Sonic Rupture

A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design

Jordan Lacey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501310003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Sonic Rupture applies a practitioner-led approach to urban soundscape design, which foregrounds the importance of creative encounters in global cities. This presents an alternative to those urban soundscape design approaches concerned with managing the negative health impacts of noise. Instead, urban noise is considered to be a creative material and cultural expression that can be reshaped with citywide networks of sonic installations. By applying affect theory the urban is imagined as an unfolding of the Affective Earth, and noise as its homogenous (and homogenizing) voice. It is argued that noise is an expressive material with which sonic practitioners can interface, to increase the creative possibilities of urban life. At the heart of this argument is the question of relationships: how do we augment and diversify those interconnections that weave together the imaginative life and the expressions of the land? The book details seven sound installations completed by the author as part of a creative practice research process, in which the sonic rupture model was discovered. The sonic rupture model, which aims to diversify human experiences and urban environments, encapsulates five soundscape design approaches and ten practitioner intentions. Multiple works of international practitioners are explored in relation to the discussed approaches. Sonic Rupture provides the domains of sound art, music, creative practice, urban design, architecture and environmental philosophy with a unique perspective for understanding those affective forces, which shape urban life. The book also provides a range of practical and conceptual tools for urban soundscape design that can be applied by the sonic practitioner.

1

Shaping Sonic Cities

This chapter presents terminology central to the act of creating sonic ruptures. This terminology seeks to balance the pragmatic aspects related to engaging government bodies and industry with the need to align soundscape design concepts with recent advances in sound studies. The sonic rupture has a simple goal, which can be understood as two simultaneous moments:

1.The environment of a specific location in a city is recreated by the presence of an operative sound installation.

2.Those who encounter the recreated environment are afforded the opportunity to experience the city in new ways.

Thus, a sonic rupture simultaneously recreates an environment and reconfigures experience. Importantly, this process begins with relationships. Entering into a relationship with the city requires the creative practitioner to be present in the moment and connected with the immediate. This causes an affective interchange between environment and practitioner, from which installations are born. A network of sonic ruptures, as explained in the following section, is proposed as an urban soundscape design programme. The term ‘network’, as it is used here, is suggestive of an interconnection of multiple and discrete sound installations dispersed across a city. These are non-hierarchical arrangements that together (by the nature of their existence) seek to diversify relationships between urban dwellers and the environments that they inhabit. Each rupture seeks change, particularly the evocation of imaginative capacities to challenge the reductive tendencies of everyday life.

An urban soundscape design programme

In the present study, soundscape design is the weaving of relationships between sonic environments and human experiences, where sonic environments are considered to affect physiological changes and imaginative expressions across social bodies; and the urban is defined as those global cities, in which human habitation is increasingly concentrated. A new, practitioner-led urban soundscape design programme is proposed that seeks to establish networks of sonic ruptures, where each rupture, operating within a citywide network, is a localized intervention that reshapes the immediate sonic environment and enables experiential diversity. A network of sonic ruptures is politically sanctioned and geographically specific. Each rupture point is predicated on a creative relationship between practitioner and the immediate sonic environment. This is a unique approach to urban (sonic) planning that designs creative (sonic) encounters and imaginative evocations within urban space that are otherwise homogenized by functionalist imperatives.¹ Functionalist imperatives are the repetitive everyday behaviours expressed by our bodies and urban environments that contribute to the ongoing efficiency and productivity of our cities. In the case of urban soundscapes, this refers primarily to the traffic and air-conditioning sounds that dominate the global sonic city (see introduction for a detailed discussion of functionalist imperatives).

A network of sonic ruptures consists of a multiplicity of points rather than a hierarchically managed programme. Each point is a locus of creative activity in which the relationship between creative practitioner and the sounds of the locale forms the conditions for rupture. The rupture maintains longevity as an operative sound installation, which affects ongoing dynamic relations between space,² sound and social body. A sonic rupture seeks to reshape noise, which is the dominant expression of city soundscapes. As will be made clear, the rupture does not judge noise; rather, it recognizes noise as the ubiquitous environmental condition of the urban that must be diversified if the contemporary city is to afford creative encounters. The homogenizing sonic condition of noise is an expression of the functionalist tendencies of urban cities, which affect banal everyday experiences (e.g. the repeating sound motifs of the daily commute). It is the intention of each sonic rupture to disperse those homogenizing sonic conditions that have functionalized human experience; for this reason, establishing a network of sonic ruptures might be considered a political act, as will be discussed in the final passage of this chapter, ‘Affective Politics’.

Defining ‘soundscape’

Although it will be noted that the term ‘soundscape’ has been immediately foregrounded in this work, it would be impossible to ignore the fact that this term has become problematic for a range of theorists and practitioners in recent years (see below). The proposed urban soundscape design programme retains the term for two reasons. First, it is politically expedient. Regardless of its philosophical problematics, the word has entered the political lexicon as a signifier for noise pollution concerns and the possibility presented by design to address those concerns. The World Health Organization (WHO)³ and the European Union (EU)⁴ recognize the problem of noise pollution on human health and well-being, and the possible resolution of this problem through soundscape design. Similar positions have been reached by other organizations, including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),⁵ the US National Park Service⁶ and the City of Melbourne.⁷ Secondly, the term is useful as a planning tool, as it easily translates into geographic and topographical mappings of cities, which is essential for citywide programming. Both reasons are admittedly pragmatic, but without the attention and support of centralized bureaucracies, public-focused creative practitioners will be permanently relegated to that of the temporarily funded artist. The goal here is to create permanent sites, manifested by creative processes, which afford ongoing experiential diversity. It is difficult to see how this can be achieved without the support of political bodies, including their adopted lexicons. Nevertheless, the term ‘soundscape’ cannot be understood without a proper discussion of its philosophical problematics. These will be addressed, followed by the introduction of a new term, affective sonic ecology, which is proposed as an alternative definitional understanding of ‘soundscape’.

Critiques of the term ‘soundscape’

Criticism aimed at the term ‘soundscape’ typically takes issue with its improper characterization of environmental sounds as something akin to an aesthetic object, which is external to the subject who judges it. The term ‘soundscape’ is often used aesthetically. Often it is employed to describe the virtues of natural soundscapes in comparison to the poorer qualities of urban soundscapes. Alternatively, a number of contemporary voices are calling for a perception of environmental (particularly urban) sound that is affective, dynamic and creative. This resonates with similar issues related to the term ‘landscape’, which brings to mind framed paintings on the walls of galleries and lounge rooms; the word landscape seems to denote an idealistic representation of the external world, rendered as a consumable image,⁸ rather than something sensual, atmospheric, immersive and unbounded, something expressive and evolving, which continuously and uniquely affects our bodies and its perceptions. Similarly, common notions of the term ‘soundscape’ may obscure the idea that sonic environments are unfolding, dynamic aural and vibratory immersive fields that continuously affect our experiences, rather than something external to the perceiver that can be judged for its aesthetic values.

Before examining a number of critiques of the concept, we begin with a reminder that the term, as originally understood by the WSP,⁹ is more flexible and open to interpretation than many of its detractors seem to recognize. The Handbook for Acoustic Ecology states that a soundscape ‘depends on the relationship between the individual and any such environment (and that) … the creation, improvement or modelling of any such environment is a matter of soundscape design’ (Truax 1999). Implicit in this definition is a flexibility and creative opportunity rarely attributed to the term as it was originally applied by the WSP. However, to complicate matters, the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology states elsewhere that soundscape is similar to, if not synonymous with, the terms ‘acoustic ecology’ and ‘soundscape ecology’.¹⁰ This lack of definitional clarification makes the claims of the WSP – and the domain of acoustic ecology in general – vulnerable to criticism. It also risks confusing those sonic practitioners who wish to apply acoustic ecology concepts to an urban soundscape design practice. Despite these definitional ambiguities, as made clear by the above quote, relationships are central to its definition of soundscape. It states that acoustic ecology is concerned with relationships between people and their sonic environments, while soundscape design is considered an act of creation that can affect the experiencing of such relationships. Applying this definition to an urban soundscape design practice suggests a broader relevance of acoustic ecology than many of its critics, who call for new understandings of sonic experiences, would have us believe.

Scholars in contemporary sound studies, who have criticized the soundscape concept as one that is unhelpfully judgemental of the urban,¹¹ include: Agostino Di Scipio, Björn Hellström, Brandon LaBelle, Christoph Cox, Greg Hainge and Steve Goodman. When considered collectively, their criticisms present challenges to certain conceptions of soundscape introduced by the WSP. This book responds to such criticisms, through practice (as detailed in Chapter 3), by reimagining the soundscape concept through theories of affect. Before this can be achieved, however, several critiques of the concept are presented.

Steve Goodman locates acoustic ecology in a broader ‘politics of silence (which) assumes a conservative guise and promotes itself as quasi-spiritual and nostalgic for a return to the natural’ (Goodman 2010: 191). It should be noted that Goodman is equally critical of the ‘politics of noise’. He replaces these dualistic accounts with an ‘ecology of vibrational affects’ (Ibid: xvii), which describes an immersive sonic continuum that affects corporeal and incorporeal responses across populations. By conceiving of sound as a vibrational field, Goodman eschews language-based judgements as to the aesthetic qualities of sound. Instead, Goodman’s term provides a material basis (in the sense that sound requires materials for its transmission) for understanding the affects that sounds can produce. As described below, a particularly powerful description of these affects is the ‘ecology of fear’. As such, Goodman is one of a number of contemporary voices calling for a non-anthropocentric, emergent and expressive understanding of sound, which ceases to be considered from a phenomenological perspective (human-centred) and becomes instead affective (networks of interconnected bodies).

Somewhat similarly, sonic philosopher Christoph Cox reconfigures our understanding of urban sound by redefining noise. In so doing, he dismisses typical silence-versus-noise arguments, by claiming that noise is a type of ground of being from which all significant sounds emerge. He conceives of noise, or background sounds, as an ever-flowing flux, from which emerges the sensible signals of music and speech (Cox 2009: 20). For Cox, noise is a creative medium from which the sensible is derived. Greg Hainge has recently expressed a similar argument by enlisting the philosopher Michel Serres’ meditations on noise, claiming that noise is a type of abstract ground of being from which everything emerges (not just sensible sounds). He extends the argument to other media such as film and typeface. He argues for an ontology of noise, where noise does not sit in opposition to music, or silence, but is the basis of all ‘expressive assemblages’ (Hainge 2013: 15). What can be discerned, broadly speaking, in the viewpoints of Goodman, Cox and Hainge is a conception of noise, not as a negative expression that needs to be eliminated, but as a ground of being that creatively affects a dynamic world. Their thinking opens up the possibility for urban soundscape design methods that creatively engage with noisy urban soundscapes.

In his book Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Brandon LaBelle provides a thoughtful overview of the acoustic ecology project, particularly in his discussions of the works of Hildegard Westerkamp. He touches on the mythic intentions of acoustic ecology, describing their search for the ur-sound.¹² This acknowledgement of acoustic ecology’s capacity to engage with the mythic and poetic is also found in the concept of sonic rupture, which will be discussed in the following chapter. LaBelle brings attention to the uneasy relationship acoustic ecology has with urban noise. He comments ‘that acoustic ecology may pass judgement on noise as negative is to fall short of recognizing it as part of the sound world, if not potentially its most expressive moment’ (LaBelle 2006: 214). Like Goodman, Cox and Hainge, it seems reasonable to assume that LaBelle is seeking new ways to engage with urban sounds, particularly its noises. It is notable that LaBelle gives less attention to acoustic ecology in his book Acoustic Territories, which explores urban sounds as cultural and sociological expressio...