One day this Spring, I went for a walk. Feeling the thunderstorm suspended above my head, the wind calling the rain in gusts, I chose a street near my house and started my journey. I turned my phone’s recording app on, kept a steady pace and, while walking by the buildings, I rang doorbells.

I heard a whole city within a couple of streets: residential buildings, bakeries, cafes, architecture offices, gardens, lawyers, supermarkets, gyms, pharmacies, restaurants, garages, seamstresses, hairdressers, toy stores, and medical clinics. I heard sounds from people of all ages talking, children laughing, birds chirping, dogs barking, noise from the wind, planes, cars, and street works. I felt my own breathing, my key chain clinking, and my steps.

Most doorbells produced just a muted mechanical click. After all, doorbells are designed to be heard by people on the other side of the door. But some of them rang, either because they were too close to the entrance, or because they seemed to want the visitor to know that the doorbell was working. Ring, ding-dong, buzz, beep. I never knew what sound, if any, I was going to hear.

I kept going until I reached my starting point again. I looked at my phone and pressed stop. The walk took me sixteen minutes and thirty-five seconds to complete. Shortly after that, it started to rain. A peaceful white noise, cleaning the previous urban cacophony off my ears.

My phone traced a sonic landscape of that part of the city; or, using R. Murray Schafer’s terminology, a soundscape. But it was more than a soundscape. It was a sonic map, for each doorbell ringing placed a specific building at a specific place in time. The distance in time between each doorbell also defined the distance in space between buildings and places, my steps being the measure for both.

Sound Thieves is a sound piece made from the sonic map I recorded that day. Inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, I extracted sounds from my recording – birds, cars, wind, doorbells, and many others, and treated them as musical notes, or musical cells, although I did not remove their surrounding noise. I repeated the sounds, changed tempo, pitch, and volume, and assembled them in many different ways to make a sonic patchwork. Some of those notes and cells, the more diffuse ones, form different sonic webs waving in the background. Others, the more distinct or more strident, get to hop and bounce above that mesh.

In Sound Thieves, each of the first three movements steals a set of doorbell sounds and develops around a specific type of doorbell. The last movement gathers all the different doorbell sounds - ding-dongs, beeps, and buzzes, plus an additional ring - in a bombastic and epic tutti ending with someone opening the door. I see it as a collection of four cinematic (or, better still, programmatic) miniatures containing my response to the sonic landscape of that day. It is a playful script of a fictional urban environment, an almost childlike narration of imagined sonic realms.

Although I am no sound artist or composer, this sonic experimentation allowed me to pay attention to doorbells in different ways. It showed me that doorbells also sing outside the home and they have a role in the random orchestration of the street. It made me more alert to the different types of sounds that come together in the city and the rich variety of sounds that a humble object such as the doorbell can make. It also made me think about how history can be encapsulated in a sound; how modern doorbells often play an electronic, cold beep, while older doorbells show different timbres and textures, recalling old memories. Sometimes, it is even possible to hear the scratches of time in an old ring, a kind of sonic patina that makes the bell sound mellower, like the soft touch of old wooden furniture.

Joana Albernaz Delgado

V&A/RCA History of Design PhD student

Joana is a design historian devoted to mix-media methodologies. She graduated from the History of Design MA at the V&A/RCA. Her doctoral research focuses on the history of doorbells and the role of the sonic in design history.

Important notes: While the recorded sounds are real, no person was disturbed for the purposes of this work. These sound files have repetitive and sometimes loud sounds. Listen with caution. Headphones are recommended for a better experience.