Zenith: Civic Self-Reflection ThroughSound and Play

Photo of Zenith's sound-domes. Photo courtesy of Sarah Parent.

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses Zenith, a public sound installation developed by the author's team in collaboration with the City of Mississauga. Participants interact with the piece by contributingsoundscapes recorded through the Zenith web app, which are then moderated and added to the installation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Zenith is a public sound installation for the city ofMississauga; a western suburb of Toronto. Takingthe form of four suspended speaker-domes, Zenith

allows listeners to hear various soundscapes localto the city, while the Zenith web app allowsparticipants to make and contribute soundscapesfor the installation.

What makes a place livable—and how canlivability be fostered in a space? This questioninvolves a broad range of social, technical andpolitical issues, drawing discussion from a rangeof parties. Advocacy groups like Congress for theNew Urbanism define livable communities asdense, walkable spaces with generous allotmentsfor public use.1 The Economist uses a different setof criteria, measuring livability by indices of

culture, stability and education, as well as moreconcrete factors like the healthcare, infrastructure,and the environment.2 Although operationaldefinitions contradict and vary, the general spiritsurrounding livability suggests and emphasis oncommunity, culture and expression in publicspace.3

1.1. 'SMART' PLACEMAKING AND LIVABLE COMMUNITIES

As networked technologies become increasinglymobile and ubiquitous, a growing overlap hasdeveloped between networked infrastructure andpublic space. This collision has fostered the notionof the 'smart' city, a cluster of urban designpractices revolving around "urban digitalinfrastructure, governed by big data collected byvarious means, which allows 'the city' to talk backto its inhabitants by offering real timeinformation[.]"4 SmartSantander, a smart city test-bed based in Santander, Spain, aim to build areproducible design pattern for smart citytechnologies, allowing civic governments to see a'big picture' view of how their municipalitiesfunction.4

Despite all optimism, one rarely encounters thephrase 'smart city' without some form of criticismattached. As new media scholar Michiel de Langenotes, smart city infrastructures are vulernable tooversimplifying their contexts, and "[assuming]that their are easy technological fixes for complexurban problems."5 Moreover, smart cityinfrastructure runs the risk of mitigating citizenagency and creativity; sacrificing "serendipity,friction and playfulness," for, "control, efficiencypredictability."5

1.2. PLAYFUL CITIES

In the face of these concerns, de Lange proposesan alternative approach to handle synergiesbetween networked technologies and public space.According to de Lange, framing digital practicesas games and play leverages citizen creativity,fosters communal participation and prioritizescitizen agency; all while encouragingexperimentation on the part of planners andcitizens.5 A recent work in the regard calledRezone the Game challenges players to negotiateplanning solutions to resolve vacancies in theirneighbourhood.

Zenith was developed with such playfulengagements in mind. As part of a collaborationbetween the Digital Futures program at OCADUniversity and the City of Mississauga, our teamwas tasked with building a public workincorporating playful and digital elements.

2. PRELIMINARY WORK

2.1. GETTING TO KNOW MISSISSAUGA

From the very beginning, we knew we wanted ourpiece to be appropriate and specific toMississauga. As such, we started this project with

Photo taken during field investigation.

a series of field trips, taking photographs andaudio recordings in various parts of the city.

Our firsthand experiences yielded the impressionof a car-dominated suburb, where manyexperiences are shaped by the city's roadinfrastructure. In many outdoor spaces, we couldhear the sound of distant traffic. The calm ofKariya Park (a local zen garden) wouldoccasionally be punctuated by the horn of apassing car. Even in the city's expansive ErindalePark, we could frequently hear aircraftapproaching Mississauga's Pearson Airport, thebusiest passenger gateway in Canada.6

Many local destinations were surrounded byground-level parking, and were generally bestaccessed by car. We found that, with its parkinglots, Mississauga's Square One Shopping Centre isapproximately the same size as Toronto'sFinancial District.

Left: Square One. Right: Toronto's financial district.

Researching the city's demographic characterrevealed high degree of diversity. Mississaugahosts large populations of Urdu, Polish, Punjabi,Arabic and Tagalog speakers. 7 In 2012, more thanhalf of all Mississaugans reported having a mothertongue other than English.7

This research gave our team two chief topics forthis project: we were interested in eitherhighlighting the influence of car culture onMississauga's communities, or exploring itscultural diversity by proxy of language.

2.2. SOUNDSCAPES

Several members of our team had experienceworking expressively with sound. As such, wedecided to make audio a major component of ourpiece.

Our practices in this regard were heavilyinfluenced by the work of Raymond MurraySchafer, a Canadian composer and earlyproponent of soundscape studies. Writing in TheTuning of the World, Schafer calls for researchersto study their sonic environments with a carefulear for their unique semantic and perceptualcharacteristics. Two of Schafer's technical termswere particularly helpful for our team—'keynotes'and 'soundmarks.'8

Keynotes are ubiquitous sounds arising fromsocial, geographic and technological factors—they are the 'background' of a soundscape.8

Keynote sounds have a deep impact on those wholive in a given area. According to Schafer,"[keynotes] may have imprinted themselves sodeeply on the people haring them that life withoutthem would be sensed as a distinctimpoverishment."8 Soundmarks, on the otherhand, are "community sounds which are unique orpossess unique qualities which make themspecially regarded or noticed by people in thatcommunity."8 Where keynotes bear implicitsignificance, soundmarks have explicit meaning tothose who position themselves in a culturalcontext.

For us, Zenith started as an investigation into thekeynotes and soundmarks of Mississauga. Howmight the steady drone of planes and carsinfluence one's attitudes and perceptions? What isit like to live in such linguistic diversity? LikeSchafer, we were interested in the semantic valueof Mississauga's acoustic character.

Our means of investigation were analogous inspirit to Schafer's World Soundscape Project, a

research group which made detailed andmethodical recordings of acoustic environmentsacross the globe.9

3. EXPLORATIONS

Elevation plan from our team's initial pitch deck. Courtesy of Obaid Quraishi.

We originally planned to present our acousticinvestigations with sensor-based interactions andprojection-based displays. To evaluate thesedesign targets, our group split up to build severalexploratory prototypes.

Among these prototypes was a touch-sensitivewall speaker, which used signal from a lengthconductive fabric to scrub through an audiosequence.

Image of prototype. Courtesy of Bomi Doh.

Although the actual device was rudimentary, wefelt this form of interaction had a great deal of

potential. What sort of tactile information couldwe apply to the control surface? Could it be linkedto the sound? Moreover, what sort of visualcontent could we paint, stitch or print onto thesurface?

While these questions excited us, we wereconcerned that additional sensory content woulddistract from the core act of listening. As such,we leaned on the side of restraint and moved awayfrom sensor-based interactions as a whole.

One of the chief concerns surrounding smart cityinfrastructure is privacy: namely, that the 'big data'required for smart cities to function mayconstitute a form of panoptic surveillance.Surveying critiques of Sidewalk Toronto, a 'smartneighbourhood' proposed by Google, journalistBrian Barth notes, "It's one thing to willinglyinstall Alexa in your home. It's another whenpublicly owned infrastructure—streets, bridges,parks and plazas—is Alexa, so to speak. There'sno opting out of public space[.]"10

We wanted to explore how our piece could usecomprehensive and possibly live sonicinformation from Mississauga without employingsurveillant or panoptic tactics. To this end,members of our team prototyped a speculativeonline dashboard which used webcam streams totrack inventory at OCAD U's Reuse Depots—small shelves where students can take out anddonate spare materials.

Discomfort from our peers indicated that camerasoperated by absent authorities are unshakablysurveillant—this made a compelling case for datacapture via ground-level, citizen-operated tools.

4. HYPERLOCAL

Hyperlocal design is a cluster of platform-baseddesign practices which aggregate local tools andperspectives from the inhabitants of a given space.

In the words of cultural historian Lucy Ballivant,hyperlocal is a "social ecology... enabled bydigital tools and open-source activities...underpinned by a belief that on-the-groundengagement and shared resources are offundamental benefit to the evolution ofcommunity and cities."11 As urbanist AdamGreenfield writes, "[Hyperlocal] practicesconceive of city people as the subjects of dataproduction, rather than its passive objects[.]"12

On example of a hyperlocal platform isTransformCity, a web app for organizing eventsand resources in Amsterdam's faltering Amstel3office district.13 The app itself, constisting chieflyof a map and event dashboard, allowing localstakeholders to share proposals and feedback forinitiatives in their neighbourhood.13

Responding to feedback from this project'sexploration phase, our team decided to capturesoundscapes using ground-level, citizen-operatedtools. To this end, we began developing a phone-based recording tool to contribute soundscapes forplayback in our installation. This tool beecame theZenith web-app, and allowed citizens to recordand set geolocated soundscapes to be curated andmixed into the installation's audio content.

The web app's mode of capture mirrors thehyperlocal approaches described by Greenfieldand Ballivant. Rather than capture soundscapesusing top-down or otherwise exclusiveinfrastructure, Zenith relies on the resources andperspectives of Mississauga's citizens. In handingresidents the literal microphone, Zenith became aplatform for the city to draw its self-portrait.

5. TECHNICAL DETAILS

The Zenith web app is built on the tried-and-trueLAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stackof web technologies. The client-side of the app,written in JavaScript, uses two redundanttechniques to capture sound. The primary methodis the recently-developed MediaDevices interface,which allows websites easy access to media inputdevices through the browser.

We found that this technique is unsupported onsome devices, with frequent difficulties in thedefault Samsung mobile browser and olderversions of iOS. Since we wanted the app to workon as many devices as possible, we implemented asecondary recording method devised by webdeveloper Ajay Goel. Far 'closer to the metal' thanthe MediaDevices interface, Goel's code handlesaudio buffering and encoding directly in nativeJavaScript.14

Once encoded, the audio is geotagged,timestamped, and uploaded to a directory on ourweb server. This collection is the basis of Zenith'saudio content—from here, our team can selectsubmissions to be added to the installation.

Building the domes. Image courtesy of Bomi Doh.

To play back audio in the installation space, our team built four domes using vacuum-formed plastic. Each dome contained a small speaker, pointed towards the centre of the dome. Each

Screen capture of the Zenith app.

dome was then suspended at an approximate height of ten feet.

While we wanted to keep our technology as low-footprint as possible, we also wanted to leave room for custom playback behaviours. To meet this need our team used two Raspberry Pi microcontrollers, with each device playing audio for two domes via the left and right channels of a stereo mix.

6. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

We planned to revisit and update Zenith'ssoundscapes as local recordings poured in.However, unexpected schedule changes reducedthe length of Zenith's installation to a few hours.As such, there was very little time for people tocontribute audio. In spite of that, we managed tocollect 32 recordings in the span of a singleafternoon.

Raymond Murray Schafer's concept of'schizophonia'—"the split between an originalsound an its electroacoustical transmission orreproduction"8—had an interesting effect ourpiece. Schafer characterizes schizophonia as adisorienting side-effect of recording andtransmission, one which "[tears] sounds from theirsockets and [gives them] an amplified andindependent existence."8

Lacking context, it seemed impossible to takeZenith's soundscapes as feeling 'natural' or 'given.'In turn, this seemed to highlight their acousticcharacter. We saw that some listeners were notinterested in contextualizing the sounds they werehearing, instead choosing to appreciate themsolely for their aesthetic qualities alone.

In many ways, Zenith attests to the viability ofhyperlocal approaches to data capture in publicspace. Those who contributed appeared genuinelyengaged with their task; furthermore, the

voluntary character of recordings defusedperceptions of surveillance. In a surprising turn,crowdsourcing the audio collection enabled thefield of 'play' to extend far beyond the exhibitionspace—with good data connectivity, anywhere inthe city could become a space worth recording.

As networked technologies continue to pervadethe public realm, we encounter new risks, choicesand possibilities for building livable space. Whilethere is room for debate between top-downplanning and ground-level organizing, Zenithappears to demonstrate the conceptual andtechnical viability of the latter option.

REFERENCES

1. Steuteville, Robert. "What is a livable community, anyway?" Public Square: A CNU Journal, Congress for the New Urbanism, 2016. cnu.org/publicsquare/2016/10/25/what-livable-community-anyway

2. Global Liveability Index 2018, The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist Group, 2019. eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=liveability2018

3. Anthony, Carl, "Livable Communities," Race, Poverty & the Environment, no. 1, vol.15, pp. 9-11, 2008.

4. Griffiths, Mary, "'Imagine if our cities talked to us': Questions about the making of 'responsive' places and urban publics," Making Publics, Making Places, edited by Mary Griffiths and Kim Bardour, ch. 3, 2016.

5. de Lange, Michiel, "The playful city: Citizens making the smart city," The Playful Citizen, edited by Rene Glas et al.,

ch. 18, pp.349-369, Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2019.

6. "About Pearson Airport," Greater Toronto Airports Authority. torontopearson.com/en/AboutPearson.

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8. Schafer, Murray R. The Tuning of the World , Random House, 1977.

9. Truax, Barry. "The World Soundscape Project." sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html

10. Barth, Brian, "The fight against Google's smart city," The Washington Post,2018. washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/08/08/sidewalk-labs

11. Ballivant, Lucy. "Less Smart City, More Shared Value," 4D Hyperlocal: A CulturalToolkit for the Open Source City, edited byLucy Ballivant, Architectural Design, no. 1, vol. 87, Wiley 2017.

12. Greenfield, Barry, "Practices of the Minimum Viable Utopia," 4D Hyperlocal:A Cultural Toolkit for the Open Source City, edited by Lucy Ballivant, Architectural Design, no. 1, vol. 87, Wiley 2017.

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14. Goel, Ajay, "How to record audio from a mobile web page on iOS and Android," 2018. gmass.co/blog/record-audio-mobile-web-page-ios-android/