In this third volume of Sonic Urbanism, the completeness of the magic three invites a reflection. Not a conclusion, but a breath. A musical rest that frames a pattern within an investigation that is ongoing for both Theatrum Mundi and many others. 1 What, and for whom, are sonic urbanisms for?
On the one hand, they implicitly resist any idea of urbanism as a specialist subject – asserting that sound artists, activists and anthropologists, or animals, plants and performers might all be urbanists by virtue of the ways they interrogate and construct built environments. In this sense, sonic urbanisms are about developing a set of tools and values – things like listening, voicing, rhythmicity, harmony, scoring and performing – beyond the usual pedagogical canons. These are imaginative infrastructures 2 – methods for articulating ways of making and experiencing shared life, beyond the specialist language systems of urbanism. Such infrastructures are stages for broadening the constituents of city-making to include all those who do city‑dwelling.
In another sense though, sonic urbanisms are intended as a set of provocations for those working, studying and researching in the worlds of architecture, urban design, planning and so on. They do not start from an assumption that these professionals are insensitive to sound. Instead, these provocations are offered in the recognition that every field of expertise has its limits, and that by reaching out to other fields it might expand those limits. Our aim, in these volumes, has been to help articulate a field of sonic urbanism, gather its constituent thinkers and makers, and begin to map their ideas and methods. Taking stock at this moment of temporary completion, what follows is the beginnings of a map of what has come so far, hopefully offering directions for the next steps.
Acoustic Communities and Public Hearing
Part of our initial framing of sonic urbanism was a call to go beyond the idea of the soundscape as a passive by‑product of everyday life, and instead to address social questions raised through sonic concerns. Many contributions in this series have described how communities and societies are held together through sonic acts. They have depicted strategies for claiming acoustic space. The ways, for example, that street vendors use “tone, modulation and rhythm to stand out in a noisy context…” (Grégoire Chelkoff, Sonic Urbanism vol. 2), “organised the street economically through sound” (Richard Sennett, vol. 1) and “continue to be heard in the face of adversity; a resilient living tradition” (Duncan MacLeod, vol 2).
In contrast to the vocal competitiveness of the market, we have also seen how collective voicing is used in very organised and pointed ways to amplify communities of political struggle. In volume 2, Tom Western & Kareem al Kabbani recount improvisatory strategies for being heard:
There was no amplification at first, but someone had brought a big loudspeaker in the middle of the square and found a way to plug it into the electricity supply of a nearby kiosk. And we connected a microphone, which made its way to Kareem, who, without missing a beat, keeps singing – his voice is now ringing out from the loudspeaker. The square is transformed with electric sound.
Where electronic amplification is not an option, the human microphone with its “active engagement required between speaker and crowd” creates a “novel form of social technology” for mass political deliberation in tightly policed public spaces (Sharon Phelan, vol. 1). Or conversely, the collective refusal to voice by factory workers engaged to carry out a performance of Lin Chi‑Wei’s’s Tape Music, in which “silence might be understood as an act of protest” (Jonathan Packham, vol. 2). From the market traders to the factory workers – all these stories represent clear tactics in which the voice, that most emblematically human of instruments, transforms the spaces between bodies into something thick with social fabric. Sonic urbanism, then, is about a set of vocal tactics for contesting and reconfiguring the public realm as much as it is about designing “infrastructures for voice”. 3
Public hearing, of course, is also larger than the human world. Matt Parker, in this volume, draws attention to “environmental publics”, constellations of beings that become audible when listening in on “dialogue between organic and inorganic bodies” (Nicola di Croce, vol. 3). Non-human voices also become voices of protest – when species such as the monk parakeet in Lisbon are viewed as foreign ‘invaders’ to national territories their calls are an affirmation of presence (Nuno da Luz, vol. 3). The project Radio Gardening in Lagos (T-Shine-baba, Tushar Hathiramani, Monaí de Paula Antunes, Niko de Paula Lefort and Seetal Solanki, vol. 3) proposes a multiform ecology emerging from interactions between voices, plants, devices and radio waves, showing how even the most technological of public realms can build community across species.
Sonic Epistemologies and Design
Sonic urbanism implies making explicit – and thereby contestable – the ways that sound is apprehended and valued in city-making. In this volume, Juan-Guillermo Dumay and Ruth Oldham recast the sounds of energetic transfer in a musical frame in order to shift them from a framework of noise pollution to one of creative material. Mathilde Meireles’ sound work Sunnyside similarly brings infrastructural sounds of the home into the foreground. Contributions by Matt Parker and Ahmed & Rashid bin Shabib drew our attention to the acoustic impact of sounds inaudible to humans on other forms of life – the complex communication systems of beehives or the homing systems of pigeons. Honing in on the inaudible opens the opportunity for a reappraisal of noise, but also entails a challenge to anthropocentric experiences of sound. Meanwhile, whereas architectural briefs for luxury residential towers demand insulation from the noise of the surrounding environment, Gascia Ouzounian hears silence, conversely, as evidence of the degradation of biodiversity in urban environments.
Could these shifts in position and perspective aid urban planners and designers to think further and wider about potential conflicts or unexpected interactions between non-humans and human systems? If so, what tools are needed for hearing, remembering and representing these sonic conditions? Audio recording, of course. But also an understanding of recorded sound not just as a representation of reality but as a “ruin in reverse” (Frédéric Mathevet, vol. 1), an act of subjective construction of meaning from something unstructured. Listening too, but as an active and creative act, as proposed by Listening With collective’s suggestive texts that run throughout this volume. Ways to represent time, pitch and rhythm learned from music: the “open graphic score is thus a useful reminder that the focus of the city‑maker is not necessarily on the design of discrete and static urban elements, but on the quality of the performances which these elements collectively inspire” (Sara Adhitya, vol. 1). 4 Sonic urbanism is not a metaphor: elements of musical craft like scoring, recording and listening are tangible tools for imagining and designing.
Sonic Space and Acoustics
The phrase sonic urbanism might most obviously evoke acoustics: the technical field of building design concerned with the way architectural spaces transform sound through resonance, decay and dampening. But as several authors through this series have shown, sonic urbanism offers a framework for connecting these material facts to the cultural dynamics that shape and are shaped by them.
Nathan Belval’s account of the Villa des Glycines describes acoustic design as a way to “define sonic spaces – locations identifiable by the ear – thanks to their audible characteristics” (vol. 1). Composing the shared social space of a residential development as a series of acoustic zones with distinct characteristics leads to “musical vision of the environment”. In the performance Voi[e,x,s], a live project running alongside these volumes and analysed throughout them, amplification and staging are used to mould the acoustic space of a future park, showing how the same piece of wasteland can hold a sense of intimacy or expand into connection with its environment, as performers whisper to the audience or shout form surrounding rooftops (John Bingham-Hall, vol. 1).
As much as acoustics contain social forms, social norms in our relationship to acoustics can also be shifted. In museums silence has long presided, favouring a visually-oriented relationship to cultural artefacts. “Now we see that some change is happening and people are gradually understanding museums as places where they can meet and things can happen – as multi-sensorial places” (Eric de Visscher, vol. 2). This is evidenced by the growth in popularity of ‘museum lates’, where prominent institutional foyers become stages for performers and DJs. Sonic urbanism, then, suggests building architecture outwards from these socio‑acoustic concerns, and provides the language for framing them.
Coda
It is impossible to conclude here. Building a sonic urbanism, or sonic urbanisms, is an ongoing work rather than a question to be answered. As a kind of coda though, I propose a few refrains, in the hope these might ring in the ears of our readers, reminding them to keep coming back to these three volumes to enrich their future work with the motifs resonating throughout their diverse interpretations of sonic urbanisms:
The different spatial distributions of sound and light as they reflect off of or pass through spatial boundaries. The difference between being seen and being heard – simply being present, or having a voice. Chosen communities of speech, language and music, rather than imposed ghettos of identitarian belonging. Geometric spaces bent and stretched by the recomposition of acoustic properties. The representation of dynamic forms like rhythm, time and tempo as opposed to the concrete forms of line and volume. Being aware of, and working through, the divergent value systems wrapped up in hearing and in seeing the world.
- See particularly the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism led by Gascia Ouzounian at University of Oxford (soncities.org ).
- With thanks to Amica Dall, Theatrum Mundi trustee, for proposing this phrase in conversation with the author.
- Kostourou, F. and Bingham-Hall, J (2021). Infrastructures for Voice. Urban Transcripts 4 (03).
- See also the project Scoring the City, led by Gascia Ouzounian and John Bingham-Hall and stemming from discussions around sonic urbanism, for a set of propositions for architectural scores and reflections on their application (scoring.city).