What is Sonic Urbanism? Creative Practices in the Acoustic City

We conceive of sonic urbanism as encompassing much more than the urban soundscape. Instead, it might be understood as an approach to thinking and making the built environment that is reconfigured around sonic methods and sonic concerns. Recomposing the City and Theatrum Mundi are interested in engaging composers, sound artists and musicians in dialogue and creative experimentation with city-makers: engineers, architects, planners, and citizen activists. All whose work is to create urban environments must look outside their professions to find ideas about how to live together and create shared experiences. This will only become more urgent as the world is reshaped and its populations displaced by climate change. Creative sound practice, then, might not only draw attention to and intervene in the urban soundscape. It can propose conceptual and practical tools, ways of listening, and new modes of representation.

Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut is a collection of works we curated that try to do this. Published by Optophono in 2019 in partnership with the Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL and Relief Centre, this collection stems from a series of workshops we organised in Beirut in 2018 that brought together sonic and spatial practitioners from the UK and Lebanon. Beirut was particularly interesting to explore in connection to sonic urbanism because the city’s troubled past continues to resonate in distinct ways in the acoustic conditions of the city today. In this article we reflect on those works, and a panel discussion about them that took place at the collection’s launch event at Sursock Museum in Beirut. Stimulating creative experimentation in sound, and reflecting on these works, is a way to open up new concerns and approaches for urbanism, and that is what we hope to do here.

Sonic Urbanism as Activism

Sound artists have posited key challenges to conventional approaches to urban practice. When we first travelled to Beirut, several projects stood out for us in this regard, and we documented them in Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut, along with the seven new works we commissioned for the edition. These projects draw attention to such vital issues as the uneven experience of noise pollution in the city and how noise can affect vulnerable populations; how documenting the sounds of a city can contribute to wider campaigns for environmental and social justice; and how listening can be used by architects to re-examine a site’s history and reimagine its future.

The first of these projects, Nathalie Harb’s The Silent Room, **was created in response to the persistent problem of noise pollution in Beirut. Harb noticed that the city’s poorer residents were not only subjected to more noise, but that they were less able to escape that noise. Especially at risk were the city’s many refugees and labourers who work outside in noisy conditions. Working in collaboration with architecture firm BÜF, acoustical consultants 21dB, and sound designer Khaled Yassine, Harb erected a two-storey structure and sound installation at the intersection of a highway, an industrial site, and a low-income neighbourhood in Beirut. The idea was to provide an acoustic refuge for those who might not otherwise have any respite from intrusive sounds. Despite its name, The Silent Room was not completely devoid of sound. Rather, the structure was acoustically treated such that environmental noise levels were reduced from a harmful 70 decibels to a muted 30 decibels, while a sparse soundtrack composed of everyday city sounds played in the background. The Silent Room thus offered Beirutis an alternative sonic experience of their city as an imagined possibility. Harb believes the project could serve as a model for a new kind of public utility. Cities might erect such ‘silent rooms’ in the way that they do public toilets, which is to say as a public good, one that recognises the need for safe sonic environments as a fundamental human right. Here, sonic urbanism is articulated an alternate poetics of the acoustic city, and equally as a profound commentary on how the experience of urban sound environments map out onto social inequalities.

Another compelling project used sound recording to reconfigure the understanding of an urban space. For The Invisible Soundtrack Nadim Mishlawi used underwater microphones to capture the sounds of underwater life at Dalieh, one of the last remaining public access points to the sea in Beirut. The post-war construction boom in Beirut has been accompanied by the widespread privatisation of formerly public spaces, with new developments typically financed by foreign investors and designed by international ‘starchitects’ (Wainwright 2015). Not only is public space shrinking, but new developments are widely felt to be insensitive to local contexts and the needs of local communities. The Invisible Soundtrack was commissioned as part of an art intervention at Dalieh by Temporary Art Platform in collaboration with The Civil Campaign to Protect Dalieh. Mishlawi’s underwater compositions, which revealed the rich ecology of underwater life, offered a new understanding of what would be lost if Dalieh were turned into yet another luxury hotel. The intricate sounds of underwater life not only brought a new dimension to the ecological understanding of the site; they also allowed for a new way of engaging with the site, its non-human inhabitants, and the multi-layered strata of the city. Here, the act of field recording both became political commentary and brought new value to place.

Taking a very different approach, the architect and sound artist Mhamad Safa’s installation 50cm Slab grappled with the acoustic violence of warfare and how this violence is conducted through a city’s architecture. Initially presented as part of the Points of Contact exhibition at Goethe-Institut Libnan in 2018, Safa created 50cm Slab in response to the suspected use of thermobaric bombs by Israeli forces in Beirut during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. With thermobaric bombs, buildings are not only damaged; they are pulverised. 50cm Slab sonically recreated the harrowing experience of hiding in an underground shelter during war. It was also a statement on how architects in Beirut must respond to the vast destruction of the urban fabric, e.g. by building stronger fortifications: new architectures that emerge as a response to acts of destruction and that anticipate future wars. Safa created 50cm Slab upon conducting a forensic analysis of a ruined building in Lebanon. His work shows us how an architect might hear through a building’s past in order to better understand and shape the city’s future.

Politically conscious approaches to sonic urbanism can thus encompass a wide range of methodologies for contending with, experiencing, and reimagining urban architectures and spaces. A sonic urbanism might invite the question ‘what does sonic justice mean for a city’? Or, it might use sonic methods to reveal and engage layers of the city that escape the visual gaze; or, it might reconfigure the role of listening in architectural and urban practice.

Democratising Knowledge of the City

Urbanism is not just about designing cities, but producing the knowledge that is used to inform that design. Ideas about how cities work – future visions produced by architects or even planning codes that govern what can and cannot be built – underpin the decisions that are taken about them. These ideas are so often stored in words and images that circulate within the professions that make them. City-makers often wonder how to ‘engage’ inhabitants with these ideas, but the city is already full everyday with words spoken about experiences of urban living. How might a focus on speech, on sonic forms of knowledge, democratise and enrich the ideas that make cities?

Christabel Stirling’s Voice Memos from the Dance Floor shows what happens when a smartphone – something almost all of us carry with us through our experience of the city – becomes a research tool, capturing conversations and experiences from the underground and nocturnal spaces of club culture that often made marginal within urban planning discourse. Recording her conversations with the people sharing these spaces, Stirling not only holds onto what is said but also the ways that voices respond emotionally to changing environments, something lost in writing. She says, “I think that using my phone as a tool to make these field recordings, it really felt like I was able to get right up close to the fleeting aspects of that and the multiple sensory aspects of them. I think it is often hard in writing to convey discursively, because it really gets to the minutiae of urban experience, musical and sonic experience”.

Joan Baz’s Public Hearing 02: dwelling on dwelling “consists of a series of one-on-one conversations with individuals who are asked to simply remember a place they have once lived in and to use the set of building blocks to construct that place. This begins to create a space for an intimate conversation to take place.” Asking people to talk about their environments, hearing their own voices sparks memories that build into an ability to reconstruct spaces. “This is also telling us about how we perceive space, how we inhabit and how we remember it, and how we decide to talk about it.” A conversation is intimate in a way that writing cannot be. “I think it’s also this relationship with them, their intimacy and what they decide to tell me and how they decide to remember,” Baz says.

Hearing people’s voices in context, the way they respond to what is going on around them, whether they are amplified or drowned out, this is a way of understanding a city that is as close as possible to the everyday physical experience of using it, much more so than rarefied architectural imagery or discourse. The fact that the speech is ephemeral, and it disappears because it is sound, has meant that it hasn’t kind of been as valued as writing or other visual media as a source of knowledge for the ways that we deal with and design the city. And that means the everyday ways people talk about their own experiences do not become part of the public sphere.

So democratising urban knowledge means seeing the mobile phone as an essential documentary tool in everyone’s hands. It means going to hear people’s voices in the places they speak, and making those narratives audible within the ways that decisions are made. It means developing a conversation, through which the intimacy of the body made sound generates memories that excavate past realities.

Conclusion

So what do we learn from these projects about sonic urbanism and its possibilities? They are intended as a starting point and a set of provocations, rather than definitive tools. But hopefully they show that by making sound a primary concern, new questions can come to the fore that were previously neglected. In this way, sonic urbanism becomes more than designing the soundscape, and instead a way of thinking and working through sound in order to reveal urban issues and new methods for addressing them.

Urbanism itself is of course a complex web of architecture, planning, research, formal and informal modes of development, economics, history, and so on. These projects suggest the possibility for new parts of that web: sonic justice as a right to access to quiet or indeed to make noise; sonic forensics that uses sound as evidence to reveal injustices; sonic citizenship as a sense of one’s own acoustic agency; sonic archaeology that digs down to reveal how the past leaves acoustic traces and how sonic memories layer up within place. These are not intended to replace, but to expand existing ideas about how we live in cities, what the politics of that co-existence are, and what tools urbanism has to improve it.