JOHN BINGHAM-HALL Sound and the City

Introduction 2

Acoustic Ecology, Locality 2

Why talk about noise? 4

Noise Pollution? 6

City and Periphary? 10

The Relational Sound Field 12

How can we work with sound? 13

Light vs Sound in Public Spaces 20

Acoustic Architecture 21

Against Soundscape 23

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Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Luigi Russolo predicted, on behalf of

the Italian Futurists, that ‘the motors and machines of our industrial cities will

one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an

intoxicating orchestra of noises’ (Tisdall and Bozzolla 1977: 15). Perhaps this is

true, but at present such an acoustically harmonious city seems far off. At this

point, though, the beauty of city and industry was recognised and even idolised by

the Modernist project and since then a minority strain of artistic practice has

explored its sounds, sights, materials and movements. Now, ‘more than 50% of

us live in cities and, according to the United Nations, this number is set to rise by

2050’ (Tate Modern 2007). The city, therefore, is no longer a fetish of

Modernists and Industrialists but a necessary reality for the future of all humanity.

This essay aims, as a part of a wider movement to understand cities and as a

contribution to debates in the strand of contemporary music dealing with the

sounds of the real world, to explore ways that sound behaves and can be dealt

with in the city. London will provide a focus for this study as direct personal

experience is an important method in studying one’s own habitat. Obviously,

different issues may arise when studying the newly burgeoning mega-cities of the

Southern Hemisphere, but questions raised here about the relevancy of public

arts policy may be taken as pertinent to their more haphazard development. The

centre of this essay is urbanity, but the freedom to approach this wide issue

though sound and related media is opened by practices such as phonography and

sound art which are usually taken to come under the umbrella term of

‘contemporary music’.

Acoustic Ecology, Locality.

Initially, several concepts need to be introduced. Whilst I will not aim to provide

an in-depth reading of locality I do require it here to make sense as a socio-

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geographic site which holds in varying levels memories, security, sustenance,

culture and a sense of place for its inhabitants and users. Relating to London

specifically, locality can perhaps be defined by the ‘town’ or ‘village’ centres that

have become encompassed by the sprawl. Schools, colleges or universities may

come to be at the centre of an imagined sphere of locality or the boundaries of

music and fashion subcultures such as those of Camden, Notting Hill and

Shoreditch may actually come to delineate a geographical area. Historically, for

example in traditional Chinese culture as described by Lucie Rault, bells were

chimed so that their sphere of acoustic influence could demarcate a socially

coherent zone (Rault 2000: 140). Whilst in London the ‘Bells of Bow’ have

ceased to be used as the benchmark for a true Londoner the Mayor of London’s

Noise Team still propose using the audibility of Big Ben’s chiming to assess noise

pollution. However, with such high levels and variety of noise in London we must

work harder to sonically define local cohesion. Another concept then, that of

acoustic ecology or soundscape study, is invoked in order to study, highlight and

work with ‘a specificity of sound in which location and listening intersect’ (LaBelle

197). LaBelle has provided a comprehensive description of academic and artistic

approaches in this wide field:

‘Locality of sound is of paramount concern for the study of environmental sound, or

what acoustic ecology has deemed the “soundscape.” It promotes active listening,

environmental awareness and cultural practice sensitive to questions of place, and

location-oriented musical education. While pinpointing local sound as a powerful

presence affecting the human condition…………acoustic ecology, in turn, expands

locality to global proportions. Whereas sound installation……works with locational

sound….acoustic ecology situates local sound in relation to…the entire field of sound’

(LaBelle 2006: 197).

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I will also speak about acoustic architecture; the planning, designing and building

of these soundscapes in the public urban realm through specific three-

dimensional concrete-acoustic sound installations. The Mayor of London defines

soundscape as ‘the overall quality of the acoustic environment as a place for

human experience’ (Mayor of London 2004: 262). Sounder City: the Mayor’s

Ambient Noise Strategy is a document which outlines the proposed development

of policies to improve and control the London soundscape, which is deemed ‘a

quality of life issue’. I will refer often to this document and to the Mayor’s Noise

Team who research and implement noise policy. So when talking about

soundscape in a massive and densely populated city such as London it becomes a

moral issue. Decisions, which are made not only by policy-makers but also by

each citizen, impinge directly upon human life. Peter Gutkind suggests that

discussing urbanism always draws us into a ‘moral message’ (Gutkind 1993: 252)

and so I will be talking not only about the current situation in soundscape design

and sound installation but about future potentialities and their extrapolation into

utopias.

Why talk about noise, about noise in the city or about noise in relation to music?

‘Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space …….The goose quill put

an end to talk, it abolished mystery; it brought architecture and towns.’

(MacLuhan and Fiore 1967: 44) The age in which sight was the only sense trusted

to give us our clear perception of the external world was perhaps an

intermediate one between a latter age of primordial ‘acoustic space’ as described

by MacLuhan and Fiore and what may be seen as a contemporary reawakening of

the ears. Such specialist visual symbols as architectural drawing, written language

(incomprehensible to so many now in the less developed world and in previous

less literate ages of our own society) and mathematical symbol systems excluded

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undesirables from knowledge reserved for the privileged. ‘Printing……confirmed

and extended the new visual stress………The private, fixed point of view

became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-

involvement’ (Ibid: 50). Visuality permeates our every experience of the world

and subsequent communication of it. MacLuhan offers the alphabet, sensible only

in lines of code which must be read in order from one end to the other, as the

basis for our perception of linear forms of space and time – lines along which

ephemeral events such as sounds can only have a duration and quality and are not

perceived in their full spatiality. ‘Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time

and space as one and live in acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space’.

Alphabet means A to B – a singular journey – but sound radiates outwards to

infinite points from one source. If we, as modern urbanites, are living, as is so

often said, in an ‘urban jungle’ then must we not relearn the kind of hearing which

enabled our ancestors to survive in the primeval jungle?

Sound now emanates loudly from millions of sources underground, in the sky and

at all heights and distances from where we stand and listen. This provides a

spherical experience of the city which breaks the doctrine of linear alphabetical

space. William J Mitchell likens the networked city of the modern West to the

human body; a semi-autonomous structure, internally hierarchical, consisting of

architectures, flows and separate actions with multiple links to the world around

it (Mitchell 2003). It seems clear to me that only a regaining of olfactory space

can truly advance the general public understanding of the living city.

Bill Fontana’s sound work has gone even further in networking the city by setting

up acoustic links between city and places outside of its boundaries (Fontana

2007). In Sound Sculptures through the Golden Gate Bridge (1987) sound was

transported from various points outside of San Francisco and projected onto the

façade of a city art gallery. No processing was applied and his compositional

control consisted simply of the placing of microphones. The resultant live

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soundscape was allowed to blend with the existent soundscape whilst providing a

link, in the mind of the listener, to that distant sound source. People’s

experiences and memories of local soundmarks outside of the city were evoked

not only to ‘activate listening to one’s surroundings as a permanent condition’ but

in a specific way to extend and deepen the sense of place; the listener is placed in

the square outside the gallery by Fontana’s composition, which is placed in the

city centre by the noisy traffic and pedestrians, which is placed in context of the

surrounding countryside by the link provided by Fontana.

Noise Pollution?

Max Dixon calls noise the ‘forgotten pollutant’ (Dixon 2007: 101) and it is clear

from both government statistics presented in the Sounder City document (Ibid:

14) and simply from listening personally to London’s roads, rails and skies that we

accept and often ignore levels of intrusive sound that we might rather live

without. By encouraging, though, the perception that noise is a pollutant,

alongside airborne particles and intrusive lighting, will we simply unleash a

psychological disturbance that is currently subdued in people unaware of the idea

of bad noise? With more and more writing emerging on sound as an artistic

medium and a key perceptual feature of our lives it certainly seems that there is a

risk of over-accentuating its importance in an unnecessarily keen reaction to the

perceived ocular-centricity of our current culture. It concerns me that by forcing

acoustics into the arena of urban debate we are creating a new vocabulary for

dispute and complaint, and handing over to a government that already attempts

to retain full control over the arts another element of a culture which is ‘none of

its business’ (Hensher 2008).

A lifetime ago, surrealist poets refuted the centralised control of the French

language held by L'Académie française and sought to destroy the logic of words,

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so that people might understand exactly how they sound and what they fail to

convey. Painters and sculptors quickly followed suit in their abandonment of

recognisable visual signs, yet it was not until forty years later that John Cage

ripped open our notion of formalised music. The accidental and environmental

noise that was revealed inside and beyond his musical structures is in relative

infancy in its role as a form of art. It is young enough that many contemporary

figures have witnessed its entire history and have consciously furthered its

position. Perhaps this is the reason that many sound artists and legislators feel

that environmental noise can be rationalised and forced into forms that can come

across as self-important and overly proud of their community mindedness.

Perhaps, like language and vision, sound should be relinquished to the population

before it is fully taken up by administrators.

So, whilst in this essay I would argue for an enriching of the urban experience

through hearing and sounding, I would like to question the ability of the Sounder

City project to identify and realise this potential new acoustic culture and

environment.

In the 1970s, R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project sought to map out

territories, experiences and mythologies revealed by distinct soundscapes and

soundmarks – always placing the ‘sentient’ at the focus of an acoustic sphere.

Looking to a form of communication which massively predates written language

or other visual symbols, Schafer invoked deeply mystic aspects to the sonic

experience stemming from the ‘beginnings of earthly presence, from the

Dionysian to the Apollonian, to the alchemical and Gnostic, to siren songs and

celestial harmonies’ (LaBelle 2006: 201). So, rather than being a new category of

aesthetic experience, environmental sound, whether in country or city, has

always played a profound role in defining our sense of were we are. Given the

issues to do with lack of urban space raised by Gutkind and Rogers, and

discussed later in this essay, it seems we can look to ‘the spatial metaphor

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embedded in our experience of music’ to see why an acoustic understanding of

space might be increasingly essential. Sound does not require us to draw a

‘distinction between a place and its occupant’ and as an event in time ‘it does not

compete with other events for the time required’ (Scruton 1997: 74). In other

words, so long as we do not expect complete silence then acoustic space can be

shared almost infinitely. Schafer posited ‘the complex overlapping and

interpenetrating acoustic spaces as observed in birds and animals’ as a currency

for space in the overcrowded modern community, with physical demarcation

becoming increasingly inefficient. There is large scale physical/visible enclosure of

space in all the urban financial centres; the massive size and harsh solidity of the

corporate towers is hidden behind glass and metal skins which give, according to

Jameson, the illusion of transparency. However, they in fact block the free

movement of sound, light and pedestrian traffic in a way that Schafer’s acoustic

spaces could not. Physical structures achieve the ‘same semi-autonomy as

cyberspace’ (Jameson 1997: 187) in that once their construction has been

completed they relate to each other and to space in a way outside of our full

control or understanding; ‘a screen on which the images of surrounding life are

projected’ (Tafuri and Dal Co 1968: 397). Buildings remain tyrannically present

until violent action is taken against them. In response to this very tyranny Yves

Klein suggested that all architecture be replaced with pneumatics, so that banks

of pressurised air keep out dust, moisture and cold from inhabited spaces (Conor

2008: 88). This Utopian suggestion allows our need for shelter to be fulfilled

whilst releasing geographical space from the bondage of permanent concrete

structures, and human society from the segregation created by privacy. Whilst an

unlikely achievement in the real terms of urban planning, it recalls the aims of the

Károly Sirató’s Dimensionist Manifesto - to ‘extend art into all the available

dimensions of space’ (quoted in Conor 2008: 87) – by engaging the space around

the object (which is, in essence, ‘thin air’) as a material for art. More recently the

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artist Ann Veronica Janssens has worked with mist in an attempt to achieve,

similarly, ‘absence of authoritarian materiality, that effort to get out from under

the tyranny of objects’ (quoted in Conor 2008: 88). Iannis Xenakis added ‘poetic

and dynamic detail’ to one of his spaces with a system of windows and divides

casting shadows which overlap and shift throughout the day (LaBelle 2006: 185).

The perpetual arc of the sun across the sky allows light to become Xenakis’ art

each day but to disappear nightly without a trace. It seems to follow to present

sound as another utopian structural element in our urban spatial culture. It is an

environment – a continuous field though which the body moves and which both

arises from and informs our activity in an ongoing and agenda-free way – and also

a culture that we may choose to listen to, learn about and partake in the

alteration/creation of. However unlike concrete structure, sound achieves this

whilst being ephemeral and passing, leaving only a psychological reminder of its

occurrence. The soundscape is perhaps an all-encompassing public work of music

formed of multiple nodes of reception and generation. In an instrumental group

performance every musician can hear the entire work yet also contributes their

own interplaying line. Classical sensibilities allow a composer to dictate the style,

duration and form of each participant’s contribution. As I have said, though,

modern music has long since embraced forms of group sounding which allow

performers to react either purely on their own hearing and understanding, or not

to react at all and listen simply to the sounds which are occurring anyway. The

Scratch Orchestra stated in its constitution a desire to break down barriers

between private and group activity by allowing people to produce spontaneously,

or along loose guidelines, sound in large groups (Cardew 1972). So if there can in

fact be analogy between public soundscape and musical work it would seem

culturally anachronistic to allow planners to become composer-dictators with

powers to shape such a large and democratically-produced piece of music.

Lefebvre has already recognised the musicality of the city itself:

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‘Hard rhythms: silence and uproar alternate, time broken and accented, striking the one

who from his window takes time to listen’

(Lefebvre 1996: 221)

He sensed though that from his balcony vantage point he was removed from the

city mêlée and at a distinct advantage in hearing this musical structure play out

below him. I suggest though that he was still very much embroiled in the acoustic

space of the city and that perhaps not only he and any other individual who

looked down onto the street could hear this ‘ensemble of flows of metallic or

carnal bodies’, but that each one of those carnal bodies, people, could too.

City and Periphery

Speaking against a conception of the city as an ‘organic whole’ Lefebvre promotes

a multi-layered view of urban relations; social, legal, familial and commercial. The

city is not simply a by-product of modern life and is not singular and saleable in

the way of a commercial product. In the hands of a dominant power such as the

state or the corporation (not to raise a debate here as to which holds the

greater power, or where they become distinct) the identity of a city must

become focussed on its centre; on its greatness and on its ability to be exported

(via the tourist brochure). In reality though, according to Lefebvre, the city

represents a collective historical force and is a ‘production and reproduction of

human beings by human beings’ (Lefebvre 1996: 101). Whilst the centre may

always remain iconic, the lens must in my view become wider and allow the

suburbs and the communities perceived as inferior to become arenas for cultural,

not only material, life. Whether through grass roots activity stemming from

within each respective lesser centre in the metropolitan area, or through

outreaching legislation, it would seem beneficial for various reasons to imbue

identity and detail into all corners without regard for their distance from the

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current heart. For Richard Rogers, London itself is potentially the ideal humanist

city:

‘London…….developed around a multitude of centres, and it is still a collection of

distinct towns and villages……..each with its own character visual identity and history.

Instead of allowing London to sprawl, and this polycentric pattern to erode, we should

actively reinforce these neighbourhoods as compact, sustainable nuclei.’

(Rogers 1997: 113)

I am fully in agreement with Rogers’ vision, though by bringing it into this study I

want to show how his built concerns may be enriched by a realisation of each

nucleus’ acoustic identity. For example, whilst he rightly talks about traffic in

terms of its physical threat and production of air pollution (Ibid: 120) it has come

to light in statistics reported in the Mayor’s Sounder City document that almost

40% of Londoners consider traffic noise some kind of problem (Mayor of London

2004: 14, fig. 1). The official planning attitude clearly prioritises flow of traffic

towards the industrial and commercial centres of the City, West End and

Docklands and therefore many localities are dominated physically and acoustically

by junctions, flyovers and roundabouts. Inevitably their unique soundscapes are

drowned out, and in a psychogeographical sense their identities and energy are

drawn out along these concrete arteries towards the over-saturated centre.

With London supporting such a diversity of sonic generators and resonators –

languages, topographies, architectural styles and geographically specific musical

subcultures – the sum of lost soundscapes must be huge.

As an inevitable product of human activity and communication, sound comes to

embody Lefebvre’s user-generated city. Also, heeding his warning that an

organicist view of the city blocks deeper enquiry and understanding on the level

of everyday life, we see how the city must develop in its periphery; filled in all its

infinite distinct ‘‘places’’ with the sounds desired by those who live there

everyday. Such imperatives seem spurious in the context of wider concerns facing

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society until the ecological and social benefits of localisation are also considered.

Sound can be employed as one of a wider gamut of tools and products in the

reclamation of the city by its inhabitants.

The Relational Sound Field

The all-inclusive soundscape-as-work is a true embodiment of the relational

aesthetic of modern art as put forward by Nicolas Bourriaud. If ‘the role of

artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be

ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ (Bourriaud 1998: 13)

then to listen to the soundscape as a massive Cagean composition is a truly

relational artwork of grand scale. Listening to the soundscape almost always

involves listening to other people. Whether it be their voices, their cars or the

music they play we always learn something about the choices made by those

around us from the sounds they produce. If ‘art is made of the same material as

social exchanges’, and its most distinguishing quality is ‘social transparency’ (Ibid:

41), then everyday sound is the ideal medium. If we are talking about letting

sound freely arise from our actions and then appreciating its aesthetic quality as a

part of the temporally and spatially wider soundscape, then here is an art form

which presents no social blockages. Depending upon whether we are looking for

aesthetic experience in addition to daily survival or simply as a part of it, then it is

desirable to do away, as the Situationists would have had, with constructed art

situations which preclude certain behaviours and social groups. Those that

choose to perform, to extend their behaviour beyond the everyday in order to

create extra sounds to their pleasing or to that of others’, can do so within a

framework where the all-encompassing sound field is viewed as an arena for art.

‘All the world’s a stage’; the artist need not replace his daily activity with art but

can transgress the experiential by taking the increased appreciations of everyday

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life and then reinventing them through the body in performance (Mullis 2006:

109). Bourriaud also furthers an anti-technology aesthetic. Technology is the

domain of economic power and ‘our optimism with regard to the liberating

power of technology has become considerably blurred’ (Bourriaud 1998: 65). In

soundscape work, technology can either become the singular tool or a inhibitor

in the social flow and independent experience that I have described. I will attempt

now to look at forms of sound work engaging with either technology and the

external world, or the ‘radical subjectivity’ of the listener (Vaneigem 1967: 256).

How can we work with sound?

To attempt to work in situ with sounds already occurring in the environment and

to call it musical composition is inevitably to follow the branch of music initiated

by Cage, as previously mentioned. He turned his back upon the dialectical and

expressive compositional methods of ‘the classical system and it’s contemporary

continuation (Stockhausen)’ – ‘essentially a system of priorities which sets up

ordered relationships between its components, and where one thing is defined in

terms of another’ (LaBelle 2006: 4)

So if in the Cagean tradition ‘the writing of music is supplanted by the creation of

situations’ as LaBelle suggests, it would seem that the acoustic urban situations I

have described ought to follow and be seen as a part of Cage’s non-dialectics.

Therefore, following his example, we can provide a platform for listening to ‘the

prevailing extravagance of nonintentionality, multiplicity, silence and noise’

(LaBelle 2006: 7) that characterises the urban soundscape, rather than trying to

change or recompose it by introducing new elements that answer to, accentuate

or negate pre-existing soundmarks. It seems that a dialectical approach to urban

acoustics is exactly the kind of practise which Alan Bloomfield, in interview with

myself, was warning against when he questioned the benefice of sonic artworks in

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the public domain which purport to improve the acoustic but in fact impose

themselves upon inhabitants’ ears and dictate certain modes of listening which

may not be universally relevant. Michael Benedikt sees a problem with the

tendency in architecture to drench buildings with ‘fabulation on top of fabulation’

and to lose patience with a reality ‘unwilling to yield its secrets’ (Benedikt 1987:

12). Thus, an architect such as Vito Acconci who ergonomically moulds his

constructions to become almost living extensions of the human body in their

ability to respond to our every need and desire (Acconci 2007) succeeds actually

in underestimating the ability of buildings’ inhabitants to use them imaginatively

without the dictation of architects or planners. When forms become stylized our

own ‘gestural systems’ (Baudrillard 1996: 45) follow suit and become removed

from our immediate experience of our own bodies. ‘The style of such gestural

systems always implies the suppression of muscular energy, or labour. Primary

functions are overwritten by secondary ones, by relationship and calculation, and

intellectual drives give way to cultural connotations.’ Baudrillard is not explicit in

celebrating or condemning stylized forms such as Acconci’s architecture. He

does, however, suggest an idealistic belief that ‘man’s profound gestural

relationship to objects, which epitomizes his integration into the world, into

social structures, can be a highly fulfilling one’ (Baudrillard 1996: 50). Benedikt’s

solution is a beautifully simplistic architecture which stands with ‘emptiness’ and

‘presence’ – ‘offering opportunity rather than giving direction’ (Benedikt 1987:

52). Those, then, seeking to work in the sonic realm can look to the lessons

learnt from mistakes made in constructing our visual/physical environment and

avoid the over-saturation brought about by a proliferation of competing

referential forms as found in postmodern architecture. Sonic artists can avoid

becoming the acoustic equivalent of the ‘image engineers’ who, having partially

replaced infrastructural architects, ‘are geared towards constructing a reality,

regardless of whether this is possible historically or scientifically’ and producing

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“entertainment architecture” (Shamiyeh 2001: 272). In physical architecture and

sonic architecture alike the aim can now be ‘to get away from reality as an effect

of representation and move towards the real as trauma’ (Ibid: 276); the shock of

the soundscape therefore is not softened but reframed.

When considering in synthesis Cage’s formally open work, Benedikt’s functionally

open building and Baudrillard’s assessment of the human body in relation to the

physical world, two main directions in thought open themselves to me as distinct

potentialities.

Firstly, the focus for change in the acoustic experience could be on the human,

the subjective listener, or even the body itself as a focus for aesthetic experience.

If the onus is upon the listener to change what they hear through psychological

attitudes or, more simply, physical positioning within the four-dimensional world

(time, as a fourth dimension, being key as certain sounds can be discovered to

occur at certain times, in certain places) then an improved acoustic experience

could be in theory free, immediately available and under complete control of the

individual. If it sounds better from above, climb a tree. Is the train outside the

window always a disturbance or can it in fact serve to remind you that you are a

member of a vibrant and mobile urban community? It is not only within an

anarchist framework, whereby no overarching governant strategies are required

to predict the average needs of multitudes of individual sentient bodies, that this

autonomous approach to subjective experience is possible (see an in depth

discussion of anarchist modes of aesthetics, for which there is not space here, in

Taylor 1976). Baudrillard’s reading of human physical activity also points to the

fulfillment that can be gained through physical exertion. The buttons and switches

of modern technology allow us to exert control upon our environment using

only the smallest movements in our bodies’ extremities. This is perhaps

appropriate in the visual realm (lighting effects, pictures, crafted objects), acted

upon as it is by man’s skilled fingers to weave detailed works visible only as far as

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their surface. However, sounds emanate from within objects and our bodies and

can be felt by them as vibrations too. So, just as when playing an instrument,

subject-centred sonic interventions must originate with air propulsion in the

lungs or from energetic bodily movements which bring sounding objects into

contact with one another. ‘Man has to be reassured about his power by some

sense of participation’ (Baudrillard 1996: 51). Baudrillard acknowledges that

whilst the body can be liberated of effort by technological niceties, it has also

become ‘ignored by modern praxis.’ (Ibid) Subsequently, physical recreation

comes to replace direct forms of play within our environment - forms of play

which could focus this power onto and enrich quotidian experience. We are left

with the ‘splitting of time into active and leisure time.’ (Ibid) Such somatic issues

in the creation and reception of aesthetic experience are taken up and furthered

in the study of ‘performative somaesthetics’ (Mullis 2006). Its central principle

states that to transgress the state of everyday experience an artist develops

‘extra-daily techniques’ - activities beyond the minimum energetic input necessary

for life in an automated environment – and thereby enhances their ability to

receive, and participate aesthetically in, the environment. In popular culture,

freerunners and skateboarders extend their normal relations to the physical

forms of the city in a kind of artistic athletics (see the Channel 4 film Jump London

for a full description). In relation to the soundscape, though, we can look to

individuals such as Francis Alÿs, Hildegaard Westerkamp and Ian Sinclair who

have all moved through urban spaces by undertaking pedestrian journeys dictated

entirely or in part by preplanned acoustic topographies. Ian Sinclair tried to

exorcise the emotional spectre in the left in the collective British psyche by the

money-eating mismanagement of the Millenium Dome project. He walked a route

that kept within earshot of the M25 ‘London Orbital’ motorway; within its

‘acoustic footsteps’. In his non-fiction book (Sinclair 2002), fellow walkers such as

photographer Marc Atkins suffer blisters and exhaustion from the long hikes but

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Sinclair is evidently fit enough from previous walking projects to trace the entire

sweep of the motorway’s acoustic space in a series of long sections. Therefore

such insights as he gained into the ontology of this creation stemmed in part from

his physical conditioning as promoted by somaesthetics. Francis Alÿs’ walks have

also demanded physical endurance but have simultaneously fulfilled Baudrillard’s

notion of participation by acting upon the structures they pass through and by. In

one of his Seven Walks (2004-5) Alÿs was filmed running a stick along railings he

passed as he walked though Regency areas of West Central London. The kind of

railings (cemented, free-standing, iron, steel etc) dictates the sonorities produced

and thereby though his choice of location he can exert a limited compositional

control. However, once initiated, ‘the details of the architecture automatically

generate a sound pattern’ (Alÿs 2005: 20). So, as in the Cagean approach, the

material world is allowed to speak freely to the listener; the only human

intervention is to activate the potential sonority of the architecture. In his own

words, ‘the simple act of….feeling the architecture with the drumstick was a way

of making contact, of connecting to the physicality of the place’. Communicating

in such a direct way with the city is perhaps a form of musical ‘dérive’ and

succeeds in allowing any urban location to become a potential site for playful

acoustic enjoyment. Inevitably, the Situationist International must be

acknowledged in aims like this, but I will not at this point elaborate further upon

their role. Marshall MacLuhan, though, has since explained similarly that

‘environments are not passive wrappings but are, rather, active processes which

are invisible’ (MacLuhan 1967: 68). Alÿs has allowed these ‘active processes’ to

become audible and has brought them out into the cultural realm. Where Alÿs’

and Sinclair’s walks demanded a particular state of physicality, Hildegaard

Westerkamp asks for a particular mentality in relation to the soundscape. She

does not ask for physically demanding routes but does request ‘uncompromised

listening’ in order to ‘rediscover and reactivate our sense of hearing’

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(Westerkamp 2007: 49). Social behaviours in Westerkamp’s soundwalks are also,

to use Mullis’ term, ‘extra-daily’ - ‘it is interesting to explore the interplay

between group listening and individual listening’ (Ibid) – and so walkers are asked

to control modes of perception as well as instinctive behaviours just as

somaestheticists would their bodies. There can be no control in soundwalking

over the sounds that are received as the city continues its daily cacophony and

instead a psychic space is created in which the many mixing voices of the

environment can become a composition. However, as in Cage’s 4’33” there is a

decision as to the location and duration of soundscape listening. Westerkamp

uses the term ‘Soundwalk Composition’ to denote a more active approach to the

practice:

‘Go out and listen. Choose an acoustic environment which in your opinion sets a good

base for environmental compositions. In the same way in which architects acquaint

themselves with the landscape into which they want to integrate the shape of a house,

so we must get to know the main characteristics of the soundscape into which we want

to immerse our own sounds………Create a dialogue and thereby lift the environmental

sounds out of their context and into the context of your composition, and in turn make

your sounds a natural part of the music around you. Is it possible?’ (Westerkamp 2007:

52)

Assessing the role of the internal voice – the unsounding speaker in each of our

heads to whom we listen without using our ears – Daniel Birnbaum invokes

Derrida’s concept of ‘phono-centrism’. Derrida is in fact warning, in Of

Grammatology, against the ability of this inner monologue to act as a ‘definition of

interiority and subjectivity’ (Birnbaum 2007: 16) which leads to a conservative

understanding of the self. However, by exploring the consequences of ‘‘hearing

(understanding)-one-self-speak’ through the phonic substance which presents itself

as the non-exterior’ (Derrida 1967: 7) Derrida in my view to provides a

justification for the commentary and compositional listening with which

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Westerkamp aims to understand better her place within the exterior sonic

environment. Referring to a state of mind in which multiple voices are spoken

and heard Birnbaum uses the term ‘polyphonic’. So, if Derrida would have that

the experience of hearing oneself think anchors subjectivity firmly within a

chaotic phenomenological world and Birnbaum can use a semi-musical term to

describe the experience of hearing this voice alongside the many other human

and non-human voices (sounds), then perhaps an acute listening accompanied by

an ongoing subjective commentary can indeed become a musical composition of

immediacy and complete relevancy, existing only in the mind of the listener.

Christina Kubisch has furthered the possibilities offered by these kinds of

perceptual acrobatics in offering technological extensions to our hearing

capabilities. She provides headphones which are altered in order that they

transform into sound waves electromagnetic radiation from underground cables,

wire boxes and any other of the numerous emitters to be found in urban and

rural spaces. Suddenly a realm of sound is revealed that is not intended for public

consumption as we hear signals from underneath the solid ground and from

beyond the external veneer of private buildings. Thereby we are reminded of the

political potency of sound as a medium that can transgress fences, barriers and

closed-off spaces – carrying information from within.

The perception of everyday reality changes when one listens to the electrical

fields……… Light systems, transformers, anti-theft security devices, surveillance

cameras, cell phones, computers, elevators, streetcar cables, antennae, navigation

systems, automated teller machines, neon advertising, electric devices, etc. create

electrical fields that are as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence

Possibly, these mechanical extensions of human capabilities are an inevitable

future, or even present, as is suggested in cyborg theories like those of Donna

Haraway (Haraway 1991).

More tenably, though, the introduction of technology into our question of the

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improvement of the soundscape leads directly on to what I propose as my

second potentiality – the alteration of the buildings, machines and built spaces

which give rise to the soundscape itself.

Light vs. Sound in Public spaces

Such a practice as described above would require us to think of sounds in terms

of the objects that produce them, as opposed to solely their aesthetic

manifestation in our own experience. Just as we would make improvements to

our visual experience by moving or in some way altering the objects which reflect

light and thereby impress their image upon our retina, we might modify the built

environment in order to generate or reflect sound waves in ways to our

choosing. Of course, in the public realm, which is the arena in which I wish to

debate, this constitutes a process of architecture and of planning. It is posited by

both Max Dixon and Alan Bloomfield of the Mayor’s Noise Team (Interview

24/09/07) that it is desirable for acoustic concerns to take their place alongside

cost, durability, profit and appearance in the designing of the city. At the moment

however both the lack of awareness of bad acoustics and lack of professional

acousticians makes it economically unprofitable on the behalf of developers – it

goes without saying, and here without judgement either, that profitability remains

the primary concern for the market-driven planning executed in London. Must

we therefore accept that any public sound design in the city be fully

institutionalised – funded, approved and controlled by the State?

Acoustic Architecture

Few examples seem to exist in which buildings have been designed with sonic

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properties in mind. Peter and Alison Smithson proposed that public spaces be

protected on either side by large ‘commercial galleries’ (Smithson 2005: 95) that

block out traffic noise; none have been realised. Bernard Leitner, on commission,

installed the Cylindre Sonore (Sonorous Cylinder) into Paris’ Parc Villette. It

consists of a walled circular space sunk into the ground, encircled again by a

hollow created by a larger, outer wall. ‘The voids…..act as columns through

which sound is composed and elaborated’; this sound is then projected using

wall-mounted speakers back into the space for the ‘audience’ to hear (Leitner

1994). It remains a spectacle, outside of the realm of everyday sonority. As a

structure whose only purpose is to be listened to it reinforces the separation

between listening-as-living and listening as a specialised aesthetic experience. Max

Neuhaus succeeded in penetrating more deeply into the acoustic everyday by

sneaking sounds into uninhabited gaps in public space. In his ‘legendary Times

Square installation’ a ‘large loudspeaker mounted below emanates a deep

resonating drone’ which ‘converses with the existing sound environment to bring

it into relief’ (LaBelle 2006: 157). So the work is experienced simultaneously to

and as an enrichment of the complex soundscape of the busy New York square.

Neuhaus also infiltrated radiophonic space in the work Drive In Music, in 1967. A

series of transmitters along Lincoln Parkway in Buffalo, New York, each

broadcast its own pitch on an empty radio frequency. Drivers could tune into this

frequency and hear ‘each sound mixing and overlapping’ (Ibid: 155) as they

passed; sound was broadcast from the infrastructure itself to form an ethereal

composition that was also localised. These works, though, succeed in adding to

the sonority of the built environment only through their support from public

bodies. It would seem that, unlike graffiti as urban visual art, urban sound art

must be public sound art. Gordon Matta-Clark alone has taken an anarchic

approach to reshaping the urban acoustic. In disused buildings he appropriated

illegally in New York’s defunct docks, enormous cuts were made in the

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structures that allowed light from above and sound from the sea below to

penetrate into the previously fixed and static space. A building thus becomes a

“state of mind” (James Attlee quoted in LaBelle 2006: 161) into which sound, as a

perceptual element that is usually kept forcibly out from indoor spaces, could

enter. LaBelle recognises that this process was not carried out with sound

explicitly in mind, but it does highlight how a radical architectural practice can,

though violence, free up a space to aesthetic experience in a way not condoned

by official planning.

However, are not the millions of teenagers that can be heard on buses and trains,

and in the street, playing music aloud on mobile phones taking active steps to

alter their own soundscape to their liking? Music can be shared at any time and

place amongst groups bound by their shared love for particular tracks. Unlike the

personal headphone and Walkman which have dominated for so long, there is a

shared acoustic space between young people in a way similar to the ghetto

blaster of the 1970s street culture which gave us what we now call Urban Music.

Max Dixon suggested to me that the most successful kind of public sound art

would be that which can be carried and listened to privately on headphones, and

heard in relation to whatever sound- and sightscape the piece has been designed

for – such as Janet Cardiff’s audio walk for the Whitechapel Gallery, The Missing

Voice (Case Study B) (1999). I would go further though, and in fact come full circle,

by saying that we do carry sound art with us at all times, without the aid of

composers or sound engineers and audio equipment with specialised skills

beyond our own. Perhaps the art itself only really occurs at the point at which

sound is received, reordered and re-imagined in our perception. Perhaps we

must save the urban soundscape in advance by acting, not at all.

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Against soundscape?

In 1996 the artist Martin Creed made, in the private medium of paper and ink,

the statement that ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’ (Creed’s

Work No. 143). However, ‘when he installed it in neon, as Work No. 232, on the

façade of Tate Britain to celebrate its launch, the artist’s personal mission

statement was embraced by the institution. For both it offers a fundamental

assertion, that art should be seen and understood as part of the world, relevant

to everyday life and to all people…..The statement is self-effacing…..by admitting

that all works are subsumed into the overwhelming context of ‘the whole world’,

in this equation their value is zero’ (Stout 2004: 65). Sound embodies this mantra

entirely. The work of sound art is audible only so long as it is (re)sounded.

Subsequently, it fades without a trace. The acoustically designed building is

permanent, but its usefulness depends on the ability of architects to understand

and provide for the needs of its users. All urban space has an inherent sonic

property and in a city with such multitudes of potential listeners as London,

differences in perception will surely cause any purposeful sound design to

become subsumed, according to Creed’s prediction, into the metropolis’

cacophony of sonority and resonance.

Throughout this study I have used similar terms to describe and evaluate both

acoustic and visual experiences and it is clear that the disciplines of art,

architecture and music are increasingly becoming blurred. Even at its most

progressive though, theory driving this merge still works on the assumption that

there is or was once a distinction between aural and visual worlds. Surely,

though, ‘the environment that we experience, know and move around in is not

sliced up along the lines of the sensory pathways by which we enter into it’

(Ingold 2007: 10). Ingold distinguishes between the powerful concept of

‘landscape’, a physical form lying complete and ‘not tied to any specific sensory

register’, and the multitude of other ‘–scapes’ which we use to generalise or

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theorise about certain aspects of our own perceptual experience. He rightly

points out that visual studies and visual art theory are currently concerned with

objects themselves and their relation to one another. They have, then, lost touch

with light itself. Light and sound enable us to discover what is actually there

around us. Aurality does not stop at sound any more than visuality does at light,

but neither is it concerned only with the reality beyond. Through an activated

subjectivity like that prescribed by Vaneigem we can perhaps transcend our

distinction between mundane objectivity and the extra-mundane aesthetic.

‘Sound, like breath, is experienced as a movement of coming and going, inspiration and

expiration. If that is so, then we should say of the body, as it sings, hums, whistles or

speaks, that it is ensounded. It is like setting sail, launching the body into a sound like a

boat on the waves or, perhaps more appropriately, like a kite in the sky’ (Ibid: 12).

Sound becomes within ourselves as we move through a world whose secrets may

be revealed by a holistic perceptual experience. It is undiscovered in that it

cannot be fully controlled. Sound remains an anarchic and mysterious force

within seemingly rational urban zones; just as the whistling wind spoke to the

ancients of spirits and gods, we can now begin to listen deeply and discover what

has become of gods now, in a web of technology so dense it is beyond any

singular human understanding. Through art we might dig deeper, make new

connections or present to the world our own imagined sonic utopias. Altering or

harnessing the acoustic richness of the city through art, though, risks simulating a

reality as deep only as our desire to change it, and losing the chance to

rediscover sound as the carrier of a message from deep within contemporary

human experience.

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