Abstract
Why sound and music? Ricciarda Belgiojoso has his sights on ‘sensorial architecture’, and making urban planners and architects more aware of the importance of the aural to enrich the lives of those dwelling in cities. For Beligiojoso, the aim of writing this book is to bring architects and planners into conversation with strands of thinking about acoustic properties from music and the visual arts.
Belgiojoso begins with European musicians that intently debated Western music theory in the early 1900s along the lines of harmonic, contrapuntal and predetermined formal rules. Led initially by the futurist movement, Beligiojoso outlines how these composers including Luigi Russolo, embraced the ‘art of noise’ to include sounds into their compositions characterised by enharmonic intervals. Compositions by the futurist movement included sounds that mimicked those of machines, explosions, screeching and voices. Likewise, in the 1950s, when most agreed that music was tied to composed rather than accidental sounds, the composer John Cage drew on the principle of indetermination. What of the elements external to a composition? Are accidental sounds integral to or separate from the making of music? Beligiojoso depicts how the works of John Cage that famously included 4’33, tacet for any combination of instruments, helped break down the dualism between noise and music. This work consisted only of the unexpected and expected external sounds of someone sitting with, rather than playing an instrument. Likewise, behind Pierre Schaeffer’s embrace of audio recording devices and typology of ‘sound objects’ in the 1950s was to challenge conventional understanding of music as written according to prescribed theories and performed with musical instruments.
And then there is the work of the Canadian musician Murray Schafer from the 1960s onwards and as Beligiojoso puts it the problem of ‘urban acoustic design’. Shafer famously founded the Canadian school of Acoustic Ecology. Schafer holds that our categorisation of sound as noise indicates moments when we are not listening carefully. Schafer hence challenged approaching noise as a problem of abatement in urban planning and instead advocated, as Beligiojoso noted, ‘to improve the orchestration of the world’s soundscapes’. The work of the acoustic ecologists may assist urban planners by thinking about built environments as musical compositions; and to analyse soundscapes as comprised of ‘keynote sounds’, ‘signals’, ‘sound marks’ and ‘archetypal sounds’. Beligiojoso (p. 42) discusses, following the work of Schafer, how urban planners hope through ‘ear cleaning exercises’ to ‘preserve sound marks, and organise sounds so as to make places pleasant’.
The second part of Beligiojoso’s book then advances a discussion of how sound may strengthen the relationship people have with urban places through exploring the work of different sounds artists including Llorenç Bamber; Bruce Oldland and Sam Auinger (O+A); Bill Fontana, Max Neuhaus and Viv Corringham. Beligiojoso (p. 48) argues that the public art work of these sound artists has the potential to ‘radically change our perception of the physical environment’. There is excellent detail about various public art works from the 1990s. For example, Beligiojoso outlines how Max Neuhaus work installed in, and entitled, Times Square, involved the installation of a loud speaker at a crossroads below the ground to introduce sound generated by the flow of cars and people above. Again, discussing the public art work of O+A, Beligiojoso discusses how the installation entitled ‘Traffic Mantra’ in the Fori Traiaenei in Rome relied on recording, then later broadcasting by loudspeaker, how traffic sounds resonated within vases (amphorae) they found on site. As Beligiojoso notes, Roman architecture employed the resonating quality of these vases. However, Beligiojoso turns out to be uninterested in explaining how these installations operate to change or reinforce how different people perceive, move and feel in the city. There is little critical analysis about the transformative potential of these sound installations along the lines of either the social, psychological, cultural, material or visceral processes. The treatment of theoretical ideas is patchy as illustrated in the discussion of urban excursions. Instead, a lot of space is devoted to describing and listing rather than interpreting the experiences of these sound installations. He is more interested in listing the work of various prominent sound artists.
The third and final part of Beligiojoso’s book turns specifically to consider the role of sound and how we sense, and make sense of different places. To do so Beligiojoso (p. 94) argues this section of the book investigates ‘methods and concepts of space’. This is now a huge topic. However, Beligiojoso has overlooked many of the recent discussions found in the pages of journals that span across anthropology, urban studies, geography and sociology. His discussion focuses on the important work of the Cresson Centre for Research on Sonic Space and Urban Environment, Grenoble founded in 1979. In particular, singled out is the edited collection by Grégoire Chelkoff published in 1988 titled Entendre les espaces publics (Hearing Public Places) that characterised and categorised the aural specificity of eight public spaces. The discussion of the work of Pierre Mariétan L’environment sonore seems random and superficial. A much more substantial treatment is required of both the methods and concepts of space.
Beligiojoso thinks that urban planners and architects would do well to pay closer attention to how sound helps people make sense of place. I am sympathetic of this vision. Detracting from its potential, however, is the gendered language, figures that contain unreadable text, sketchy explanation of theoretical concepts, and lack of engagement with more contemporary literature. This book offers a starting point in helping understand the importance of sound in everyday urban life.