Finding the Hidden Cityscape Ambience: Marc de Pape’s The Chime

By Carolyn Heneghan

When you think about the bustle of city streets, do you think of harmony or cacophony? The honks and rush of the wind from cars and buses blowing by, footsteps and chatter, birds chirping, dogs barking, leaves crackling—all have great musical potential in the mind of musician and “creative technologist” Marc De Pape.

Concerning his thesis project, The Chime: Scoring the City, Marc De Pape, says:

“I set out to explore the relationship between sensing technology and the routines of everyday life. I feel the city is all too commonly represented by abstract systems and maps, a tendency driven by a reductionist pursuit of efficiency, and one which ignores the idiosyncrasies occurring on street level. This is the noise in the system, the richness that ultimately renders cities generative landscapes.”

Pape celebrates these idiosyncrasies with a musical instrument powered by sensors that pick up on the noises at the street level and convert those noises into harmonious music. Think of wind chimes elevated to the 21^st century. It’s that same reactionary sound to movement—music not directly created by the hand of any one person but rather by the world around it.

The Chime is made up of 18 sensors which measure 27 different parameters around it to translate the sounds and produce reactionary music out of them. For example, temperature controls the key of the piece. Proximity generates xylophone tunes, while light modulates the reverb and so on.

This project produces ambient music in its truest form. In fact, it very nearly defines ambient:  music that builds a generally mellow soundscape using noises produced by the world around us. Except that instead of starting with a host of noises that are already tempered and harmonious, The Chime transforms the haphazard sounds of the street into what can only be called music.

Depending on what is going on around it, the music can sound like anything from light classical to experimental jazz. In the video below, you can see The Chime being especially responsive to cars passing and people talking, and those sounds generate everything from light guitar strums to twinkling piano and bells.

He has documented 14 different performances in both video and audio form, which can be found on his website or The Chime’s Bandcamp. You can also read his entire Master’s thesis on his website.

Studying at OCAD University in Toronto, The Chime was one of the first graduate projects to emerge from the school’s Digital Futures Initiative. This project aims to “respond to the increasingly important and sophisticated role of digital technology as a magical catalyst for integrating societal, cultural and economic change.” Certainly The Chime fits into this mission statement as a medium for transforming the soundscape of an urban jungle into beautiful, delicate music.