Sound Signatures

Looking at the sound of history

In 2015 I spent two months at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, on an Artist Research Fellowship. My plan was to look at the sound of air travel, thinking about how sound is integrated into our associations and memories of planes, spacecraft, and technology in general.

This residency resulted in “Sound Signatures”, a series of screen prints of sound recordings of historical aircraft.

Being a Smithsonian Fellow opened up a lot of doors for me, allowing me behind-the-scenes access to a number of historical aircraft societies as well as archives and experts all up and down the east coast. I spent the first half of the residency travelling around making field recordings of extremely rare airplanes, from a Bleriot XI to a P51.

Whilst editing and producing all the recordings I became really interested in seeing their spectrograms (a way of visualising the frequencies of a sound over time). Looking at the sounds this way revealed a number of hidden details, like the slight variations in the chugging of each cylinder, or the whistling of air rushing through the wires of a triplane.

Visualising sound has a long and fascinating history: the very first sound recording machines were only able to make pictures of sound, without playing them back. Recent research has enabled us to hear these early recordings again, as detailed in the wonderful book Pictures of Sound by Patrick Feaster. In a gruesome twist, some of these early recording machines used actual human ears as microphones.

Having recently started doing a fair amount of screen printing, I got in touch with the Open Studio DC about doing some explorations with these spectrograms. Many thanks to Carolyn Hartmann for her enthusiasm and endless help – with her assistance I was able to produce a number of screen prints of the field recordings.