By day, Ruben Kooistra designs the acoustics of concert halls and offices. At weekends he takes a microphone, a pole and a small recorder into the city and looks for quiet. Over six years he has built a map of more than two hundred places, each with a recording and a note of the time of day. We walked with him through a park at seven on a Sunday morning.
Looking for quiet
Mei Tanaka: What counts as a quiet place?
Ruben Kooistra: Not silence. True silence does not exist, not outdoors and not really indoors either. There is always wind, traffic somewhere, your own blood in your ears. What we want is room to hear small things. A place is quiet when you can hear a leaf land.
MT: Where do you find those places?
RK: Often where you do not expect them. Courtyards behind apartment blocks. Church gardens. The inside corner of a big building, where the walls block the traffic. A bench by the water in a park at dawn. Sometimes a place is quiet only for twenty minutes a week, and the map says when.
The map
MT: Why record them?
RK: Because quiet disappears quietly. A new road, a new ventilation unit on a roof, and a place that was peaceful for fifty years is gone. Nobody notices, because nobody measured it. I want there to be a record. And I want people to know that these places exist, so they can go and sit in them.
MT: What is the quietest place on your map?
RK: I will not tell you. If I publish it, it will be full of people with microphones. But it is inside the city, it is free, and it is at its best on a Sunday morning in winter, just after snow.
Listening
MT: Has the work changed how you hear the city?
RK: Completely. I used to hear noise as one thing, a kind of grey wall. Now I hear layers. The low hum of the port. The middle layer of traffic. The high, bright layer of birds and voices. When you can separate them, the city becomes less exhausting. You can choose what to listen to.
“True silence does not exist. What we want is room to hear small things.”
