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.

Applying Acoustic Ecology

Applying CRESSON’s Sound Effect

The book Sonic Experience: a Guide to Everyday Sounds, an outgrowth of CRESSON’s urban sound research, is critical of the acoustic ecologists’ use of the term soundscape. CRESSON states that their approach “discredits a number of everyday urban situations impregnated with blurred and hazy sound environments, which would then belong to the lo-fi category,” and “question whether, other than for the fields of aesthetic analysis, creation, and conservation, the use of the term soundscape remains useful and pertinent” (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 7). Students were presented this criticism as a means to reflect on their own attitudes to the intervention site and their own soundscape designs: namely, that considering the site as exclusively lo-fi risks reducing the sound environment to something that is judged negatively rather than something that may in fact contain its own complexities. The students were then introduced to three of CRESSON’s “sound effects,” carefully selected to help them develop a deeper appreciation of site conditions. However, it should be noted that the acoustic ecology exercises – sound walking, listening, and sound mapping – were applied as a means to obtain a deeper appreciation of each sound effect as a site-specific visceral experience.

Before turning to these three sound effects, I would like to note that urban sound designer and researcher Bjorn Hellström, whose soundscape design practice utilized CRESSON’s sound effects, shares the above viewpoint:

the majority of sonic environmental research today is concerned with protecting people from sounds. The opposite attitude promotes supportive and creative approaches to sounds. That is to say, by entering deeply into the very complexity of the sound world, we pursue knowledge that does not hide our relation to the sound world, but rather reveals its riches. (Hellström 2003: 204)

Again, students were encouraged to develop a deeper relationship with the site’s sonic environment rather than act on a simple desire to remove its noise source. As suggested by Hellström, “the knowledge field of sound art might be useful when approaching sound design” (Hellström 2003: 34). Using this view as a departing point, students were encouraged to apply exploratory soundart approaches that could lead to more imaginative listening environments than those achieved through typical acoustic design approaches such as shutdowns, attenuations and masking (Brown and Muhar: 2004).

Augoyard and Torgue define urban sounds through a compendium of “sound effects” defined from interdisciplinary perspectives, which “analyze the experience of everyday sounds in the contexts of architecture and urban spaces” (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: xiii). Hellström describes “sound effects” as “conceptual tools to depict the context of sound in the sense that it embraces the interaction between human, spatial and physical dimensions” (Hellström 2003: 22). The main conceptual use to the students was that it encouraged more nuanced perceptions of the site than the lo-fi concept could provide, particularly in regard to thinking about the relationship between the social and the acoustic. Sound effects, as defined by Augoyard and Torgue, which were introduced to students include:

Mask – "the presence of a sound that partially or completely mask another sound" (p. 66).
Drone – "the presence of a constant layer of stable pitch in a sound ensemble with no noticeable variation in intensity" (p. 40).
Filtration – "a reinforcing or weakening of specific frequencies of a sound (p. 48).

Each of these effects could be perceived in the site, the analysis of which informed the students' interventions. To be clear, neither the acoustic ecology nor the CRESSON approaches were considered to be superior. In fact, they were introduced to students as soundscape design tools that work best conjointly. Students were encouraged to use the imaginative cues and listening exercises of acoustic ecology while applying the structural analysis tools offered by CRESSON for the creation of a more diversified sound environment.

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