t r a n s p a r e n c y Transparency was a multi-channel site-determined composition comprised of environmental recordings made inside the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, mixed into stereo, and then installed in their outdoor garden as an 18 loudspeaker sound installation. The sound design was based on a careful examination of the acoustic events that occupy the transparent Fondation Cartier, to draw attention to the rich and complex range of sounds that not only inhabit this particular space, but which also are common to and active within most public spaces. Transparency therefore aims to reveal the imperceptible soundtrack underscoring these familiar, everyday places that is too often ignored, unheard or forgotten. This microsonic world encompasses a latent range of sounds on the verge of silence that occasionally swell from the noise threshold of perceptibility and permeate throughout acoustic spaces like perfume: refrigerator noises; fluorescent lights; computer hum; air conditioning; vibrating pipes; distant conversations; footsteps; traffic rumble; to name some. The sound design comprised a series of site-specific field recordings that reflected the particular acoustic shape and character of the Fondation Cartier, and were divided into categories that define the morphology of each recorded event, such as frequency, intensity, rhythm, mass and texture.
		These elements were arranged and mixed to articulate a highly speculative sonic environment representing the variety of shapes, gradients and textures that invisibly inhabit aspects of this domain. Upon initial audition, this mix appears alien yet is constructed from the very resonances and reflections constantly resounding throughout the museum space, recalling other technologically mediated environments in which daily routines are diligently enacted. As Transparency was designed for outdoor exhibition, the exterior sounds that constantly occupy and/or occasionally infiltrate the garden setting have been acknowledged in the final stereo mix in order to minimise negative elements such as frequency masking, incoherence and redundancy through duplication of events. The types of events the sound design had to negotiate were insects and bird song, low-level traffic noise, the flapping of blinds, and the regular tolling of church bells. The stereo mix of Transparency was distributed in the garden of the Fondation Cartier by 18 matched loudspeakers hidden throughout the space. An evolving soundscape derived from the internal sounds of the building was dispersed along the garden path so that listeners could simultaneously observe the activity occurring in the transparent building occupied by the gallery, one constructed primarily from see-through glass, while hearing many of the interior sounds that colonize its spaces. Sounds normally mute from this perspective. The loudspeakers were organized in pairs along the path and spaced so that listeners heard different aspect of the linear soundscape by the time they travelled from one listening zone to another. The absence of visible technology in the garden encouraged a rapport between the natural/urban sounds that commonly inhabit this exterior space, and those of the building itself, so that oblique relationships form between interior and exterior perspective, and natural and artificially generated sound.