Voices That Carry Beyond the Towers
What stays in the imaginations of the two veteran sound producers is not the sight of jets cleaving the towers in two, not the cloud of smoke that rushed the streets, but the ephemera of daily life--memos, notes, mail, swirling like a snowstorm.
“There was all of this paper,” says Davia Nelson, half of the award-winning radio documentary team known as the Kitchen Sisters. To her sound-obsessed mind, and that of fellow Kitchen Sister Nikki Silva, that sight on Sept. 11 triggered a sensory leap. Just like the mail drifting through the air, thousands of voicemail messages, they suddenly realized, were “hovering around in the ether”--and soon to disappear.
Rescuing and preserving those messages seemed less like a whim than a duty.
Silva and Nelson contacted Verizon, the telecommunications company that provided service for much of the World Trade Center complex, and helped shape a phone-in program. An 800 number was set up to allow surviving employees, their families and loved ones to retrieve, on cassette, the voicemail messages left at the towers that day.
With the works in gear, announcements prominently placed, they considered their work done. End of story.
Except, says Silva, “it was sort of the beginning.”
To the women, who have long immersed themselves in the arcana of America’s journey, it was apparent that what was within those password sealed-phone messages was just one piece of the story. Before they knew it, they found themselves thinking about trying to re-create the life of the buildings through what they call “sonic artifacts”: late-to-meeting footfalls, perhaps, or a computer’s electronic exhale, the drone of a PowerPoint presentation, the clink of crystal over the sea of lunch-rush repartee.
A seemingly insignificant sound, they knew, could evoke a rush of memory, open the lock on a long-forgotten world. For their end-of-the-millennium National Public Radio series, “Lost & Found Sound,” which won them a Peabody Award, they had chronicled America’s 20th century history through a series of collage-style radio documentaries mixed with found-sound fragments--carnival talkers and West Virginia steam trains; recollections from a witness to the delivery of the Gettysburg Address; and the hums of old electric fans. Both understand storytelling and history from unique perspectives: Nelson is also a museum curator, Silva a screenwriter who also casts and produces film. But sound breaks the rules of linear storytelling or recalled memory: “Sound,” says Sliva, “has some direct line to heart. You can’t control it.”
The notion of reconstructing the lost world of the twin towers intrigued them. Perhaps they could piece together a sound mosaic that might not only bear witness to the tragedy, but also tell the history of the buildings, the neighborhoods surrounding them and the nation’s now evident connection to all of it.
The challenge became quite clear, says Nelson: “How to capture life--not only death.”
They tossed around the idea with friends--other radio producers, sound designers and assorted trusted confidantes--trolling for input, free associating, dividing up tasks: Interviews? Ambient sound? Oral histories? Street bartering? What pieces would it take to evoke not just the story of these buildings but all that fell within their shadows?
Those early hashing sessions became the foundation for building what Nelson and Silva are now calling “A Sonic Memorial.”
In their warm, bedtime-story voices, Silva and Nelson lay out the blueprints in a conference call from their home-base office in San Francisco’s North Beach: They envision it not as a point-A-to-point-B narrative, but rather a means of conveying the buildings’ history and the lives they touched. It’s too early to guess what form the project will take. Much of it, Nelson and Silva know, depends on what comes across their paths.
Early digging has already produced a rich selection: Tape of composer-musician Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City: Symphony for 100 Guitars”--performed live last summer outdoors at the World Trade Center--or, in contrast, more subtle fragments of noise: the empty artist studios around the neighborhood, a sense of silence fanning out from the still-burning complex’s adjacent streets that were once a loud sound smear of competing activities.
Such early “tiles of sound” tell them already that they might get their wish--to come at this mosaic from unexpected angles. As well as delving into sources of “found” sound, they also hope to conduct oral histories, looking for slantwise takes on their story. “There is a woman who is making a quilt from the clothing of the people who are lost,” says Silva. “We want to interview her {nbsp}.... “
“And there was a radio station at the top of the towers, and we’re looking for the air check from the last broadcast from the attacks,” adds Nelson, her voice falling neatly atop Silva’s. “We’re talking to the Windows on the World [restaurant] piano player and hoping to record his repertoire. We’ve talked with someone who had an office on the 40th floor of the second tower who had gone into his office with a video camera and toured the floor, poking his camera into various rooms. ‘This is my neighbor. This is my workspace.’ It’s so innocent! So endearing. We want to give a sense of the different businesses. The workplace. This was a microcosm of this country at this moment. And it changed Sept. 11.”
They are seeking what might seem insignificant: “Tourist videos. Were looking at training videos and the video e-mail service that was available on the observation deck,” says Nelson, alert to the possibilities of aural color that others might overlook. “We’re looking for radio broadcasts and business transactions that were recorded. Anything. Dictation tapes, recordings of morning meetings.”
With the technical help of more than 40 volunteer producers, radio reporters and sound fanatics, and the goal of having a fully fleshed out document by Sept. 11, 2002, the Kitchen Sisters know better than to be guided by, let alone to compose, a specific list of wished-for treasures. Imagination doesn’t always live up to what real life delivers. “I’m hoping we’re able to find sound that will reveal the depth of people who are gone now. I don’t know what that is,” says Nelson. “Someone’s sweet 16. Someone’s quinceanera ... Maybe there’s a video of a Christmas party with the busboys from Windows on the World. The people whose lives are centered there. People in the shadows of the shadows.” Tones of voice, and particular sonic moments, “are ghosts,” says radio producer Jay Allison, whom Nelson and Silva have pulled in to work on the project. More than words or images, haunting fragments of sound “oftentimes make a more direct connection. You don’t have ear lids. Sound ambushes you. You can’t defend yourself against it. I think there are times that there is information carried in the human voice that gets below our radar and we have a spontaneous emotional response.”
Those resonant, primal notes, the Kitchen Sisters know, don’t often come from the professionally conducted interview on state-of-the-art equipment. So in addition to their own hunting and gathering, they will suss out leads from a phone line NPR has set up specifically for the project--a Sonic Memorial Line.
The memorial line will give people the opportunity to phone in recollections or leads on found sound in and around the twin towers.
“We’re urging people to think of an audio component, “ says Silva, “the voices that tell the story in an intense and personal way.”
Because Nelson and Silva have been brainstorming with various radio world mainstays including Allison, an independent producer who also works for NPR and heads Transom.org--a listening post and public radio workshop Web site--and David Issay, an audio documentarian, some part of the project may well give way to radio documentary, but Silva and Nelson are quick to clarify that their aim for this is much larger: They hope to create something for a national archive, “Something that would be permanently available for students, tourists, news media--whoever,” says Silva.
Applying for various grants--from foundations and businesses--and accepting in-kind donations and services from the public, they’re already thinking beyond the confines of their own memorial project to what sort of sound component might work best within New York’s official memorial to the lives lost at the World Trade Center--whatever it turns out to be.
Balancing verisimilitude with sensitivity is at the top of the creators’ minds, says Art Silverman, senior producer with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” who has, over the years, worked closely with Nelson and Silva.
“We don’t want radio pornography. If it is going to be a memorial, we want a sense of these people who went to their jobs every day, the drudge of [the] everyday.” And if there is, say, a last message from a panicked family member on a machine, “the question is: What piece does it tell?”
“Sound, like smell, goes right into the soul,” says Nelson. And its reverberations can trigger the unexpected associations--the sonic equivalent of afterimages.
“One woman started humming during the interview,” says Silva, “She sang us a song of what the story was to her. What the music was in her heart. So we began to imagine asking everyone to sing. Just voice. To see how sonically ... these things are linking.”
But for many people--even the Kitchen Sisters--a full sense of the story--of the tragedy--is yet to emerge. As they wait for accessible words to come, they are captivated by what rises around them.”We asked this musician, was there a song--some sound--that summed up what he felt about the moment of the attack,” says Silva.
His answer stunned them. “He told us, ‘There was no music in me.’ Every walk he took, every day since, ‘There was no music.’ I thought the absence was shocking.”
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