Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design

Jordan Lacey

This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.

Introduction

Intervention Site Description

Media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Edmond Carpenter, invented the term Acoustic Space as an alternative way to understand the properties of space: “The essential feature of sound [is] that it fill[s] space” (McLuhan and Carpenter 1960: 67); thus, rather than visually construing space, space can be understood through its sonic properties and appreciated through the act of listening.

The acoustic space of the intervention site (see figure 1) is dominated by the sound of a cylindrical exhaust fan outlet that removes exhaust fumes from an underground car park. Directly above the exhaust outlet is an angled metal awning that further amplifies the sound by reflecting it back into the space. The result is a site dominated by consistently loud ventilation noise.

The site was selected for intervention due to the noise source’s seemingly incongruent relationship with the communicational needs of people who use the space.As a primary entry point to popular RMIT amenities – including the library, cafeteria, and thoroughfare to the university’s main entrance – this space is a node for meeting and transition. Many students and staff stop at the site to talk, relax, and eat lunch. There are also weekly markets and events held in the space. Students were asked to consider the interrelationships between the two intertwining spatial dimensions – acoustic and social. To encourage this thinking, students were introduced to philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who indicates that the social dimension of space is, at least partly, shaped by the presence and action of people. Lefebvre states that an “approach is called for today which would analyze not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it” (Lefebvre 1991: 89). Accordingly, considering those relationships that were perceived to exist between the noise source and human behavior were made integral to the design process. As discussed below, the design process revealed a power complex underlying the formations of social relationships with which the soundscape designer, as activist, must contend.

Applying Acoustic Ecology

Figure 1: The Intervention Site. The exhaust outlet emits an airflow containing a constant sound source, which is reflected by the metal awning above. Note the speakers on either side of the exhaust stack and the ad hoc performance space.

Tip

Tip