"Why are all those people looking down?

I went to college in Bristol and we visited it last year. It has changed a little bit since I lived there; there is a lot of stuff going on around the central dock area where I used to work during my placement year. All around this area, there is a long poem (prose?) called "Walkie Talkie" which is stretched, mostly at ground level, around the buildings and window frames and even through the shallow fountain pools which lie about all over the pedestrian area. It is a rather wonderful mess of seeming nonsense but it leaves you with a real sense of the whole city. I downloaded the entire text and put it into a banner program, though this is rather jerky and difficult to read. I also put all of the Oblique StrategyCards into a program so that you get a random one each time it runs. I see now that I do actually get some things finished. I even wrote a Mandelbrot Generation program with zoom facility.

Anyway, while we are in the after echo of a mention of Professor Eno, my web meanderings over the Oblique Strategy cards led me to this - "My life in the Bush of Ghosts". Go listen and know how two men can influence so many others. I thought a minute ago, when I mentioned the after echo, of how Brian Eno likes the ambience you get after a sound proper has finished. There is a man, Matt Rogalsky, who released a CD of "Silence" and I heard that someone else planned to release a collection of the Rememberance Day two minutes silences. Then there is good old 4''33' (I am amazed that you can actually buy it.) We don't notice silence until it appears suddenly. Do you ever have a moment when you are engaged on some task while music is playing? You don't actually hear the music until the track finishes and then you remember the sound. Ambience is a very important thing. Total silence is probably quite disturbing but ambience is comforting.



As a quiz, which name crops up on two of the linked sites above?

Ambient sounds in an Empty IT area.

I am in an empty office at the moment. Well, almost empty. In the distance I can here the squawk of a phone on speaker, just within earshot; there is rain on the window pane and various hums and rattles from the bits of the Office which move about after we have gone home. On top of all these external sounds, I can hear my own tinitus which at the moment is giving me a very, very faint rattle like a paper clip in a tumble dryer. Occasionally a phone will ring or the wind will make the vertical blinds rumble. Probably not finally, there is the sound of the keys of the laptop.