New York Big Fritz

Izzi on the Job
October 11, 2008

On Saturday, October 11, Ear to the Earth 2008 presents New York Big Fritz , an evening's-length immersive multimedia environment based on sound field recordings and video images of Times Square around the clock. The name comes from a psychoacoustic research model named 'Fritz', a 'listening head' that has microphones for ears.

The three-step process of composing the environment was a project of the NYU Music Technology Program, involving two graduate students and several faculty. The first step, taken by graduate students Izzi Ramkissoon and Sandeep Ravindranath and faculty members Agnieszka Roginska and Paul Geluso, was the planning and determination of the microphone configuration. The second step was the recording in Times Square, done by Izzi Ramkissoon and Sandeep Ravindranath. The third step, the processing of the recordings for the performance, was done by Paul Geluso, Tom Beyer, Joel Chadabe, and Robert Rowe. The video was shot and processed by graduate student Langdon Crawford.

The recordings were made within the pedestrian triangle between 45th and 46th street in Times Square at about midnight, 6am, noon, and 6pm. According to Agnieszka Roginska, "the spatial effect in the recordings is absolutely superb." She said: “The audience will hear Times Square. But better than in Times Square because they'll be hearing it through the ears of artists."

We asked Izzi Ramkissoon to describe his experience in doing the recording.

He answered:

"The recording was a great experience. I've been in Times Square before but never for such an extended time, and upon setting up the microphones and pressing record, I began to see and hear Times Square in a new way. It became a theater of different stories that were happening at the same time. Every event seemed to act as a catalyst for the next, stringing together to form a series of sounds. In the first session, at around 6pm, the first set of sounds was the breakdown of a stage, technicians talking, and as time elapsed, trucks that had pulled in to take away equipment. But these sounds and all of the sounds were coming from a huge number of things happening at the same time. In fact, the noise of the trucks influenced us to set up the mics differently in the next session.

"The second session was around midnight. It was really amazing to see the types of characters that came out around that time. While some people negotiated through the crowds quietly on autopilot, many people added their own excitement to the sound mix. A group of young female tourists, for example, decided to take pictures near the microphones, and on the recording you can hear them in the background, talking, shuffling around, switching cameras, and at the very end hailing a horse-and-buggy ride. Then there was a tourist who had no idea what we were doing with these fluffy dog-like things, which were the windscreens for the microphones, and not knowing about the delicacy of the equipment, she reached out and pet the microphone setup. After I signaled to her that she had to quickly remove her grip from our carefully placed microphones she said, 'I had to do it, or else I would have dreamt about it all night.'

“'Don’t sleep' was the mantra that Sandeep, my partner recording engineer, adopted for our early morning session. To be there in place before 6:00am takes a certain amount of dedication, and our recordings reinforced the reputation of Times Square as the center of the 'city that never sleeps', even in the early morning. The recording started with a couple arguing about who’s place they were going to and ended with the woman taking her shoes off, walking away from the microphones, and yelling 'I’m not going back to your place'. But besides a few people, it was Times Square in its calmest hour. The next session was around noon on the same day. Times Square at lunch."

Photo by Sandeep Ravindranath