[Music by Rahul Vaghela from Pixabay]
ROBERT RYDER: Whether it’s your heartbeat or you swallowing or something like that, your stomach rumbling. I feel like those kinds of bodily sounds are similar to some kind of the bodily sounds of the Kresge building in some ways.
[door opening]
KARRAH TOATLEY: Welcome to Kresge Centennial Hall, home to Northwestern University’s programs in comparative literary studies, art theory and practice, art history, and foreign languages and also the office of Robert Ryder, a Northwestern Professor who wrote his dissertation on the acoustical unconscious.
RYDER: I got it also from Walter Benjamin because Benjamin himself wrote a text on film which is um a very famous paper that um that students would read if you were in any kind of film theory course. The techniques like slow motion allows us to see things in a kind of unnatural, but a new world really of, of vision. For him, that sort of opened up the optical, what he called the optical unconscious. And so similarly, I’m just sort of writing on his coattails in a way, but converting it to the soundscape.
TOATLEY: And if you listen closely, Kresge has its own acoustical unconscious. The opening and closing of its doors may have become background noise but these doors actually tell a story about the building’s history.
RYDER: There’s so many different doors. There’s wood doors, there’s glass doors, there’s steel doors, lots of different doors and how they sound um back then, not just with Kresge being old, but all doors were a lot heavier and they’re like storm, like storm doors. And so they would just ker-chunk a lot more.
[door closing]
TOATLEY: Originally constructed in 1954, Kresge went through a major renovation in 2014 that lasted two years to meet new green building practices.
RYDER: With every new building and renovate and or renovation, there’s always going to be a, a recreated soundscape.
TOATLEY: Professor Ryder has known Kresge for over 20 years and noticed in this recreated Kresge space its more mechanically sounding
RYDER: So that’s what’s also interesting, with these new buildings, they have a lot of more beeps and boops. So there’s the elevator that, you know, if you hit the button, there’s this, there’s this clinging sound. And then when you get to the floor that you’re at, there’s another sound as the doors open, which are themselves, these kind of swooshing things.
TOATLEY: Even the sounds of the door have changed
RYDER: It’s in the office here um but if you get closed on the inside you have to press a button to open the door, um, to get out. But when you hit that button to unlock the door so you can get out, there’s this little clinging sound. It almost sounds like a, like a tinkling of a bell. It’s really weird.
TOATLEY: Professor Ryder then guided me to that office door
RYDER: So, but this is the door. Um I think maybe it does the cling. So yea there is this kind of cling there so now its locked but when I push this you hear that and then you can open it.
TOATLEY: Though no matter the top-tier architecture, it can never fully silence the sounds behind the walls.
RYDER: So yeah there’s still within the very, I think, high-end, uh, filter system that is Kresge. There’s still a lot of mechanisms, behind the walls that sort of creak or tap or sometimes just were, um, for some unknown reason, and then it just stops. It’s like what, ok.
TOATLEY: These mechanical sounds aren’t lost on students either. School of Communications Freshman Zachary Cook often hears tapping on the pipes.
ZACHARY COOK: Sometimes when I’m walking down the main hallway of the second floor or the main floor, I just hear like little ting ding like or something like.
MORIAH PETTWAY: But for Cook these sounds have become so normal he doesn’t worry about them anymore.
COOK: I look up, but I tend to mind my business, you know, and keep it pushing ’cause I don’t wanna mess with anything.
PETTWAY: Ryder explains that just as we start to notice sounds we hadn’t registered before, we often tune out sounds we hear frequently.
RYDER: Like the fans that we’re listening to right now, which you sort of unconsciously just take out of your mind, because it’s like smells, like you walk into a room and you suddenly get used to a smell, and then you can’t smell it anymore.
PETTWAY: But there are also sounds in Kresge that don’t quite fit into the background.
COOK: Well, you definitely hear a lot of singing because, um, people are rehearsing a lot of musicals, acapella groups. We all rehearse in these classrooms. So if you’re here after six o’clock, that’s what you’re hearing.
[choir singing]
PETTWAY: School of Communication graduate student, Oluwaseun Ayeni, says that because of the singing, Kresge is not the best place to study after six pm.
OLUWASEUN AYENI: I would say it depends on what you are here for. If you are here to like, lock in and be like super serious, then it might not be the optimal place.
PETTWAY: Kresge creaks, taps, and sings its own kind of heartbeat. Ryder’s research encourages us to listen. Sometimes, the quietest places are the loudest.
TOATLEY: For WNUR News I’m Karrah Toatley.
PETTWAY: And I’m Moriah Pettway.
[Music by Rahul Vaghela from Pixabay]