II. An Attuning Approach to Sonic Citizenship
Sonic citizenship is phenomenologically and post-phenomenologically conditioned through the ongoing effort to create a balance in a varied and complex sonic community through dialogue and attunements. An attuning approach is thus formed in a complex interplay between the multisensory context, our physiological, cognitive or emotional state, our experience (cultural understanding, prior knowledge, etc.), and factors that are not inherently acoustic in themselves (expectations, motivation, attention, bodily abilities, etc.). The ways we experience soundscapes are therefore not only about sound in a narrow sense, such as the acoustic impressions we register; they also relate, in a more holistic sense, to the living conditions offered by the environment at a given time. With the attuning approach, we emphasize the close interweaving of perception, meaning making, and action that takes place in our listening. We thus explore the interdependence that exists between the environment and our abilities to attune ourselves to and with this environment. A simple case study of this could be a studio apartment with three residents and a creaking wooden floor. Through habituated attunement, the residents develop a bodily-attuned relationship to the creaking floor, which may be especially relevant at night when showing consideration for sleeping roommates. Day to day attunement will probably take place out of habit and remain in the background of the residents' awareness. With the COVID shutdown, the daily rhythms in the apartment changed suddenly, causing a break with the habitual and practiced tunings. The creaking floor could now disturb the other residents, who must all work from home at all times of the day. This breach – articulated above as a reckless break – typically results in the residents' foreground attention being activated, so that they suddenly consciously experience both the breach (the creaking floor) and themselves in relation to it (I make noise and must adjust my behaviors in consideration of others). In this situation, a need to either re-attune their behavior or solve the problem in other ways (for example, by buying a rug) would occur. Thus, both materially and socially determined conditions can create ruptures in practiced attunements and result in new ones (Jelić et al. 2016: 7). Our abilities to attune ourselves in certain ways to sound are thus dynamic and continuously adapt to changing conditions in our surroundings.
Although historically these mundane, everyday soundscapes have received very little attention in research, policy making, and governance, the soundscape tradition over the last decades has allowed for a comprehensive humanistic analysis of everyday sound environments. A specialized vocabulary has been developed through concepts such as soundscape, soundmark, sound signal, earwitness, etc., as well as methods to investigate them (Schafer 1977: 7-9 and 123ff.). Schafer’s research – theoretically based on dichotomous concepts such as foreground and background sounds, noise and silence, and an understanding of sound environments as historically and geographically rooted – therefore continues to serve as the predominant starting point for many soundscape researches. Soundscapes are, as Schafer explains, bound to time and space, and can be distinguished from each other through history- and place-specific sounds. Thus, soundscapes change over longer historical periods because of cultural and technological developments or sudden shifts, such as a pandemic.
In continuation of Schafer's work, an international flourishing of the so-called soundscape approach is seen today, for instance in the project Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes (Kang et al. 2013.) as well as in the development of an ISO standard for soundscape research. So far, the development of this standard has resulted in three publications that describe the framework, data collection, and analysis methods, respectively, for conducting soundscape research (Institution 2014; Institution 2018; Institution 2019). The motivation for the development of an ISO standard is, in addition to the standardization itself, the desire to qualify and nuance the approach to sound environments from a negative focus on noise control to a quality-of-life focus, in line with what Schafer suggested in the early 1970s. Furthermore, the development of the ISO standard is based on mixing quantitative methods of acoustic measurements with qualitative methods such as interviews, soundwalks, and field recordings. As the term soundscape already implies, the approach is rooted in the study of the landscape, and, as such, it appears conceivable to define the register and sketch the main lines of the “sound-landscape.” In this approach, the frequency, location, and intensity of individual sounds are registered and recorded in various diagrammatic and/or cartographic representations. In addition, the sound events of the landscape are classified and categorized based on a sound taxonomy.
With this shift in the general approach to study sonic environments that we see with the soundscape approach, the perceived soundscape has become the central focus point, and a much greater focus on context (experiential and environmental) is included. This context incorporates sonic parameters and non-acoustic factors, addressing the complex interplay between the multisensory context and our listening skills, given through our physiological, cognitive, and emotional state. Seen through the lens of sonic citizenship however, there seems to be a discrepancy between the desire of the soundscape approach to turn the focus towards the perceiving human in a specific situation, and the methodological and conceptual guidelines of the ISO standards. For example, the standards do not consider how affective, bodily, and atmospheric attunements influence the way in which a given soundscape is experienced. Furthermore, as the Canadian sound researcher Milena Droumeva has stated in relation to the ISO standard, the community or citizenship perspective is absent, which includes an understanding of cultural and social practices, their significance for soundscapes, and our way of experiencing and understanding them (Droumeva 2021). According to Droumeva, since the methods of the ISO standard are based on a series of individual experiences (how the individual citizen experiences the soundscape or rather the sounds in them), they also point to merely individual solutions. Droumeva states that the missing citizenship perspective is a result of the desire to streamline the approach and develop a universal and generalizable procedure, but the effort is thereby caught in an approach by which sound is understood as a resource that can be controlled, and which, in the spirit of Schafer, can be tuned to the human ear. As Droumeva explains, there is no single soundscape for a given place, not one sound map to draw, but a plurality of individual sonic experiences (Droumeva 2017: 338). In her view, a soundscape is not given in the same way as a landscape that lies before us; rather, a soundscape is practiced and created between citizens in everyday communities.
By focusing on attunement instead of tuning, it becomes clear how our habitual ways of listening and our attuning abilities are continuously changed, challenged, and broken. The tuning approach presupposes a distance between listener and sonic environment, and it is in this objectified position that one can analyze the soundscape of a given place (in the same way a landscape can only be seen if viewed from a distance). In contrast, the attuning approach works through a relationship between the listener and the sonic environment, and thus with a distinctly situatedperspective. The relational framework that an attuning approach requires thus extends, challenges, and expands the soundscape approach. This concerns knowledge production – building sustainable meanings or establishing adequate sonic knowledge – but also what options for actions this framework of understanding offers in relation to building sustainable environments for concrete bodies.[5] Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods that, so to speak, put the body, listening, place, and exploration into play – both in relation to analyzing soundscapes and in relation to setting the framework for an active sonic citizenship through attunement.
To include participatory and community-oriented perspectives to inform the understanding and design of soundscapes, one could expand and challenge the existing reference methods in the ISO standard through methods such as artistic and design research (Löwgreen and Stoltermann 2004). An example could be speculative and critical design fiction that, through prototypes and temporary installations, allow us to hear and experience situations and places in new ways (Dunne and Raby 2013), or new types of dialogue-based and citizen-involving activities.[6] In recent years, we have seen examples of recommendations and projects that try to develop citizenship-oriented methods that do not try to solve noise problems by attempting to (only) reduce decibel levels. Instead, the projects invite relevant groups to meet, agree, and negotiate the sonic aspects of their everyday lives. An example of such a practice-oriented method that sets the stage for improved neighborliness is mentioned in Petersen's report (Petersen 2020). Here, acoustic tours are recommended, where, with the help of a building acoustician, residents listen to everyday sounds in all their diversity, with the ambition to develop a neighborhood noise manifesto. Similarly, Silent City, a collaboration between the Capital Region of Copenhagen and municipalities southwest of it on traffic noise, tries to work from a citizenship perspective in a Living Lab, and to develop and test innovative solutions on a 1:1 scale to combat traffic noise (Petersen 2020: 33). A third example can be found in the municipality of Copenhagen, which has previously set up an interdisciplinary expert group to work on noise problems in the city via a dialogue- and community-oriented approach with representatives from the construction industry, residents' associations, and local committees. In an article in the Danish newspaper Information on June 23, 2021, Copenhagen's Mayor of Culture at the time, Franciska Rosenkilde, highlights this approach as an attempt to create a “different sense of citizenship.”
It is important that attuning and citizenship-oriented methods such as dialogue creation or preparation of design proposals, become part of a scientific research practice in which practice-based research enters into dialogue with existing methods. This ambition, however, requires trans-disciplinary work in negotiation between the various methods and actors. Illuminated by our examples, we argue for the necessity of a future public dialogue and action related to sonic citizenship, which focuses on communities and how they can attune and negotiate the sonic problems and sensory belongings that continuously arise where people meet. This ambition therefore necessarily involves many different human and nonhuman actors, including citizens, authorities, technologies, laws, standards, cultural habits, and regulations.