Environmental Sound and Urban Noise: Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp’s Herald/Harbinger

Abstract

“Environmental Sound and Urban Noise” looks at the impact of sound in the experience of Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp’s Herald/Harbinger. This work by two New York-based artists is installed in the centre of the Calgary city downtown to invoke, in Thorp’s words, “a long-distance conversation between a glacier and a city.” Real-time data is collected from geophones embedded into the Bow Glacier, some 220 km west of Calgary. The data is then translated into aural form (by way of an algorithm devised by Rubin and Thorp) and relayed via satellite, with a mere 5-minute delay, to a sixteen-channel speaker installation located on the forecourt of the city’s tallest building, Brookfield Place. The installation at once provides a place of repose and an injunction to listen. The glacier’s soundtrack heralds the past and the present, the Pleistocene and the Anthropocene eras, Indigenous and settler populations, natural and built environments. At the same time, the installation is a harbinger, asking its audiences to listen to where our climate crisis seems destined to go. The “conversation” hailed by Herald/Harbinger is all the more poignant and most certainly urgent in a city whose economic prosperity remains overdetermined by the fossil fuel industry.