Listening to urban sounds

The paper is an extended version of the inaugural lecture I gave on November 28, 2016 at Leiden University when I was officially appointed Full Professor in Auditory Culture. Main idea presented in this paper is that artists and artistic researchers can and should play a more prominent role in the acoustic design of public urban spaces.

1969

of the second experiment consisted of three sensorially differentiated types: blindfolded, deafened, and normal seeing and hearing persons. These were taken simultaneously on the same trip and the procedures were similar to those of the first experiment. In general, the hypotheses are confirmed, but it is determined from both the analysis and the experiments that the sequence was lacking in most qualities considered desirable on the basis of the hypotheses, and sound settings lacked informativeness, uniqueness, and diversity, and the visible form was not well-correlated with the sonic form. The sonic environment, as well as the non-visual environment in general, is concluded to be an important area for new design work because of its apparently important effects on visual perception and because it may be an economical way of increasing persons? delight and acceptance of the city without massive and costly redevelopment of the visible form. The elements which are considered to have the most potential for sonic design on the basis of the analysis and experiments are the large open spaces, signs and other communications, the sequence network, and small and responsive spaces.

The Auditory Culture Reader, 2003

A common phenomenon now marks the ordinary experience of city dwellers : walking through the city to music. Geared with headphones, the walkman listener strolls along and takes in the musical scenery on his/her way. A kind of tuning in is created between his ear and his step. New sonic territories are composed in the course of this mobile listening experience. As the body moves in sync to the music, the listener transforms the public scene and provides a new tonality to the city street. His footsteps seem to say what his ears may be trying to hide. How does music with headphones mobilize the walker's gait ? What does this contemporary form of urban mobility stand for? How should we consider this micro-ecology of musical navigation ?

Urban Studies, 2007

2009

This PhD dissertation presents an investigation of the methodology of sound environment analysis with specific concern to its relevance in modern urban space. Inspired by a growing interest in urban acoustics it investigates how sounds contribution to the urban life world is articulated within existing complexes of theory, and it outlines perspectives for alternative descriptional categories.

2009

This paper examines urban site-specific sound installations, as an artistic expression that integrates other disciplines such as sociology and urbanism in the practice and theory of art. It also explores the impact these soundworks produce not only on the physical city but also on the role that citizens play in it. I propose a critical and theoretical approach to this field of sonic arts from the main topics that along time artists have been concerned for in their artwork: on the one hand the relationship between the artwork and the spectator, and on the other the analysis and reasoning of the space through the work of art. In considering site-specific sound installation from these two starting points, the echoes of the previous non-sonorous artistic tradition, especially that closest to its advent in the mid-sixties are noticeable. For this reason, together to their sonorous specificity, other arguments, such as their sociological, urban and phenomenological implications, are rathe...

2020

The concept of soundscape has garnered increasing research attention over the last decade for studying and designing the sonic environment of public spaces. It is therefore critical to advance knowledge on how the soundscape of a place is evoked by its sonic environment, given visual, cultural, and situational contexts. Working Group 1 of the COST action "Soundscapes of European cities and landscapes" revolves around this question. In our current understanding the sounds that are heard during normal activities in a place trigger meaning and emotions based on the matching with expectations of the people using and acting in that place. This complete package of human experience in relation to the sonic environment can be named the soundscape. In terms of design, this understanding opens several opportunities. The designer can decide which sounds should be heard and try to make this happen by guiding the attention to particular sounds or simply remove, add or shape sounds. In doing so, he or she should keep in mind expectations of the local users. Expectations and meaning might be changed by suitable design of non-sonic features of the environment including besides the obvious visual context also the openness, lighting, local climate, etc. Bringing these concepts to practice requires new tools and methodologies.

On January 12, 2017 a Dutch national TV channel presented a news item which stated that, without measures, noise, within 20 years from now, will be the most important environmental problem with the biggest impact on public health in The Netherlands due to, for example, urbanization, increasing traffic, and technological developments. According to the Dutch Health and Safety Inspection over 50% of the Dutch population already suffers from too much noise; noise makes people ill, it causes insomnia, stress and, on the long term, it can lead to palpitations, increased blood pressure, and depressions. While looking and listening to this news item, I was thrown back some 40 years in time when R. Murray Schafer first published The Soundscape. In it Murray Schafer comes to more or less the same analysis as presented in the news item: we are exposed to too much noise and too many sounds. Sound volume and the amount of sounds still increase which is bad for our health. And it seems as if the proposed solutions haven’t changed all that much over past 40 years: Noise reduction, promotion of so-called hi-fi sounds, and sound design taking the human scale as a point of departure. In this paper I will propose some alternative ways of sonic interventions to make alternative interactions between humans and their (urban) environment possible. It is a proposal to listen and react differently to our sonic milieu, to reevaluate and transform it beyond the ideas formulated by Murray Schafer some 40 years ago. What will be emphasized is the role sound artists can play in (a) raising the auditory awareness of residents and users of public urban spaces and (b) changing (improving?) the sonic environment without necessarily aiming for noise reduction.

Soundeffects an Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2013

Within recent years, there has been a renewed focus on sound in urban environments. From sound installations in public space to sound festivals in alternative settings, we find a common interest in sound art relating to the urban environment. Artworks or interventions presented in such contexts share the characteristics of site specificity. However, this article will consider the artwork in a broader context by re-examining how sound installations relate to the urban environment. For that purpose, this article brings together ecology terms from acoustic ecology of the sound theories of the 1970s while developing them into recent definitions of ecology in urban studies. Finally, we unfold our framing of urban sound ecologies with three case analyses: a sound intervention in Berlin, a symphony for wind instruments in Copenhagen and a video walk in a former railway station in Kassel. The article concludes that the ways in which recent sound installations work with urban ecologies vary. While two of the examples blend into the urban environment, the other transfers the concert format and its mode of listening to urban space. Last, and in accordance with recent soundscape research, we point to how artists working with new information and media technologies create inventive ways of inserting sound and image into urban environments.