IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

The hegemony of the ocular-centric paradigm for knowledge reflects upon the urban studies and practices. Regarding this, the fact that sound is an instrumental agent to capture the spatiality of a place is mostly underestimated within the scope of urban research. This paper argues that everyday sounds could give texture to settings, making places the places that they are. Moreover, as an integral part of the urban context, the sonic environment plays an important role in creating an acoustic memory and a sonic cultural heritage that contributes significantly to the creation of a place’s identity. In this paper, the concept of soundscape is invoked to explore the intangible acoustic heritage, which is mainly composed of the aural cultural codes, acoustic community patterns, and sonic identity values. Critically, existing primary methods of urban research do not sufficiently account for the audibility of the urban environment and cannot narrate the latent sonic order of the urban context. Since the 1960s, there have been attempts to develop a methodology for documenting the notable features of the sonic environment. The main purpose has been mostly to enhance the legibility of the complex acoustic and psychoacoustic data. When it comes to the documentation of auditory content, it is compelling to protect the ephemeral nature of sound, preserve the acoustic heritage, and maintain a sonic archive. This paper intends to investigate the alternative approaches that can be used to trace, record, sustain, and archive the characteristic variables of the sonic environment. To this end, a comparative analysis and critical review of available methods for documenting soundscapes will be presented. Subsequently, the outlines of a methodological proposal for the problem of documenting soundscape characteristics will be briefly addressed. All in all, sustaining an inherent silence towards the sonic archeology of knowledge would lead to a fragmented and reductionist urban research.