Hugh Livingston seems an unlikely subterranean. Though at 35 he has lived all over the world -- childhood in Tennessee, a teenage year in Rome, early 20s at CalArts, late 20s in China -- he's adopted the uniform of a generic Middle American: khakis, tucked-in gray T-shirt and broad, open smile.
But the peripatetic, Oakland-based Livingston is in fact an experimental composer, an advocate of what he calls "situational music" -- work bound to a piece of architecture, an acoustic space or the occasion of its creation -- and lately he's been wearing this uniform while sitting at a Macintosh PC inside a Santa Monica parking garage. There, he keys off sounds that echo or circle around the underground lot: ocean waves, a jet taking off, a bird singing, a cello, a sitar. With his wide-eyed talk of Doppler shifts and trajectories, he seems less an avant-garde musician than a kid with a really ambitious science project.
When he's finished it, he'll have a sound installation called "Listen Edgemar" that merges environmental sounds with musical instruments in an effort to blur the distinctions between them. The result will be publicly unveiled Sunday with a series of performances and is scheduled to run indefinitely. But don't look for this composition to be performed later at Disney Hall or sold as a CD at Amoeba Music -- it's designed exclusively for the parking lot.
"The idea is to respond to the space," Livingston says while surveying the garage, which sits under the upscale Edgemar shopping center on Main Street. Designed by Frank Gehry in the 1980s, Edgemar comprises a chic hair salon, a Peet's Coffee, the restaurant Rockenwagner, a design firm and an arts center and theater. Its courtyard includes a water fountain powered by a pump in the basement, which the composer has also recorded.
To Livingston, the mundane noise above him is a kind of human symphony.
"How does the noise that's here, upstairs and downstairs, suggest a musical effect?" he asks. "The fountain has its burbling. When the restaurant sets up for dinner at 5:30, there's the clink of glasses. There's a rush when the theater opens at 8. The design funnels street sounds into the courtyard. And the sounds of hair-cutting and coffee-brewing are also musical sounds.
"I thought it would be really interesting to re-create that downstairs. A mural is painted on a blank wall, after all, so what if you treated the garage as blank canvas and brought sound into it?"
