Hopper pinned down like a narcotized specimen is not a village with friendly dogs and children, and certainly not the Village. It's a city that is paved over, glassed in, and swimming in heat—the lonely dive in "Nighthawks," the erotically charged workplace in "Office at Night," and even the generic brickscape of chimney rows and skylights painted from the top of his building in "Roofs of Washington Square.""

And her noting of the great Robert Hughes's comments on Hopper, which reveal the interior perspective of modern art and perhaps suggest that Hopper's Manhattan is best thought of as an imagined soft city.

"The critic Robert Hughes credits him with establishing not just the shadowy visual style but also the private investigator trope of film noir. “It was Hopper,” Hughes writes, “a man of extreme inhibitions who had no interest in communicating with the world at large except through his art, and then only obliquely, who saw that the old frontier had moved inward and now lay within the self, so that the man of action, extroverted and self-naming, was replaced by the solitary watcher.”"

Edward Hopper's Studio at New York University