What is a sociable acoustic?

What is a sociable public space and how does it sound? Can public sociability be “tuned”, and should it be? What different ideas of sociability can be found in distinct acoustic settings?

This workshop was the first of a series planned under the project Atelier TM, under the Collège d’études mondiales Global Cities chair, bringing together practitioners and researchers from the fields of sound and urbanism to explore the social dimensions of urban acoustics, and their relation to music.

Following provocations based on field recordings taken at Paris’ péripherique, the politics of listening, and the use of urban noise as a material for dance, a discussion raised questions around silence as a mode of dwelling in and designing urban space, and the representationality of urban soundscape. Listen to the recorded seminar here.

In the afternoon these ideas were developed further through experiments in embodied encounter with urban space. A vocal workshop in the setting of the Chapelle Charbon public development site aimed to tune the hearing, demonstrating ways of navigating space acoustically and relating spatial conditions like distance to acoustic ones such as volume. Finally, a soundwalk following the acoustic shadow of the Boulevard Périphérique applied these approaches across a diverse series of peripheral urban spaces.

Drawing on these discussions and techniques, a follow-up workshop on the 13^th June invites participants to share written, recorded, and performed responses to the question “what is a sociable acoustic? Listen to an audio piece in response by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni.

Presentations: John Bingham-Hall, Richard Sennett and Brandon LaBelle
Vocal workshop: Alexandra Lacroix and François Rougier