TURN OFF AND TUNE IN
Kyla-Rose Smith has left Freshlyground for New York, where she is teaching young people how to hear the world around them, writes Carlos Amato
OUR ears are snobby little funnels. With the exception of those sounds too loud to ignore, we hear only what we are conditioned to listen out for. This is just as well: you don’t want to have hyperacusis, an acute sensitivity to environmental noise, which is as horrible as it sounds.
But the age of the smartphone is making us even deafer than we should be. Urban millennials are prone to walking around in seamless pockets of digital sound: they like to text instead of talking, while the music in their noise-cancelling headphones blots out the analogue song of the street.
Help is at hand, though: KylaRose Smith (pictured above), formerly the violinist for Freshlyground, is on the case. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, she has cofounded Hear Be Dragons, an organisation that does sound-mapping: the collecting of “found sound” to assemble a sonic landscape of place.
Their latest project, Nyanga x Williamsburg, invited two groups of musically inclined youth, one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the other in Nyanga, Cape Town, to record their environments with their phones and create tracks from the clips. Then some of the Nyanga team travelled to the not-so-mean streets of Williamsburg, where they collaborated with their local counterparts on a live multimedia performance at an experimental venue called National Sawdust.
Nyanga rapper Parradox, real name Mzukisi Ndabeni, was one of the travelling sound mappers. “I went out to find something that spoke to me. There are so many sounds in Nyanga, but I wanted to find those that people don’t normally notice. The first thing I recorded was a huge fire, some people were cooking meat, and I got the crackling of the wood. It’s something I used to do — just switch off everything and listen to the sounds of the night, and then visualise what was going on. But they gave us sound journals, and asked us to write down exactly what we heard. Things like the wind in the trees, children playing, chickens, cats, dogs.”
Noise is not hard to find in New York, and Parradox was thrilled by the legendary racket of Brooklyn streets: the sirens, the ripe accents, the hum of the projects. “We also went to South Bronx, and it’s a community that has similar challenges to Nyanga, of poverty and drugs, but I noticed the people there are more able to come together. When we went there the entire community was out in the park, braaiing meat and playing basketball. Whereas in Nyanga, we just go to a shebeen. The crime is not so bad there, so everybody is out on the streets at night.”
He says the Nyanga x Williamsburg project alerted him to his phone addiction, and the dulling effect it can have on the rich physical textures of life. “It has detached me from my cellphone, and made me more aware of what’s going on around me. I’m so inspired now by this whole new world of sound.”
For Smith, the digital world can steal from the young the very thing that makes being young worthwhile. “The social media generation is really disengaged with the wonder of immediate environments. Astonishment doesn’t exist as much anymore. We’re plugged in and switched on — everyone is heads down, no one is looking up.”
Parradox raps in rapid-fire Xhosa, which might have been awkward when rapping to black and Hispanic Brooklynites. It wasn’t. “On the night of our live performance, I looked at all the faces in the audience and I could just see that they felt me,” he says.
Smith, who came to New York “partly for love reasons”, runs Hear Be Dragons with Cape Town-based arts educator Hannah Loewenthal. They will be recruiting sound mappers in other lands soon, with Barbados a possible source.
Listen to this space. LS