1989
Excerpted from 'Notes on Place and Moment', Max Neuhaus, Sound Works, Volume I, Inscription, pp. 97-101 (Ostfildern:Cantz 1994) .
Max Neuhaus
Time Pieces
The concept of using sound to form a common moment within a community, periodically throughout the day is an ancient one. It continues in present day society in the form of church bells and public clocks. The idea for the Time Pieces is to form these common moments with silence rather than sound.
The method - sound character - public sense of silence
Instead of the usual public sound signal - a bell which begins with a sudden clang and gradually dies away - here the concept is the opposite: the sound is introduced gradually. Beginning inaudibly it grows slowly over a period of minutes and, at its height, quickly disappears.
The long subtle emergence of the sound causes it to go unnoticed. It becomes apparent only at the instant of its sudden disappearance, creating a moment of silence.
In this silent moment, for a few seconds after the sound has gone, what could be described as a transparent aural afterimage is superimposed on the everyday sounds of the environment. A spontaneous aural memory or reconstruction perhaps, engendered by the sound's disappearance.
The nature of this moment is formed by the character of the sound which produces it . Neuhaus builds it on site by ear - gradually assembling its layers while making trials from different points within the community as he shapes the afterimage's character.
The relation to the place - unifying force
The Time Piece concept constitutes a form for a series of sound works of different characters -- although they share a common principle, each work is specific to the character of its sound, its site as a whole and the different places within it.
A key idea of these works is their integration into the life of their communities -- that they become unifiers, spiritually tying together a community's diverse places and activities momentarily throughout the day.
Although the idea of creating public silences is a new one, city wide sound signals have been used for simultaneous communication among the inhabitants of communities in both eastern and western civilizations, since antiquity. In Europe, by the late 700s, in fact, the church bell had become a definitive force in communities. It not only announced church services, deaths, births, fire, revolt and festivals but it was such a strong unifying force that the limits of the community itself were defined by its range -- if you lived beyond where you could hear it, you lacked the daily information necessary to be a participant in society.
Four hundred years later the church bell had become united with the mechanical clock. The bell no longer just announced special events but provided a communal time base for the general coordination of activities. In present day society most of these minute by minute functions have been taken over by radio and television. The intrinsic natures of these media generalize and depersonalize these functions.
The Time Pieces are neither makers of announcements nor keepers of time, as such. They are reinstatements and extensions of the direct joining force of aural communal signals.
Addendum*
In the seventies, I began experimenting with the idea of making a sound by taking a sound away. This had occurred to me as an idea, but I wanted to see how other people felt about it. I could not find out much by just asking people directly, so I built some alarm clocks which functioned in this way. By connecting it with sleep I thought it would be closer to the reality; their reactions, in that way, would be real information. It was not a scientific investigation. I was talking to people about their feelings with this experience.
This idea is not something that happens in nature; continuous things do not disappear suddenly in this way. Yet it happens in the modern world. One of the most startling example for me in everyday life is the coffee grinding machine in a cafe. When somebody turns the machine on in a noisy cafe, you do not register it. It just seems to make talking a little harder.
That is quite amazing in itself, because the sound is quite loud. But your mind just puts it in the class of the sounds that are an expected part of the café and goes on with what it was doing.
Then, when it is finished and suddenly stops, there is a huge silence which envelopes the cafe, even though it is still very noisy. I've always loved that moment.
The moment or Time Pieces are also connected to ideas we may have always had in societies about sounds: signals. Concepts about sound are not well articulated in history. Most writing about history is more about visual and social environment than about sound. It is very hard to find out what our sound world was like before sound recordings. How can you know about a sound made a thousand years ago? There are no records.
But it is clear that, in Western culture five hundred years ago, sound signals from the church were an early form of broadcasting. Cities were divided up into parishes whose borders were fixed by the range of their church bells. If you were outside the sound of the bell, you had no information; you were outside the community.
A sound signal is a unifier and communicator over a whole area simultaneously. It is perhaps the first concept of large scale broadcasting, the concept of a medium that many can get information from without actually being in one place, that the information can be transmitted to many places at the same time, unifying them.
These moment works depend on a long term relationship in order to function; they need to be lived in - a small shift on a regular basis throughout the day, that you forget about, and then encounter again. They cannot be visited like an exhibition.