Constructing Urban Space With Sounds And Music

While we are used to looking around us, we are less used to listening to what happens around us. And yet, the noises we produce reveal our way of life, and learning to master them is a necessity. This book aims at drawing the reader's attention to the sound of the urban environment. The topic is by its very nature complex, as it involves sounds and noises, urban space and social activities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it examines an incongruous selection of experimentations from the domains of music, art and architecture. Significant case studies of pieces of music, public art works and scientific research in the field of urban planning are analyzed, investigating the methods that have been adopted and the aural processes that have been generated. It then uses the findings to reconstruct the underlying theories and practices and to show what might be drawn from these procedures applied to urban planning. The overall objective is to learn to build and enrich space with sound, arguing that there is a need to reconsider architecture and urban planning beyond the merely physical, and to look to the world of the arts and other disciplines. In doing so, the book guides the reader toward a sensorial architecture, and more generally toward consciously creating environmental architecture which is sustainable and connects with art and which diffuses a culture of sound.

While we are used to looking around us, we are less used to listening to what happens around us. And yet, the noises we produce reveal our way of life, and learning to master them is a necessity. This book aims at drawing the reader’s attention to the sound of the urban environment. The topic is by its very nature complex, as it involves sounds and noises, urban space and social activities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it examines a heterogeneous selection of experimentations from the domains of music, art and architecture. Significant case studies of pieces of music, public art works and scientific research in the field of urban planning are analyzed, investigating the methods that have been adopted and the aural processes that have been generated. It then uses the findings to reconstruct the underlying theories and practices and to show what might be drawn from these procedures applied to urban planning. The overall objective is to learn to build and enrich space with sound, arguing that there is a need to reconsider architecture and urban planning beyond building, and to look to the world of the arts and other disciplines. In doing so, the book guides the reader toward a sensorial architecture, and more generally toward consciously creating environmental architecture which is sustainable and connects with art and which diffuses a culture of sound.

Sara Adhitya is an urban designer and Research Associate with the Accessibility Research Group at UCL. Awarded a European Doctorate in the 'Quality of Design' of Architecture and Urban Planning by the University IUAV of Venice and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she draws on her multidisciplinary background in environmental design, architecture, urbanism, music and sound design, in her interactive and multisensorial approach to urban design. She collaborates with a range of non-profit and governmental organizations around the world towards improving urban liveability and sustainability through participatory design and planning.

TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).

Traffic, music, language and nature help to create unique soundscapes that are essential to the place-based character of each city. Taking into account both the urban soundscape and the impacts of sound on the urban dweller, this book examines sound not as a by-product of urban life, but as a fundamental part of the urban experience that is crucial to understanding the city ́s sense of place. Illustrated by case studies from Europe and North America, these range from on-site measurements to the construction of audio tours for local tourism, from media analysis of popular culture audio drama to sound-identity and city branding, and from the classification of noise in city planning to a consideration of the complex relationship between sacred sound and the creation of a sense of place. Taking a social geographic perspective, the book focuses on the effects of sounds on the individual and how they influence the ways s/he engages the city as place, especially in their daily routines. In doing so, it uncovers the socio-scientific potential of sound in the urban environment, based on the understanding that sound cannot and must not be seen as detached from the urban landscape, but rather as a constituting element. Sound exists not only ’within the city’: it ’is’ the city.

This book examines cultural participation from three different, but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics; participatory digital media, and participatory cultural policies and institutions. Focusing on how ideals and practices relating to cultural participation express and (re)produce different "cultures of participation", an interdisciplinary team of authors demonstrate how the areas of arts, digital media, and cultural policy and institutions are shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives and strategies for empirically identifying "cultures of participation" and their current transformations and tensions in various regional and national settings. This book will be of interest to academics and cultural leaders in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies. It will also be relevant for cultural workers, artists and policy makers interested in the participatory agenda in art, digital media and cultural institutions.

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.