Listen to the first 10 minutes of Glenn Gould’s radio documentary, “The Idea of North.”

Record your impressions in a paragraph or two.

Glenn Gould’s radio documentary “The Idea of North” (1967) begins with a woman’s voice describing a lake with a distinctive Canadian accent. A man’s voice then starts to overlap, the word “North” used as a linking thread between both their sentences. This overlapping continues to happen throughout the start, where one voice talks for a while and then is overpowered by another individuals speech – with each new voice becoming more interesting than the last, allowing you to focus on the different tonal qualities of the participants to differentiate them. Another woman talks towards then end of this section about peacefulness of a sun setting, this imagery juxtaposed with the constant flow of voices. This contends the listeners’ ability to concentrate, where the piece is not about guiding the audience but about placing the audience in the middle of the haphazard soundscape.

When I first heard the beginning it was easy to get confused as it jumped from one story to the next, and you can’t really grasp exactly what the people are talking about especially as you’ve been given no background or context for what is being said. The technique is like a domino effect of sound, where each sound moves onto the next but the previous still sits under creating a confusion as you don’t know what to focus on; which reminded me of a busy coffee shops rambling of everyone’s conversations where the only thing you hear is what’s relevant to you. Gould does this by making the most pivotal parts of the subject’s speech the loudest when they relate to his idea of the North most. I was a little unsure of the technique at the beginning; however after reading that Gould was inspired from listening to the radio stations shifting back and forth across the dial, I can see how this overlapping of voices and accents helps to paint a picture through sound.

At approximately three minutes Gould introduces himself and tells us the program is called “The Idea of North,” as the collection of voices turns into mumbling in the background. He talks about always remaining an outsider from the north, and therefore we hear him at a louder volume to the North’s inhabitants. As the topic of the north train ride begins distinctive train sounds, like the screeching breaks on the track, can be heard and the documentary beginning with the train crossing signal. People’s voices are then heard, with the background sounds of yelling on the train platform and train horns, which sometimes contest the subject’s voices. Towards the end of the clip the train starts to get louder until eventually the first man’s voice fades out being overpowered. We then hear a man with a British accent juxtaposed against the melodic Canadian accent, with the interior sound of space in the train heard underneath. He says that the North is a land of very narrow, thin margins – thin margin of transition; Gould portrays this idea of loneliness and isolation in the way that each person’s audio is isolated like the geographical space of the north, though they come together to create the community that drives this place as a whole.