Sound – Track – City, the urban sound walk – by art historian Ina Boiten
“I was surprised how extraordinarily beautiful the sounds were from the headphones.” Jean, a blind participant in Down by the Riverside, one of the sound walks of the Soundtrackcity project couldn’t stop talking about it.
This sound walk was walked in late October 2010 by a group of professionals from the art world along with some blind “experiencers. The blind – guided by their cane, dog or companion – walked the same route as the sighted participants.
The name Soundtrackcity incorporates the three essential elements of the urban soundwalk: sound, walking and the city, respectively, the artist’s intervention, the walker’s activity and the environment to be experienced.
Sound: eye opener
Sound art aims to make people listen more consciously to their surroundings. With a sound walk, this is done in a very direct way: a certain route is walked where a recorded sound composition can be heard through headphones. Blind people already listen very actively and consciously. So what is the added value of a soundwalk for them?
In everyday life, we usually perceive sound as a signal. This is especially true for blind people. After all, unlike sighted people, they depend on sound as a source of information. During the forum discussion after the walk, the blind participants told how they had enjoyed the beauty of the sounds from the headphones. Walking down the street had taken on another dimension for them. Their normal focused signal-listening had given way to relaxed spatial listening.
A similar effect occurred among the sighted participants in Down by the Riverside. For them, looking had become secondary to listening, and other senses such as touch and smell were also activated by conscious listening.On the New Amstel Bridge, a former bridge keeper told me through headphones how he used to operate the bridge manually.I heard the creaking opening of the bridge and suddenly I caught myself – like a blind person – scanning the relief of the letters on the NIEUWE AMSTELBRUG nameplate with my fingers.And not only that. For the non-blind participants, the relaxed spatial listening attitude also appeared to spill over into looking.The usual fragmentary snap-shot looking with the intention of capturing ‘instantaneous’ information transformed into a dreamy taking in of the environment as a whole with newly ‘refreshed’ eyes.
Another aspect of the soundwalk with headphones is that the world to be heard is different from the real environment. The sound on the sound walker’s headphones is a conscious site-specific composition by the sound artist, an intervention in the normal sound experience of a particular environment. The walker experiences that virtual world as unequal to the real world through which he walks and which he also hears (through the half-open headphones) and sees. He must connect these two opposing sources of information by tapping into his own fantasy, imagination and memories. A newly experienced environment is the result, his own newly created personal city.
This experience stands in stark contrast to the common use of mobile media in the city. More and more people walk the streets with headphones on or earbuds in, locked into their own sound bubble from downloaded mp3s or a radio station. They experience this self-selected sound as their real environment. It fits them like a warm coat and does not invite them to reconsider their impressions of the environment.
Track: sound track
Track literally means track. At Soundtrackcity, it has a dual meaning: soundtrack and the trail the walker travels through the city. In the sound walk, both meanings coincide. While walking through the city, all impressions are stored physically and emotionally. Feeling, sound, image are attached to that particular place, to that special environment together with the soundtrack on the headphones.
Literally this happened in Ghent in 1982 with the sound performance Klankspoor by Godfried-Willem Raes and Moniek Darge, which has become an icon. Raes walked through the city with a tape recorder, recorded the ambient sound and let the played tape roll on the ground. There it was buried by his companions or taped to the road with stickers showing the time and place of the recording. With this, Raes managed to concretely link route and heard sound.
Walking is an important aspect of the soundwalk. The best way to get to know a city is on foot. This is the only way to catch the vibrations, rhythm, color and smell of buildings, streets, people and their activities. Walking is first and foremost a physical movement. The walker puts one foot in front of the other, in a certain rhythm. He walks his own time path. In the process, he literally makes contact with the ground beneath his feet. Paving stones, grass, gravel. His footsteps always feel and sound different, depending on the surroundings. While walking, the environment constantly changes. The walker creates his own film. The physical pattern of the route taken and the auditory pattern of the sounds heard are interwoven into his own subjective experience. The dual temporal experience of walking – locomotion and changing environment – is further enhanced by the temporality of sound.
City: negotiation process
The significance of soundwalks in urban public spaces lies not only in making us listen more consciously to city sounds. Of even more significance is a new, personal and more intense experience of the city, making us feel more strongly connected to our environment.
On a headphone walk, we are confronted with two parallel worlds: the real environment we walk through and the world evoked by the sound composition we hear through the headphones. We must constantly switch to a different time/space experience and somehow bridge the gap between the two worlds.
The first question is how we perceive the given urban environment. We do not experience isolated objects or events, but a situation, a contextual whole that we ourselves create, according to Jean-Paul Thibaud in his 2002 essay ‘From situated perception to urban ambiences’. This overall experience, called ambiance by Thibaud, comes about in a process of negotiation between man and his environment, in which the various impressions are integrated into a single whole. Being open to the aesthetic side of everyday experiences is important in this process, both emotionally and physically using all the senses.
During a soundwalk with headphones, a virtual sound layer with other time/space dimensions is added to the existing ambience. For this sound layer to stimulate the active creation of a new world of experience, there must be sufficient difference between the sound composition and the actual environment one walks through. There must be something that is not right to engage in the negotiation process. If the sound composition merely illustrates what can be seen or merely provides supplementary information as in a tourist walk, then the difference from reality is too slight to put the imagination to work and only confirms the normal city experience. If, on the other hand, the difference is too great, we experience the sound composition as a radio play that has little or nothing to do with the city around us. We listen to it distantly and have no inclination to make a connection between these sounds and the real city experience.
A sound layer that taps into new time/space dimensions with normally inaudible but potentially present sounds stimulates surprising new connections to reality. The sound artwork then triggers a new urban experience. As happened, for example, with the creaking and squeaking sound of the manual opening of the Nieuwe Amstelbrug. Or with the fictitious party noise on Mahlerplein as the conclusion of the Zuidas walk by Soundtrackcity, created by Justin Bennett. This impressive sound compilation of all the groups of people encountered during the walk brings to life not only the square but even the surrounding stiff buildings.
In all sound walks where these conditions for activating one’s own urban experience are present, the same phenomenon can be observed. One can literally see from the walkers that the process of negotiation between the two parallel worlds is underway. If in the beginning people are still somewhat uncomfortable and embarrassed with the headphones, gradually the group hushes and disintegrates into meditative individuals, absorbed in themselves.
On the move
There are different kinds of soundwalks. In 1968, Max Neuhaus took students for whom he was to give a lecture outside, stamped LISTEN on their hands and silently led them through the city. Akio Suzuki did it even more simply: at certain spots in the city with a particular echo, he drew circles on the street containing two ears. The idea was that people could stand in them and listen to the city. A walk with headphones is more complex. Not only is there a given sound composition, but people have to sign up specifically for the walk. With Soundtrackcity, people still have the option of uploading their own soundtrack on an mp3 player and the freedom to go out on their own. But there, too, the route and duration is fixed.
A headphone walk is an elitist almost museum-like form of sound art in the public space. The question is whether people are still able and willing to conform to this rigid framework. Technological innovation offers new possibilities. GPS allows the participant to move more freely. There are new techniques where the participant in a walk can interactively influence a sound composition. There are also walks – perhaps better called installations – where the participant can generate their own composition within a given area using special sound equipment.
Still, I wonder if the rigid framework of the sound walk with headphones and fixed route is not a prerequisite for evoking a new more intense experience of urban space. The enforced passivity naturally leads to noticing the disparity between the two parallel worlds on the headphones and around you and encourages the search for a connection between them. Having to think about how you want to walk or what you can conjure up for sound only disrupts this process.
Finally:
The urban soundwalk is like a metaphor for the contemporary consideration of art as dynamic, constantly renewing and shifting roots in global urban culture, as Nicolas Bourriaud describes it in his book The Radicant. His basic concept, the radicant, is an organism that takes new roots in the ground as it progresses. Similarly, art is “on the move”: the artwork has no fixed form, but is an “interform,” creating its own context; the artists and also the public have become “wanderers.
