Sound of the City
Imagine
You walking in a local fair, with merry go-arounds and rides painted in bright candy colours. All lit up in vivid lights. The place is filled with people (No anxiety, it’s a pre-covid imagination), some parents humouring their kids with toys, children giggling and screeching happily on a go-carting ride. The place sounds — of laughter, of the sound of machines, and of show announcements. The environment smells of warm cotton candy and a little too salty popcorn that you love.
Cut.
Reading this, most of us will catch a glimpse of the space and recollect memories of their experiences at a fair. In all of this, the important way to experience a place was through seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting, through senses. Hence we associate smells, sounds and sights to places we experience that help us perceive everything around us. We build an image of the built environment around us- home, work, public places, and even cities- through our senses.
Even though humans with the sense of sight have a perception of the world based on space and distance, sound plays an essential role in the quality of that spatiotemporal experience. So, when an acoustic condition has a special meaning in the definition of a specific space, we talk about soundscapes.
Soundscape means a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment. The term was popularised by the composer and sound-studies pioneer R. Murray Schafer in his 1977 book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. In that, Schafer describes three themes of a soundscape: keynotes, signals, and soundmarks. Keynotes are background sounds that establish a place’s unique sonic identity, such as rare, localised birds or the sound of the waves hitting the shore in a city. Signals are foreground sounds meant to grab attention, often to communicate a message, such as alarms, whistles, horns, sirens, and so on. Schafer calls the third theme “sound mark” (derived from landmark): a sound that is unique to a community. Concisely put, a soundscape is an acoustic environment as perceived and analysed by humans.
The question that lingers in my mind is- what is the sound of my city? Coming from Gujarat, a city by the coast, the soundscape should have keynotes of water, of the usual city chatter and perhaps vehicles. During festival times in the ‘old normal’, it would buzz with cultural music of Ganpati and Navratri and that of the Azaan during the month of Ramzan. I came across a very interesting website of recorded sounds of Mumbai. It not only sounds of the city activity, but also sounds of nostalgia.
With rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, it sounds of trains, vehicles and airplanes- less of humans and more of machines on most days.
The past year has been a roller coaster ride for me about how I experienced my city through sound. Some context here- based out of Gujarat in India, we saw a national lockdown during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and a robust movement of vehicles and people during a deadlier second wave. The first wave’s lockdown brought with it an eerie silence thanks to the restricted movement on the roads. The only vehicles on the road were a few private vehicles and emergency vehicles. To fill in the silence that sometimes was deafening, the government had people fill that with random 7 pm claps and 8 pm bell-ringing sessions. (No comments there). The current second wave has yet to see a national lockdown despite record-breaking cases and deaths reports. This has led to the bustle of everyday life filled in with the noise of more frequent emergency vehicle sirens.
Now, noise as a phenomenon is known to cause stress, hearing loss, high blood pressure and poor sleep. However, while the occasional siren signals an emergency, currently, the frequency of the siren signal is a trumpet symbolising a constant state of war-like emergency that we are in. What was once a soundscape of startling, if only a little enjoyable, quiet during the first wave became a cacophony of raucous but righteous noise in the second. This vicious contrast between these two times has brought to notice that sound is, but, an age-old battle between noise and silence.
In fact, the recent pandemic bringing about some positive changes has had urbanists in some parts of the world launched campaigns to make such a change permanent by banning or reducing car traffic on urban streets or adding protected bike lanes. What we forget is that getting silence when required is only achieved to those in privileged positions.
The fight for silence is often, in reality, a fight for power and control. In her book, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism, the sound-studies scholar Marie Thompson argues that silence is a luxury available only to those who can afford it. Getting away from the usual city ‘’bustle’ brought out the rise in suburban and countryside-living in the West. A similar trend of ‘farmhouses’, which is rather a luxurious property on the outskirts of the city, is prevalent in India.
However, the past year’s scenario of silence and noise highlights the fact that while noise can be stressful, it draws attention to the crisis situation and helps saves lives in the current time. The importance of sound in a ‘normal’ experience of the city makes me wonder whether it plays a crucial factor in the zoning and planning of urban environments. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Research waits.
On a parting note — here is to hoping that we shall soon be rendering a sonic image of our cities through laughter, chatter on the streets and the traditional music of the festivals. Amen.
