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.

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Intervention

After being introduced to these various approaches and activities linked to soundscape design, students were asked to consider the intervention site with the following theme in mind: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? The question was framed to encourage an artistic response to the existing sound environment. Considering the sound of the exhaust outlet as a voice dispels the notion that it is simply noise, instead anthropomorphizing the sound as something alive and “dialogical” (Carter 2004: 44-5). Furthermore, the terms deciphered, transformed, and augmented call for prior analysis of the acoustic characteristics of the sound before its repatterning and encourage greater sensitivity to the interventions’ potential impacts on social conditions.

Materials provided for the intervention included two JBL speakers on separate tripod stands on either side of the exhaust outlet, an amplifier to power the speakers, a mixing desk, and leads. Students were responsible for their own soundmaking equipment, whether instrumental or physical artifacts. Each intervention was to last for a maximum of 15 minutes. Students had to identify themes for their interventions (described below), relating to the introduced acoustic ecology as well as the CRESSON approaches. Some of the interventions were performative, in that the students responded to the soundscape in real-time, altering it with their own soundmaking approaches.

It was emphasized to students that this was to be considered a design intervention: the space was to be altered in relation to its social and acoustic expressions. This was not simply the provision of entertainment and/or distraction. As pointed out to the students, the intervention was dependent on them forming a dialogical relationship between themselves as listeners and the immediate soundscape. Providing students with this conceptual tool provoked their sense of fascination; what was usually passively received (the urban soundscape) became a conscious entity open to (symbiotic) transformation.

Description of Projects

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