Reverberating through history Reverberating throughhistory Reverberating through history through history Reverberating through Reverberating through history Reverberating through Reverberating through history Reverberating Reverberating through history Reverberating Reverberating through history Reverberating through history Reverberating through history through history Reverberating through history SoundScapeIssue 0226Tuned City was part of the official programme of European Cultural Capital Tallinn 2011. It built on the first event of its kind in Berlin in 2008, and showcased a celebration of sound, exploring its artistic, entertaining and experimental merits.The concept of 'tuning' a city owes much to Canadian composer and environmentalist R Murray Schafer's seminal book Tuning the World, first published in 1977 and since re-published with the title prefix The Soundscape which, of course, has also inspired this ezine. Tuning environments has the effect of re-energising our sense of hearing in a world where architecture, urban planning and city management are often reduced to just the visual and functional. The opportunity to explore and consider our other sensory needs is encouraged through creative tuning. The process encourages co-creation through a diverse constellation of interventions that can evoke, provoke, exemplify and inspire. As a great deal of our experience with the sonic effects of architecture and cityscapes is subjective, Tuned City focuses on direct, participatory situations to explore these effects. Through a combined programme of soundwalks, listening exercises, recording sessions, site-specific actions and sound mapping projects, the Tuned City workshops involved scores of people dedicated to examining and cataloguing their own unique sonic relationships with the city of Tallinn.The installationsIn several places around the city Eyland07 and Florian Tuercke's 12-Tone Filter transformed urban noise into tuned sounds. Walkers in narrow medieval streets wore 'Schizophone' - ear mounted horns by Pierre-Laurent Cassière - to explore the role of hearing in orientation, and discovered quiet sounds which are usually unheard. On a grassy slope in Tallinn's Song Festival Grounds, by the glistening Baltic, visitors discovered the gentle resonances of their own voices in Lukas Kuhne's 'Cromatico' pavilion, its semi-enclosed spaces tuned to the well-tempered scale. In an old horse mill, cellist Charles Curtis exposed the 'wolf tones' of his instrument, ringing it like a bell, but on the edge of

Reverberating through history history Reverberating through through history Reverberating through through history Reverberating Reverberating through history Reverberating Reverberating Reverberating through history Reverberating history Reverberating through history history Reverberating through SoundScapeIssue 0227silence, in a piece composed with Eliane Radique. These were just some of the inspirational installations exhibited and explored in the city. Other performances, fringe events and a three-day conference, took place in unusual venues, including rocky beaches, a triple-domed seaplane hangar, a former prison, a derelict power station, and an abandoned school in a Soviet era utopian project with possibly the longest housing block in Europe. Tuned City brought together a cross-section of international artists, performers, scientists and other thinkers to offer ideas about sound and space, and the public participated directly through dialogues and other experiences. Tallinn was a particularly apt choice for Tuned City, given the richness of Estonia's own sonic history. During the 19th century, rediscovery of folk songs rejuvenated indigenous cultures weakened by centuries of foreign domination. Written records of some 133,000 songs were compiled, representing one of the largest collections in the world, despite a national population of only 1,333,000. Runic chants originating from as far as 1,000 BC may still be heard on a Baltic island, influencing the contemporary music of Veljo Tormis, while the minimalist compositions of Arvo Pärt have been influenced by Estonia's ancient choral vernacular music. Sounding TallinnDuring the Soviet era, song festivals were the only expression of national solidarity tolerated. In 1988, labour unions and the Estonian Heritage Society organised a massive festival, attended by perhaps 300,000 people, at the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn. It became the focus of mass demonstrations against the Soviet occupation, in a movement that became known as the 'Singing Revolution'. This described an independence movement across the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; an historic demonstration of solidarity that occurred on 23 August 1989, when two million people joined hands from Tallinn to Vilnius (Lithuania).The full legacy of Tuned City Tallinn has yet to be heard, but, as one grateful participant, I know that it will long resonate with me.Max Dixon reports from Estonia's Tuned City Tallinn - a celebration of sound, exploring its artistic, entertaining and experimental merits. He explains the concept and interprets the bigger picture