6. Discussion
Although the character of the neighborhood is determined primarily through the sounds of festivals and events, the experience of people living there is determined by multimodal impressions, meaning that the results do not always refer directly to sound. While we attempted at times to distill the specific role of sound in bringing positive or negative experiences to the lives of residents, other factors described here (such as expectations and age) influence the experience of being at home in a festival neighborhood more than the sound itself.
6.1. At Home in the Festival Neighborhood
Our qualitative investigation into the ways in which residents of the QDS define and relate to their home in a festival neighborhood yielded an exploratory and nuanced portrayal of everyday life in a dense, lively urban environment. Worth highlighting is how this neighborhood has been slowly and deliberately transformed to accommodate festivalization and touristification. The intrinsic sonic dimension of participants’ everyday experiences as locals, as well as their frequent doubling as festivalgoers, brought into question aspects of balancing livability and vitality, with sound as a notorious source of conflict. This investigation reexamined two assumptions: Who could call this neighborhood home? And is festival noise really that big of a problem?
Our study did not assume that festival sounds would necessarily constitute a nuisance or disruption. Our findings demonstrated that, indeed, despite conventional discourse on urban festival sound that often includes an almost quixotic search for urban quietness, festival sounds impacted locals’ daily experiences in complex ways and often reminded or invited them to interact more with their physical and social environments. The presence of festivals and the fact that their sounds dissolved the boundaries between home and the outdoor public spaces often encouraged locals to embrace the porosity of their home environments and shift to their potential identities as festivalgoers simply by, e.g., opening their windows, hosting their families, or going outside and joining the festival experience as privileged spectators. Especially for new residents, the discovery of one’s “backyard” (actually the public space) became framed by festival sounds and coupled with a form of sonic discovery (including the sounds of amplified music and performances or the sounds of crowds on the streets or in restaurants).
In this sense, the experience of festivals in general and the possibility of accessing multiple events throughout the festival season confirms Hawkins and Ryan’s (2013) proposition of festivals as third places. Festivals are perceived as encouraging repeated attendance and promoting lingering behaviors, making many locals “regulars” of the festival season throughout the year(s). Also, following Slater and Koo’s (2010) criteria for third places, the proximity of the events represents an advantage, as it allows locals the possibility of easily drifting in and out of the public festival spaces, at their leisure, providing possibilities not only for social interactions with friends and family but with other festivalgoers as well. Our results further confirm Stevens and Shin’s idea that “[t]he physical reality and the meaning of local neighborhood spaces is transformed for the brief time of a festival” (2014: 3), a transformation mediated by sound that can be extended to include the duration of the entire festival season. While other third places, such as a sports field, remain fixed in usage, the festivals are temporal (reoccurring), experiential, and sonic, using the same adaptable urban infrastructure that meets other needs of locals throughout the year. In the case of the QDS, the same space might function as a stage for smaller artistic endeavors, a fountain park, fair ground, or even a street when it is not a concert stage, thus fulfilling a different role.
While the focus of this study was to move away from the assumption that locals and festivals are always at odds with each other, we acknowledge that some of the traditional sources of tension are present. The porous experiences were not always positive and also touched on aspects of (dis)comfort, particularly in the temporal dimension, as work and sleeping were interrupted, while leisure time was often reshaped by the proximity of festivals. This point brings into focus the conversations on livability and vitality, particularly in relation to the disconnect in temporal rhythms between locals and tourists.
In the studies of Barceloneta, Nofre et al. showed that residents and festivalgoers could be regarded as two distinct groups with disparate needs. In contrast, participants in our study indicated that festival and tourist-oriented transformations are generally regarded as contributing to the liveliness of the neighborhood. The differences are evident in the expectation management effected by the urban development and information deployment strategies of the PQDS, namely the slow and clearly-communicated transformation of the district, with PQDS acting as mediator between stakeholders. As a testament to the attachment residents had formed with the neighborhood through their years of living there as well as participating in its festivals, participants welcomed the diverse audiences and crowds and rarely referred to feelings of being “invaded” by tourists. Through the communications of the PQDS, residents know what to expect and where to go for information. Could this model emerge as a potential best-practice for centralized urban festivals?
Apart from the dissatisfaction of residents whose basic daily activities were disrupted by sound or the logistical aspects of festivals, these inconveniences were, for many, part of their expectations of having their home in the QDS and a small price to pay for the chance of stepping outside their home and entering a space of entertainment. It was interesting to note that in the context of festival sounds, other, more typical annoyances remained at the top of the list: construction and nighttime noise from bars.
The emphasis by participants on appreciating the many offerings of the district in unique ways reminds us of the need for more flexible approaches in assessing the sonic qualities of diverse urban soundscapes, rather than focusing on sound levels, which has been at the center of much literature on recreational noise. This was particularly the case for participants who had moved to the QDS years ago and whose main reason for relocating to the QDS was a combination of living centrally as well as having access to festivals. Considering that most of these participants are now elderly and retired, interesting results emerge that challenge commonplace ideas of retirement and aging in the city, including previous findings that older people favor sounds relating to culture or human activities more than music (Yang and Kang 2005). It also calls into question the oft-stated increase of noise sensitivity with age: while older residents might be more sensitive to noise, overall, the meanings associated with the sounds do change the equation. Regarding the impact of prior expectations, we confirm – in agreement with previous findings (Bélanger and Cameron 2016; Ethier and Margier 2019) – that the experience of residents in QDS is dependent upon predefined rules and expectations. While festivals may have unwanted aspects, negative impacts are mitigated, as residents know when the festival will end, that the content will always be music and speech, and that thousands of people (whom they do not perceive negatively) will come to enjoy it. Such expectations are in contrast to those of other typical annoyances, such as construction noise or nightlife noise from bars, which may have a predictable temporal window but can have unpredictable content. The festival “noise” is not inherently anxiety-inducing, but it does exist in a fine balance, and residents could easily imagine this balance tipping out of their favor. These concerns were primarily expressed by participants as fears that other, imagined residents, with a different profile from their own, could be having a problematic experience.
Thus, a key aspect that emerged from the analysis was the ideation of perceived others, be they neighborhood residents or festivalgoers; all participants had clear ideas of who the neighborhood and the festivals were for and who they were used by, largely informed by their own experiences and their history with the QDS. Our exploratory conversations on expectations as viewed through the eyes of others were upheld over many varied topics: differences in experiences between younger and older participants or between those who had moved to the QDS recently or many years/decades before as well as opinions about who the neighborhood can accommodate as a home. These conversations were all mediated by considerations of the sound environment and the sonic appropriation of spaces by festivals. Given the relevance of the impact of sound in the understanding and even future management of the district, this has led us to better disentangle various profiles of neighborhood locals, distinguished and documented using a sonic lens. This process of documentation has informed the second part of this paper, where we build on the concept of “persona” from Human-Computer Interaction – in which fictional, prototypical users experience a range of design scenarios as a basis for discussion and decision-making.[11] In the sections that follow, we build on the method’s use in other disciplines and propose extending the concept of personas to include a new application – “soundscape persona” – that can help structure the way city users “envision” and imagine the sonic experiences of other users and be implemented as a bridge for stakeholder-based conversations on sound.
6.2. Personas – A Framework for New Forms of Sound-Centered Community Participation
While the exploration into what it means to be at home in a festival neighborhood like QDS is a fascinating academic exercise, there are also practical implications to the endeavor of understanding the perception, needs, and expectations of those actors who are personally invested in the neighborhood as stakeholders. The question is how to represent that in ways that are communicable between parties. As the QDS is projected to further grow and change, there is pressure from multiple organizations to implement more participatory initiatives that involve stakeholders in decision-making processes. These participatory approaches are generally designed to support the aforementioned delicate balance between livability and vitality while maintaining the central role of festivals. It is thus important to consider ways of accommodating these difficult conversations that involve so many stakeholders and navigate potentially contentious topics, such as sound. Building on an increasing use of personas in developing more human-centered policies in other disciplines (Gonzalez de Heredia et al. 2018), we propose that our soundscape persona approach emerges as a blend of top-down (inspired by the personas literature) and bottom-up insight (emergent from the data). Soundscape personas – fictional characters with basic features relevant to speculating on sound-related behaviors for stakeholders involved in participatory exercises – can act as a possible methodological missing link to practice, to be used by various decision-makers or professionals of the built environment who may not have expertise in handling sound conversations.
6.2.1. Soundscape personas
The persona method has not, to our knowledge, been applied in relation to soundscape research. Schulze engaged the concept to define a sonic persona as “an alien who is indeed trained in more specific and refined ways to thoroughly approach its or her or his environment by means of a hearing perspective” (Schulze 2018: 124). While the concept proposed here is more pragmatic, to be used as part of decision-making processes, it nonetheless integrates Schulze’s emphasis on “specific” and “refined” ways of approaching one’s environment, that we understand as sonic local expertise. Sensitive to the potential role of personas in navigating complex soundscape-related conversations, we propose a tentative definition: soundscape personas are fictitious archetypal characters used to represent stakeholders in a case-based scenario or a decision-making process, developed through a focus on sonic experiences, needs, and expectations. We propose that soundscape personas be crafted as a collaboration between sound researchers and representatives from the entity seeking to understand or intervene in the sound environment (e.g. PQDS). These soundscape personas should reflect a range of characteristics, like age, living situations, comfort with being among others, and contexts (residential or office), to be defined not only through a focus on noise problems but also on sonic experiences that leave room for complex evaluations, which is partly why our concept is that of a soundscape persona rather than a noise persona. A collaborative refining of the personas will begin to ensure that many types of people and many types of sonic experiences are represented.
6.2.2. Towards soundscape personas for the Quartier des spectacles
We emphasize the need to ground our proposed soundscape personas in solid empirical evidence, to ensure the trustworthiness of the resulting personas as close to “reality” (Gonzalez de Heredia et al. 2018). We do so in order to define inclusive and representative local profiles that reflect the complexity of diverse soundscape experiences, in this case, those associated with being at home in a festival neighborhood. The exploratory study conducted in this paper indicates the existence of distinct typologies of QDS locals (and assumed other locals) whose sonic experiences, including sonic expectations or needs, differ along particular factors, thus enabling the emergence of theoretically distinct QDS soundscape personas. Such factors emerging from our analysis include how long locals have lived in the neighborhood or the age of locals, which affected participants’ relationships with the neighborhood and their definitions of comfort both at home and in public spaces, sometimes in unexpected ways. Other dimensions that could be explored are the extent to which they have families, host visitors, or work from home or elsewhere in the neighborhood.[12]
6.2.3. Using soundscape personas as a stakeholder communication tool
There is a growing need to integrate city users in planning and decision-making through public participation, and the high number of stakeholders active in the QDS calls for a unique approach to the difficult challenge of accomplishing a meaningful and sufficiently representative participation. As detailed above, stakeholders include residents, workers in the neighborhood, and city officials but also festival promoters, academic institutions, and private commerce. Those involved in participatory processes can often easily advocate for themselves, according to their needs, but using soundscape personas allows them to practice advocating for someone else, practicing empathy for multiple realities/experiences while they also expand their sound awareness in participatory decision-making processes. Steele and his associates (2020) compared different sound awareness strategies for professional audiences and found that group exercises for talking about sound environments were most productive when the activities revolved around abstracted situations rather than dealing with specific planning cases, where decisions had already been made. Often, when the problem is real rather than abstract, participants become protective of actions that have already been taken. Using soundscape personas optimizes the situation by allowing participants to engage with a very practical, tangible scenario while maintaining a level of abstraction and minimizing the risk of stereotyping (through empathy) or politically-charged conversations.
We propose that experimenting with soundscape personas is useful in a context where discussing sound strategies can become contentious. We contend that developing diverse typologies of people and experiences into soundscape personas is a legitimate analysis, communication and decision-making strategy that can be applied both to understand and to come up with solutions that address the multiple needs of a dense, diverse neighborhood. Those in the public housing development appear to be the most enigmatic to those living in private housing, and working with soundscape personas in simulations and discussions could be an effective way to help people understand diverse but coexisting realities and navigate future scenarios. When carefully developed, rooted in actual exchanges with neighborhood users, and used in combination with scenarios and roleplaying exercises, soundscape personas can subvert the idea of the one average resident or worker in the neighborhood and ensure that all stakeholders are being considered.
