Abstract
This paper seeks to better understand the lively city with reference to recent analysis of sonic affects, bodily sensations and emotions. The notion of ‘hearing contacts’, as it is usually deployed in discussion of the lively city, emphasises the social interactions with other people in a rather narrow anthropocentric way. Yet, it overlooks the diversity of felt and affective dimensions of city sounds. This paper takes up this challenge by bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of territory into conversation with Greimas’s semiotic square. In doing so, this paper offers a compelling theoretical framework to better understand the sonic sensibilities of listening and hearing to provide a clearer sense of how people decide to attach specific meanings to sound, and which ones they do not. The paper first reviews various theoretical approaches to sound and the city. Next, the paper turns to an ethnographic account of sound and city-centre urban life recently conducted in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. This research seeks to better understand the ways bodily dispositions to sonic affects, materials and cultural norms helped participants territorialise the city centre, distinguishing ‘energetic buzz’, ‘dead noise’, ‘dead quiet’ and ‘quiet calm’.
Introduction
Urban regeneration policies and economic revitalisation processes are transforming centres of small cities globally. Small cities often aspire to generating city centres with the economic dynamism and cosmopolitan urbanism associated with 24/7 metropolitan cities. The shift towards creative and service economies represents a major economic and social transition. This is particularly so for small cities that once were hubs of manufacturing activities, where the city centre supported working-class identities and practices. More specifically, this urban liveliness is associated with where people spend more time in the street. According to Florida’s (2002) creative industries hypothesis, the ‘buzz’ of street life attracts creative workers and facilitates creative thought. To help generate lively city centres many urban planners follow the lead of Gehl (2011). He argues that the key to liveliness is sociability generated by low-intensity passive contacts between people by, for example, slowing traffic, accommodating pedestrians and providing entertainment activities (such as busking), outdoor parks or seating for people watching. Nonetheless, and as we demonstrate, while being co-present in public space may encourage accommodation of difference, this does not necessarily translate into sociability (Simpson, 2011). What is needed is a more critical examination of urban liveliness.
We build on research on how city-dwellers hear others in relation to the sounds of everyday social interactions as force of territorialisation (Atkinson, 2007; Augoyard and Torgue, 2008; LaBelle, 2010). We respond to Atkinson’s (2007: 1907) call for work that better understands how sound subtly shapes, in ways we are often unaware, our ‘patterns of sociability, modes of transport and interactions in urban space’. We build on the work of Simpson (2011) who attended to the shifting and ephemeral dimension of urbanism that arose from affective sonic encounters with street performers. His work points to how street sounds are an entry point to social relationality, and how difference is negotiated through interactions with the sounds of street performers. He illustrates how, for some, the sound of street performers did enhance urban liveliness as argued by Gehl (2011), while for others it was listened to and heard as noise. In a sense, this is precisely the problem this paper explores – the meanings we attach to sounds are always arbitrary, one person’s birdsong is another’s racket. The question then is, how do people decide which meanings they attach to a sound, and which ones they do not? This is where bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of territory into conversation with Greimas’s semiotic square is helpful.
Our argument is presented in four sections. The paper proceeds by first reviewing a broader body of literature on sound and the city. This section then draws together what might initially seem incongruous conceptualisations of sound. The first review of literature considers sound as an affective, productive force-relation. The second is concerned with how sound is talked about. Next, we introduce the small city of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, outline our methods and provide some details of the participants involved. The third section presents our analysis under the emergent themes of ‘dead quiet’, ‘dead noise’, ‘quiet calm’ and ‘energetic buzz’. The conclusion considers how our theoretical framing and analysis contribute to rethinking urban policy that fashions the lively city.
Literature review: Sounds, meanings, materiality and the city
The pioneering work of Schafer (1972, 1977) offered the notion of soundscape in response to the concern about the acoustic quality of cities because of rapid industrialisation and unwanted sounds constituted as auditory pollutants (see Beligiojoso, 2014). From Shafer’s perspective the listener is constitutive of soundscapes and Shafer thus raised important questions as to how ethics, politics and culture inform sound’s affects. As argued by Schafer (1977: 7), in discussing the concept of soundscapes, ‘the general acoustic environment of a society can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about the tendency and evolution of society’. From Schafer’s perspective, there is an auditory politics to listening. Schafer (1977), drawing on musicology, argued that what constituted desirable city soundscapes relied on the separation of the sonic universe in ‘acoustic’ ways through listening and categorising of sound properties and qualities as ‘hi fi’ or ‘low fi’. Yet, for Schafer, the objective-oriented ‘hi fi’ qualities of the sounds of silence are taken-for-granted as ‘good’ and thus wanted within cities for their positive affectivity (calm, rejuvenate and revive). As Goodman (2010: 191) suggests, there is an auditory politics to the ‘hi fi’ qualities of the sounds of silence ‘as a quasi-spiritual and nostalgic return to the natural. As such, it is often orientalised and romanticises the tranquillity unviolated by the machinations of technology.’ Thus, there is an aesthetic moralism to Schafer’s acoustic ecology which permeates auditory discourses more widely underpinned by binary categories that separate, and which stigmatises noise as bad, non-meaningful, undesirable and non-musical; whereas silence is understood as meaningful, desirable and musical. Focusing on the sonic encounters of a small industrial city centre undergoing ‘revitalisation’, we illustrate how Schaferian aesthetic moralism silences other possibilities of auditory experiences.
That said, in our consideration of sound, there are important resonances between Schafer’s approach and our own. Like Schafer, our discussion draws attention to the acoustic politics of listening and sound affects; that is, the distinctive sounds we recognise and attach meaning to. And we share Shafer’s implicit concern with sound affects; that is, how sound has the capacity to modulate, transform and perturb bodies to act and be affected. However, the proposed territorial approach outlined in what follows decentres the listening subject and widens the conceptualisation of the sonic. After Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the sonic is not simply sound, but needs to be conceptualised as entangled within and constituted by socio-material assemblages or territories. Attention thus turns to better understanding a nexus of relationships, inter- and intra-actions, both audible and non-audible.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of assemblage as a way of thinking about what sound is and what sound might do is helpful to disrupt subject-orientated discussion of soundscapes inspired by phenomenology. In this consideration, LaBelle’s (2010) concept of ‘acoustic territories’ is exemplary of a phenomenological approach. Following LaBelle (2010: xxi): ‘Sound operates by forming links, groupings, and conjunctions that accentuate individual identity as a relational project.’ To do so, he conceives of acoustic territories in terms of the phenomenological milieu of soundways, that are ‘the way people come to express their relation to sound and its circulation’ (LaBelle, 2010: xx). For LaBelle, places and subjects are co-constituted through a semiotic process that involves the production of meaning through interpreting sounds. Such thinking resonates with our approach: that sonic space should not be conceived as a container of things (directional), rather it is made by the sounds themselves (dimensional) and therefore an ongoing and improvisational process.
Yet, we aim to develop an alternative, relational framework that evades the closed notion of ‘self’ or the dualisms that work within phenomenological approaches to separate the body from mind, nature from culture, subject and object, human and machine. While drawing on, and working alongside, arguments that emphasise the signifying affects of sounds, we draw upon Deleuze and Guattarri (1987) to call into question the notion that the power of sound can be understood properly without attention to affectivity; sounds are visceral, emotional, sensuous and intensive, often felt as well as heard and known through experience.
The semiotic-affective assemblage approach to sound offered in this paper serves as an alternative ontological-epistemological framework for thinking through the relationships between sound, place and politics. Our intention in combining the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Greimas and Courts (1982) is to facilitate several conceptual shifts that then build on scholarship that disrupts taken-for-granted ideas about sound.
First, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage thinking foregrounds the socio-material interactions of sounds as a vibrational movement between bodies, things and ideas. As argued by Rancire (2004), unlike other material things such as chairs, bacteria or plants, the more-than-human-agency of sound is not located in the quality of sound alone (that is, tone, volume and rhythm) but simultaneously distributed across material and social processes. As Revill (2016: 241) points out, the framework of the assemblage is significant to these processes because ‘sound is not an object or an entity in the conventional sense of the word but rather a set of processes and properties operating in and through other materials’. In turn, these vibrations and forces may activate particular meanings, emotions or feelings in a specific context, but are not reducible to them. After Gallagher (2016), this new materialism has advanced a conceptualisation of sound as vibration to bring forth less human-centric understandings of sonic agency. This helps encourage thinking as to how sound registers beyond the ear and is a force that moves through different kinds of bodies, human and non-human. Consequently, an assemblage approach to sound decentres the listening subject.
Second, alongside meanings, attention turns to the more intuitive and provisional affective relationships generated by sound that connect the human and the non-human, the organic and inorganic, people and things and among things themselves. After Gallagher (2016), we understand sonic affects as produced through how sound includes but also exceeds the sonic by generating vibrations within and between materials on the one hand, and discourses about sound and sound production on the other. Sound can be felt as well as heard, shaping sonic affects. Following Anderson (2014: 6), we argue that sonic affects may be conceived as a process of mediation; that is, a relational process ‘that involves translation and change from which affects as bodily capacities emerge as temporary stabilisations’. When considered from an affective perspective, the sonic involves more than sound, and is constituted by a nexus of inaudible and audible processes that modulate the body’s capacity to act and be acted upon, connecting or disconnecting people and things. To conceive of sound as non-anthropocentric is not to deny the cultural dimensions, but in addition, must be understood to act upon and occur within the non-human.
Third, following the lead of Augoyard and Torgue (2006), an assemblage perspective offers an understanding of sound as productive of places, having the affective capacity to bring about stabilisation or transformation of places no matter how fleeting. Pertinent to our aims, assemblage thinking offers a relational understanding of place by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) related concepts of territory, de-territorialisation and reterritorialisation. The concept of territory enables us to conceive of places as socio-material working arrangements that allow people to order and classify city spaces to enable them to achieve their everyday lives. Reterritorialisation relies upon how sounds may trigger affective intensities, emotions or feelings that maintain a working order which enables certain bodies to remain comfortable or appear taken-for-granted in the city centre. To reinscribe a territory as intimate, private and known, both conscious and non-conscious listening may help constitute a working arrangement. For example, listening to birdsong in a park or the ‘hum’ of traffic on the street may help render these places familiar and more habitable for some (Adams et al., 2006).
The concept of deterritorialisation is understood as a forced break from taken-for-granted purposes within a territory and attends to the role sound may perform to ‘disintegrate and reconfigure space’ (Connor, 1997: 206). For example, consider how a pedestrian may involuntarily shrink from sounds of skateboards and skateboarders on the footpath and no longer feel ‘at home’ in that space as a consequence. The force of this sonic affect may be heard, sensed, felt and listened to by some in ways that diminish their capacity to comprise a territory because it is already territorialised by others through the utterances and the performative qualities of listening and speaking. As Kanngieser (2012: 337) argues, this sonic affective force of deterritorialisation may correspond to emotional, neural and physical responses to the intonations, vibrations and rhythms of specific speech, expressed in terms such as anxiety, fear or discomfort. After Deleuze and Guattari (1987), sound is productive insofar as it is making and remaking places; sounds can compel people to stay or leave and search for new places. Hence, territorialisation is always a deterritorialisation (leaving one territory) and a reterritorialisation (entering/creating a new territory). Here place is understood to be always in an ongoing process of being made and remade as working arrangements rather than a background to everyday life that can be objectively contemplated. Consequently, the approach we take is alive to these spatial and temporal contingencies to offer a more nuanced understanding of sound in the city, that does reduce sound to particular aesthetic qualities or moral values.
Assemblage thinking conceives of sound as an affective force encouraging thinking outside of dualisms including meaningful/meaningless; ordered/unordered; and good/bad. In Gallagher’s (2016: 45) words: ‘Sound constantly unfolds in difference, confounding expectations.’ Given sound, when conceived as an affective force, unsettles neat categorisations, we assert that sounds of the city can never be neatly categorised as either lively or dead, good or bad, audible or inaudible, positive or negative but ‘both–and’. Consequently, we use Greimas and Courtés’s (1982) semiotic square as an analytical framework to help evade the supposed oppositions between dead or lively city centre spaces found in discourses of city revitalisation. Greimas’s semiotic square enables us to understand that lively or dead are not ontological states; rather, they are instead relationally constituted. This permits a more nuanced understanding of sound that is alive to the dynamic relations of places by mapping the inherent and constant tensions that all spatial encounters entail. No space is just one thing – lively or dead – it is always in a state of tension between these possibilities.
Greimas and Courtés’s (1982) framework helps visualise how complex multi-dimensional ‘semiotic fields’ are formed when binary concepts are subject to the process of building contradictions, implications and oppositions. In our case, a square is projected so as to rupture and reconfigure binary oppositions of lively or dead by negation rather than the actual opposite (refer to Figure 1). In this representation, ‘lively’ is ‘not dead’, which is implied by lively; and ‘dead’ is ‘not lively’ (another simple negation). The difference between a simple negation and an opposite can be understood in the example of a pedestrian walking to work. First, they encounter a building site, this is dead space to them, yet, as they progress on their walk and things generate a buzz, the space is no longer dead, but it is not yet lively, it only becomes fully lively when they reach their favourite café; similarly, past their café there might be a group of office fronts that do not feel lively, but nor do they feel dead, they are simply a negation of lively. In other words, Greimas’s model enables us to escape binary thinking by the power of showing that even a simple binary such as lively versus dead contains within it several other binaries that add nuance to our understanding. The two diagonals of the square are then composed to two contradictions and two negations (lively versus not lively and dead versus not dead). We are less interested in the terms lively or dead, which in the case of the lively city are usually used to distinguish between presence and absence of ‘passive contacts’ (Gehl, 2011: 12), than in the secondary concepts that are envisaged as complementary rather than as opposed; that is, a lively that is not-dead or a dead that is not-lively. We argue that the emergent secondary concepts offer a conceptual space in which to better understand what sound does to organise and reorganise city spaces.
Greimas’s semiotic square: Lively and dead sounds.
Location and methods
Wollongong is a small coastal city with a population of around 270,000; around 80 km (50 miles) south of Sydney on the east coast of Australia. A number of factors work against street life in this small city. As a mining and steel town, notably absent are banking, administration or financial institutions. The linear layout of the city along the coast is comprised of several towns – each with its own shopping streets, community centres and libraries. The ideas and practices that sustain street life have diminished dramatically since the dominance of the automobile from the 1960s. In addition, working against the presence of a culturally and economically vibrant center includehigh-levels of unemployment, specifically among the young,alongside the proximity to Sydney for shopping, entertainment, and work.
Consequently, in the early 2000s Wollongong municipal authority initiated several regeneration strategies in response to deindustrialisation (Waitt and Gibson, 2009), including the Revitalising Wollongong City Center Plan that set a 25-year framework aimed at attracting 10,000 new jobs and 6000 new residents. Since 2007, there has been a range of private industry investment in new small bars and cafes, high-rise apartments, and the opening of a new shopping mall, alongside councilled investment in the city foreshore mall and events programme. This includes the weekly transformation of Crown Street Mall into Eat Street every Thursday evening, offering food stalls, musicians and street performers, as well as a farmers’ market, Forage On Crown, every Friday. In this context, we were interested in learning about the role of sound in the process of revitalisation. To better understand how sound organises and reconfigures urban territories as lively, or not, we invited residents in Wollongong who habitually visit the city centre to participate in a project titled ‘Sounding out the City’.
The project began with a mail-out survey on the Lively City Centre sent to 5000 Wollongong households. We focus on 20 people, 9 men and 11 women who reside in the city centre, from a subset of 149 survey respondents who flagged interest in participating in future research. Each consented to participate in our project, which combined semi-structured interviews and ‘sound diaries’ (Duffy and Waitt, 2011; Waitt and Duffy, 2010). All participants had lived in Wollongong for at least five years. That said, to represent the socio-demographic profile of the city centre populations within the sample, there is a diversity of migration histories, marital status, employment and ages. The range of ages is from 18 years to late 60s. Five of the participants are retired, five are full-time students and one is unemployed. Nine are in full-time paid professional employment including teaching, engineering and sales.
Participants consented to a semi-structured interview and sound diary. The semi-structured interview was combined with participants drawing a sketch-map of the city centre divided into five parts: impressions, motivations for journeying, mapping the role of sound in sustaining lively places, mapping the role of sound in sustaining dead places, and finally personal backgrounds. Semi-structured interviews were usually conducted in a café or park in the city centre. Like Pink (2009), our application of semi-structured interview is justified by how narratives offer possibilities to convey embodied, emotional and affective dimensions of human experience.
The sound diary invites participants to make audio recordings as the entry point for a follow-up conversation (Duffy and Waitt, 2011). For this project, participants were asked to make audio recordings during their usual visits to Wollongong City Centre of what they considered to be the lively and dead places identified in the semi-structured interview. Our contention is that sound recordings capture the embodied experience of sonic affects that are glossed over or missed in interviews. That said, sound diaries are not immune to critiques levelled at diaries and video methods that attempt to reconstruct experience through language. As Posso (2006: 315) argues, ‘language keeps us outside reality; it fails to grasp things because it can but describe aspects of them in “lifeless” repeatable terms’. Crucially, however, while we acknowledge that sensations are personal and incommunicable, sound diaries can help put the listener back into the context. In doing so, sound diaries can act as a bridge between participant and researcher that enables deeper and detailed conversations about sensory experiences.
We turn to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Greimas and Courtés (1982) to analyse the problematic of listening to cities as lively and dead. The analysis began by reading the interview transcripts multiple times prior to the advance of four secondary concepts to the argument of Greimas, which were then used to code them. When describing the various locations they had recorded, participants did not limit themselves to a binary of lively or dead. Instead, there was a more nuanced reading of their sonic experiences in place, which coalesced around four secondary concepts illustrated in all 20 participants’ transcripts: lively and not quiet (energetic buzz), not dead and not lively (calm quiet), dead and not lively (dead quiet) and lively and dead (dead noise). At the same time, attention was paid to the arguments made by Deleuze and Guattari to identify territories, think about bodily capacities, and emotions, and consider the presence and affects of objects.
Our analysis pays close attention to what sounds enabled our participants to achieve in their everyday lives by mapping the emotional and affective connections and disconnections that comprise territories. We are aware of the limitations of mapping emotional and affective connections – in such a way that it is often difficult for people to express their experiences of sound because of the limited vocabulary associated with sonic dimensions. That said, the sound diary became an important source of emotional self-reflection that facilitated access to how sounds made people feel.
Participants were adept at describing a wide array of territories. All 20 spoke about specific territories including, but not limited to, the mall, car parks, the beach, parks (McCabe Park, Stuart Park) and Upper Crown Street (the methadone clinic, Piccadilly shopping mall and hospital). Fifteen referred to the beachside kiosk, cafes, market stalls, pavilion and restaurants. For most, these were epicentres of social engagement. Voices figured strongly in all participants’ accounts. Those references to voices included highly negative ones about the unsettling effects of raised voices among marginalised people.
Over 200 references among all 20 participants were mapped as illustrating affective and emotional connections and disconnections with ideas, things and bodies. We were told about the ambience of certain territories; the affects of sound in terms of experiences of safety, fear, disgust, pleasure, comfort or discomfort. There were 32 references to highly positive comments about how ocean sounds and birdsong fostered therapeutic qualities within the city centre. Some of those experiences focused on the modifying effects of weather – especially of rain – alongside day and night.
Thus, our analysis of the lively and dead city goes beyond subject-oriented definitions of sound generated through the presence or absence of people in public and ‘passive contacts’ (Gehl, 2011: 12). Instead, our analysis addresses how lived experiences of sounds generate their own specific and multi-dimensional possibilities that both extend and limit the capacity of the embodied self to territorialise space. How this territorialisation process was sounded out by these sonic affects can reveal much about the social and political contexts that comprise a small city centre, as we now demonstrate.
Analysis and discussion
Dead quiet
The notion of dead quiet points to the importance of past sounds of people that, while silent, will not go away. This point was articulated by Zavier, who is 27 years of age, of Italian ancestry, partnered and a full-time student: ‘Dead quiet means is that it’s an area that you expect it to be busy, it’s designed to be busy but it’s not busy.’ Zavier illustrates the concept of dead quiet as human-activated sounds that are both discontinuous and continuous with the present, simultaneously not being and being. As argued by Gallagher (2016: 627), ‘space may hold the sonic memory’, in this case of recently passed shoppers, workers, or sports activities. As Michael, who is 31 years of age, Anglo-Australian ancestry, single, sales manager and musician, explained: There’s a lot of like sporting fields and stuff like that which I would consider dead quiet spaces unless there is something going on. Down near Stuart Park I would say there is a bit of dead quiet space.
Like Michael, all our participants were actively listening for human activity to help territorialise places as lively. The important issue in territorialising places as dead quiet is the absent sounds generated by people whose disappearance, usually at night, without a sonic trace, takes on a ghostly character. The following empirical evidence illustrates how the sonic affects that elicit fear and help to territorialise places as dead quiet rely upon the intersection of the expressive and content dimensions of an assemblage.
The ambivalent status of dead quiet territories heightens bodily intensities. For example, Zavier spoke of his sonic experience of silence broken only by the high-pitched squeal of car tyres departing a car park mall at 10 pm. Zavier: ‘at this time, it is a dead (space) – it was dead quiet at the time. It’s because like you don’t want to be there, it’s screechy and yeah, just – yeah, not really the place to be.’ The ambivalent status of dead quiet resists the dichotomous classification of present versus absent. The sounds that have disappeared, sounds generated by people, are both discontinuous from the present, and present from it.
In such cases, intense sonic affects of silence may perform acts of threat. For example, Angela, who is 18 years of age, of Anglo-Australian ancestry and a full-time student, explains: I do go the movies at night time as well and that’s when it’s [the Mall] totally dead quiet … I think like they [the sound] were some footsteps. They might have been mine … or there might have been someone around me, but … I think that was kind of … I mean, when usually you see a movie and you see, or hear footsteps, like that meet the silence, it’s kind of like a lonely kind of situation so you might feel a little bit scared.
As Angela illustrates, the discursive framing of the sounds of a stranger’s footsteps at night as an object of fear helps heighten the sonic affective resonance of monstrosity. Extending this argument, dead space is conceptual space where the missing sounds of anticipated bodies, those trace-sounds, possess an affective power of the sonic past that is not absent. The sonic affects of the anomalous status of ‘silence’ acts as a force that generates internal turbulence and deterritorialisation of socio-material arrangements that transform the meaning of buzzy vibrant places to dead quiet. In Wollongong City Centre, this occurred not only for the Mall, but also Civic Plaza, Globe Lane, the Blue Mile, specifically outside business hours.
These examples also elucidate what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) define as a ‘home’ value that is attached to those places where we can form territories, while those where we cannot are by contrast ‘unhomely’ (this is the literal translation of Freud’s concept in its original German, unheimlich, which is more usually translated as ‘uncanny’). Uncanny in psychoanalysis is fear without an actual cause, and in a way, this is what these examples demonstrate with regards to how participants define ‘dead spaces’. There is no actual reason to be fearful, but in the silence the imagination grows restless. This also implies that dead is not simply the opposite of lively, but its active suppression or transformation into its opposite.
Dead noise
Noise is a contentious and complex concept within sounds studies literature (Gallagher et al., 2017; Hainge, 2013). The object of our analysis is to better understand the sonic affects generated by sound felt and heard as dead noise in the city. Participants characterised dead noise as making an uninviting territory where you could never be yourself, regardless of time of day or night. This is because in part these public spaces are coded as lacking (participants used words like ‘leftover’, ‘empty’, ‘under-utilised’, ‘sad’, ‘gross’, ‘bad’ and ‘shit’). Moreover, these places are already territorialised through the voices of another social group, the homeless perhaps, or the drug addict. As Holzeman and Rousey (1966) suggest, our voices convey not only social traits but personalities and emotions. Participants’ voices, faces and words betrayed their fear from the emotional and affectual resonances of certain voices as dead noise, that transform specific bodies into these feared figures, and rob them of their own subject legitimacy via the territorial assemblage.
For example, Theo, who is 68 years of age, married, of Anglo-Australian ancestry and a retired teacher, illustrated how the voices of people may circulate fear as an affective force that operates as a technique of differentiation and territorialisation of dead space.
Well I’ll tell you what, there’s a dead space, Piccadilly. Okay, like this morning because I work as a volunteer in The SCARF which is the refugee support agency. Their office is in Piccadilly which is quiet. All the people from the methadone clinic tend to hang around and yes, it’s a bit of an aggressive place. And it’s not only the noise and the buses coming, buses going, people are very busy, but there’s also people there who talk loudly, talk aggressively and don’t want to have eye contact. It’s probably the most unpleasant place in Wollongong, that’s on Piccadilly, particularly in the afternoon.
Likewise, Karen who is 31 years of age, of Anglo-Polynesian ancestry, partnered, a full-time professional, explains, Yeah, just don’t like being there. Having to walk from the mall up that street and having a look at all of the people that are lazing around that street, outside of the Piccadilly is along. Rude people, people I don’t feel comfortable around because they’re druggies all there, … I just associate that with loud noises and people being really drunk and fighting and yelling and stuff.
Following Lazzarato (2009: 1), Theo’s and Karen’s rendering of Piccadilly points towards how ‘affective and ethicopolitical forces are firstly expressed by the voice’. As argued by Kanngieser (2012), it is not what is said, but the sonic inflections of voices that play an active role in territorialising spaces. Theo illustrates how the vibrations triggered by a loud voice may help deterritorialise space and render it unhomely. In this case, Piccadilly is territorialised by another social group that Theo names as ‘people from the methadone clinic’ and Karen names as ‘druggies’. Furthermore, as LaBelle (2010) and Butler (1997) remind us, the loud voice may often be aligned with performing acts of threat. Hence, Theo and Karen explained that they tried to avoid Piccadilly unless they had meetings to attend. Likewise, John underscores his sense of displacement on Upper Crown Street as he feels that he is outside his comfort zone. To counter this feeling he explains, ‘you just put your headphones on and get to where you’re going’. In this response John illustrates Bull’s (2000) argument of the application of personal stereos to privatise space (i.e. reterritorialise it). Furthermore, the way John deployed music may be conceived to orientate himself in a territory configured by dead noise that he understands and experiences as disorderly.
Calm quiet
Annette, who is 69 years of age, of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, single and retired, illustrates our concept of a calm quiet sound territory; sounds that are heard and felt as not-dead and not-lively. In her words: ‘the sea is not lively or dead, like we go for a walk along here for a kilometre. It’s not lively or dead but it is calming’ (semi-structured interview, 7th February 2015). Here the word ‘calming’ eludes the grasp of a simple binary and demonstrates the utility of Greimas’s model for dynamic mapping – calming is a point of tension (or tensor, as Deleuze and Guattari put it) between not-dead and not-lively. Sensations of calming are contingent on how sonic affects help territorialise places for a nature understood by human absences. This territorialisation process relies upon dominant cultural norms around expected leisure activities performed by people at particular times of day (sunbathing, walking, picnicking, swimming and sitting) and the presence of non-humans (trees, grass, ocean and birds). As Theo explains: I walk to Fairy Meadow Beach and to Puckies they’re great areas. So you’ve got Puckies, you’ve got the parks, you’ve got the open space of Flagstaff Hill where there’s sounds, but they’re sounds of the sea or wind. It’s not people sound and some traffic noise. So, they’re natural sounds and they’re reassuring, they’re soothing, and relaxing.
In this way, sounds of the non-human that are felt and heard as calming help to sustain city lives by organising a ‘break’ or ‘escape’ from the stressful rhythms of the urban. In doing so, the sonic affects of calm quiet organise anticipated material and social elements into a working order understood as a nature sanctuary. The notion of calm quiet offers insights to how people manage anxiety in their lives through the ongoing production of the division between places for people and nature.
For example, one important instance of calm quiet was produced by the sonic affects of oceanic rhythms, vibrations, frequencies and volume that territorialise the beach as a restorative place. The beach is governed by dominant white leisure norms about what are deemed ‘acceptable’ activities. These vary temporally. For example, Karen points towards how the sonic affects of ocean sounds are felt and heard as relaxing and calming during her lunch break.
Obviously, like anywhere along the beach really to me is a sense of a relaxed, happiest, calmest area. Every now and then I would drive up to the car park and eat my lunch on the beach; not very often but sometimes and that tends to relax me.
Karen illustrates how the sonic affects of the ocean are integral to sustaining a place felt and heard as calming. For Karen, the sound of waves organises a territory experienced outside of the stresses of everyday life. Participants confirmed previous arguments that ocean rhythms may produce calming sensation (Duffy and Waitt, 2013). A visceral approach to sound points to how such embodied responses may be understood to produce bodily intensities (Waitt et al., 2014). Extending this argument, the concept of dead calm points towards processes of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation, and how hearing and feeling the ocean is both performed and enfolded via the emotional and affective forces between and through proximate bodies and objects. Kate illustrates how the anticipated affective resonances of the beach reterritorialised as quiet calm offer her bodily sensations that help her to manage stress at work.
Several participants organised their experience of quiet calm around night and day. For example, Jack, who is 26 years of age, of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, engaged and a teacher, spoke of his experience of beach sounds framed by a temporal narrative of day and night. As Jack told: There’s something about the crashing waves. I feel that you don’t really notice the sound of waves when you’re at the beach, but you do at night for some reason. Like you hear it at night, there’s no other sound around and you’ll hear it … Yes, North Beach would be noisy in the day and then calm at night. The beach at night is beautiful. It’s. It’s underrated.
Jack illustrates how the concepts of expanded listening and sonic affects may not announce themselves on the level of consciousness. In Jack’s words ‘I feel that you don’t really notice the sound of waves when you’re at the beach.’ The sounds, while defying recognition, are implicated in the narrative of the foreshore anticipated as calming, specifically at night. For Jack, the beach is heard and felt as more calming at night when the ocean is louder, because the change in temperature gradient at night bends the direction of the sound waves towards the ground. Jack goes on to illustrate the intensity of the sonic affects of the ocean on his body through terms such as ‘really soothing’ and ‘calming’. These sonic affects help reterritorialise the beach at night through the usual narratives as both ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’, thus offering possibilities to relax. Zavier reminds us that the calming sensations of feeling and hearing ocean waves may operate to slow or still bodies.
And people are there [at the beach] and you can’t barely notice them. People are just going about their business but you know, people are moving kind of in slow motion. Like you know, people – it’s people enjoy being in there or taking their time. Because it’s you know – this was a pleasant place to be.
At night, the beach is felt and heard as calm quiet. These sensations help territorialise the beach as a natural place. Furthermore, the sonic affects of the ocean may operate to help stressed bodies to physically relax through the precognitive physical intensities or ‘gut reactions’ triggered by the rhythms of waves, and encourage slow activities such as sitting or walking. In Zavier’s words ‘people are moving kind of in slow motion’. His statement illustrates Thrift’s (2004: 64) discussion of affect as a ‘sense of push in the world’. Participants suggest that the felt and heard sounds of waves bring a force that may intensify bodily sensations of calm, encouraging people to slow down.
Energetic buzz
In the category of the lively and not dead, participants felt and heard certain voices as an energetic buzz that sustained a sense of connectedness. For example, Jack explained how he felt and heard an energetic buzz listening to the extra-linguistic cues of voices that convey social traits, while walking past the Illawarra Hotel on a Friday evening.
I feel that it’s got an organic energy happening there … to some extent like the Harp as well. That sound of, if you’re walking in the street, I said, there’s people around. Yes, there’s traffic in there, and there’s music, whatever, but there is that energy of people. The same as the food market [Street Eats], I think it has got a lively vibe and there is live music and people ordering food. I think noisy can be negative; but lively can really be positive … well it’s cheerful you know like it’s got a … It’s upbeat and it’s got a real like almost a vigour like you know a really lively sort of feel to it that’s you know it’s alive.
Listening, Jack illustrates how the anticipated affective affordances of the sounds of traffic and music are integral to generating an energetic buzz. Again, Jack provides an example of how the positive affects of peoples’ voices that convey the ‘correct’ social traits are transmitted through bodies and named as a ‘vigour’. Jack goes on to explain that sounds of people’s voices speaking at different frequencies may not be experienced as intrusive in places territorialised as lively.
You know, it’s got that sort of sound as well where there’s so many people talking that you can’t actually discern what anybody is saying sort of almost that white noise and you can almost tune out to it. You know what I mean? Like it’s so noisy that you can almost ignore it, you know what I mean? Like its sort of, everyone’s at the same sort of volume everyone’s at the same sort of pitch and tone and just having those sort of colloquial conversations that it just all so merges together so easily … almost like a waterfall you know like just that continual flow that just keeps happening.
Jack illustrates how utterances felt and sensed as an energetic buzz constitute a process of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation, in which the listener’s sense of self may possibly be achieved through not only what is said, but how it is said, which then confirms their sense of self (frequency, tone, pitch, accent and rhythm). Jack insists that alongside the sounds of traffic and music, the capacity of the body to sense the rhythm and frequencies of voices is integral to sustaining and transmitting an energising buzz. The sonic affects of energy arise with the capacity of the body to sense rhythm and appreciate certain communicative patterns. This may be conceived to operate as part of the process of territorialisation through forging a sense of self through the pleasures of inclusion in a collective identity established by communicating back-and-forth.
The affective forces triggered and transmitted by the voice may help account for the temporal and spatial diversity of places felt and heard as energetic. As Kanngieser (2012: 345) argued, the dialect, intonation and pace of voices and utterances are making, remaking and undoing ways of being in social worlds, differentiated along the lines of age, gender, education, class and sexuality. This played out across the process of how energising sensations of the sounds of voices organised working arrangements that enabled participants to assemble and reassemble a certain sense of self in different spatial and temporal contexts. Each participant felt this energetic buzz in a different place and time, the foreshore at dawn, Friday markets, Thursday Street Eats as well as specific pubs, night-clubs, cafes and restaurants usually at weekends. And participants agreed that when listening to and hearing the city over a usual week, an energetic buzz leveraged through voices that helped sustain a sense of self was not frequently felt. In Angela’s words ‘to be honest, I don’t feel like there is a lot’. For example, Karen, like Jack, recounted the energetic sonic affects of voices. In addition, Karen reminds us how the transmission of energetic affects between bodies that characterise a restaurant may be intensified depending not only on the time of day but also of the week.
The restaurants, I would classify as lively because of the chitter-chatter. Like there’s lots of groups coming together especially in Roppongi where it’s quite tight spaces, so people are pretty congested and generally lively too because it’s on the weekend that I go there. So, people have a little bit more energy as opposed to like a Monday night where they’re just coming off a working day and then go to work the next day.
Karen reminds us how, as Bissell (2010) suggests, habitual rhythms of the working week may prime bodies to feel in a specific way. Karen’s account points not only to how her body is primed to feel energised on the weekend, but also, as Ahmed (2004) argues, how the energetic affects are augmented as they circulate between and through bodies in proximity. Karen underscores how the energetic sonic affects of the ‘chitter-chatter’ of restaurant voices may be dissipated by tired bodies not primed on a Monday night for relaxation and excitement. Karen goes on to explain how the energetic affects of the sound of voices are augmented by drunkenness.
So, more people drinking, obviously intoxicated so it makes them more lively. There’s never any music or anything like that really, but generally that weekend vibe.
As argued by Jayne et al. (2010), affective drunkenness may allow people’s experience of voices to be heightened. Kate’s account is in parallel with Jayne et al.’s (2010: 552) description of the affective drunkenness heightening a felt intensity as being ‘specifically different from their ‘normal’ everyday experiences’. The sensing of conversational voices in confined built forms that Karen names as the ‘weekend vibe’ may therefore help territorialise a restaurant as ‘buzzy’ at times when bodies are primed for excitement and feel more uplifted through drunkenness.
Conclusion
The semiotic-affective assemblage approach offered in this paper serves as an alternative framework for thinking through sound, which allows for the felt and heard meaning and experiences of sound alongside sets of ideas. Our analysis of liveliness has several important implications for advancing scholarship in and beyond urban studies. First, we do not deny Gehl’s (2011: 63) conclusion of the fundamental importance of what he terms ‘hearing contacts’ in understanding what makes shared spaces of the city lively. However, we argue that sound can be inaudible. Rather than apprehending hearing contact with others in ways that emphasise only their relative positive dimensions, apprehending listening and hearing through the porosity of the body and its capacity to be affected by sounds reveals the fleshiness, sensuousness and unpredictability that characterise the everyday experiences of the city as lively or not. We advance conceptual thinking of urban liveliness by illustrating how attending to embodied experiences of sound has the potential to enrich understandings by drawing attention to the affective politics of sound. This requires taking seriously the cultural norms that condition how people listen, the regulatory regimes that condition bodily dispositions as well as the materiality of sound, bodies and the broader built context. This paper has highlighted how the intonation, rhythm and pitch of specific voices that convey social traits are woven into the experience of the city centre through their capacity to powerfully enhance and deplete the capacities of bodies to act and be affected. Where voices felt and heard as affirming may energise the body, those voices felt and heard as threatening debilitate the body. Moreover, the sonic affects of voices have important repercussions in their ability to exercise significant power over not only when and how people move through the city centre, but where they will linger.
Second, and relatedly, this paper contributes to urban research at the intersection of critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound. This builds on Waitt et al.’s (2014) and Revill’s (2015) research on sound as an entry point to understand the relations of place, power and subjectivity. Revill (2015: 240) calls for more considered examination of ‘the processes and practices by which sound actually makes space, shaping and transforming experiences of spatiality’. This paper demonstrates the utility of developing a methodological and theoretical framework that helped reveal the contrasts, complementarity and contradictions between sounds heard as lively and dead that may not have been so easily made apparent in other theoretical frameworks. Each conceptual sonic space demonstrates that acoustic territories are the outcome of an ongoing spatial process of inclusion and exclusion. We help advance sonic urban geographies by showing how social and material entities come together as assemblages, and that these assemblages constitute place in ways more nuanced than a simple binary of lively or dead. As such, this paper illustrates how acoustic territories are comprised, through attending to the ways affective and embodied aspects of city sounds helps sustain the listeners’ identities. By attending to the sonic affect that may serve to diminish or intensify affective capacities while in the city, we show how the intonation, pitch and loudness of voices can create spaces that are felt and heard in a variety of experiential affects that may then be interpreted as dead noise and off-limits, or as energetic buzz and a place to socialise.
Finally, we suggest that our novel approach to urban liveliness could provide a much needed first cut in helping rethink the role of sounds in the wider processes of the production of city spaces beyond the binary of lively or dead. We suggest the semiotic square as a snapshot of sonic sensibilities that enables us to listen to cities as assemblages, and therefore as a means to capture those moments of ephemeral experiences. In turn, such listening will facilitate a better understanding of how sonic affects operate to territorialise city spaces.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support for the research from the Australian Research Council, Linkage Project: The Lively Regional City: Mapping City Centre ‘Assemblages’ that work (LP140100088).
