Abstract
The term ‘acoustic city’ is full of possibility and potential, it suggests so much more than simply music geographies and urban soundscapes. Rather, it is a creative point of departure for an approach to the urban which challenges the visual and the Cartesian by anticipating complex, ambient and shifting forms of relational spatiality. The idea of an acoustic city also encourages an embodied and visceral geography of the city in which the sonic and haptic work together in the sense that sound becomes experienced as physical vibration through the body. It further suggests the cyclic qualities of practice and process that are understood as structuring rhythms of urban experience. The Acoustic City begins the process of exploring some of this territory; it contains an introduction and 26 short essays with broad geographical coverage which address five themes ranging from (1) urban soundscapes and (2) acoustic flânerie to (3) sound cultures, (4) acoustic ecologies, and finally (5) the politics of noise. Authors are drawn from an admirably wide range of disciplines including geography and urban studies, ethnography and anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and musicology in addition to sound artists and composers. The book also contains a CD of sonic samples and composed sound pieces.
Studies of what might be broadly understood as sonic environments have been rare within geography until quite recently. After pioneering work by the Finnish geographer J.G. Granö (1882–1956), the topic was not addressed again until the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the development of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field ranging across acoustic ecology, sociology, cultural studies, and science and technology studies significantly opens the possibilities for geographers concerned with sound. Elsewhere in geography, collaboration between geographers and practicing artists during the last decade has produced an increasing number of sonic engagements including sound walks and soundscapes. The Acoustic City draws on these developments, and the book is itself a product of such collaboration between geographer Matthew Gandy and the Swedish sound artist Benny Nilsen.
In many senses, work by the sound artist/sound studies academic Brandon LaBelle, particularly his book Acoustic Territories (2010) provides both an empirical and conceptual marker for the kind of work found here. LaBelle’s innovative study develops an approach to modernity through specific sonic registers which rework geographical understandings of urban spatiality. In this respect, I found the chapters of The Acoustic City which addressed more familiar territory in terms urban music cultures or engagements with cinema interesting to the extent they supply a new and distinctive set of case studies. However, I felt more challenged by those which concern city soundscapes, sonic environments, and the politics of noise. I think it is these sections of the book that constitute a more distinctive contribution. Perhaps, the book comes to life most readily and is most innovative with the audio CD tucked inside the back cover. Here sounds resound, echo, reverberate, and refract creating vast caverns and delicate micro-spaces, oceans of sound, and intimate engagements across the spectrum of distance and scale. I suggest you play the CD first, you may never think of the city in the same way again.