ssshame

Yeah, hey? It's been a while.

I'm in Montreal, just had a weekend chock full of transformative experiences and encounters with sounds of all sorts, music and non- alike. I'm energized, excited, and hoping to take up this blog again in the near future. There are a number of obstacles between me and time to write about sound--the GRE, grad school-related applications, work, music--but ... soon, I hope.

Please do yourself a favour and see Fever Ray live before she/it disappears in a cloud of incense smoke backlit by horizontal green lasers and flashing living room lamps.

Starting conversations

(Note: I thought I'd pressed the "publish post" button on this one a while back ... in fact, I had pressed the "save now" button, and here we are. I wonder: would outfitting the buttons with different sounds help prevent such situations from occurring? It's nice to think so ... Anyway, I've updated my thoughts to reflect some newer posts on City of Sound, as well as my previous post about the boundaries--or lack thereof--between sound, noise, and music.)

I'm really enjoying this project. It's been very helpful to think about sound in the context of writing about it: "what does this sound tell me about cities"--or "what does the city have to tell me today about sounds?" And it's changed the way I interact with urban space. For example, a while back, exhausted and on my way home from a tedious but necessary outing to a big-box store, I was held up in traffic by a passing train--and I realized that I was excited by the opportunity to be stopped by a train, because I got to record it. (I'm going to have one more crack at this html mystery tomorrow; hopefully I will be able to update this post with a neatly embedded sound file ...)

Edit: no luck on the embedding front ... but here's a link.

I want to keep the blog alive after this seminar ends, and this thought, plus feedback I received on the project, makes me think I should explore other blogs about sound and cities. So here I go ...

First stop: Google. Search: "sound blog." Hits: 261 000 000. I was curious to see what would come up with such an open-ended search term; interestingly, on the first page--along with music blogs, which I expected to dominate the list--there's this blog, City of Sound. Dan Hill has some fascinating musings about sound in urban environments and architecture. (He also has a killer instinct for punning.)

In terms of my own project, Hill also has impeccable timing. Yesterday's post about multitalented multimedia artist Steve Roden is really juicy. Among other things I've written about for this project, Roden, as he's quoted by Hill, touches on the neglect of sound in design (specifically architecture) and--indirectly, but nonetheless--the (constructed) differences between noise and music. Writes Hill:

Then to a piece composed for the Alvaro Siza pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This used contact mics on the surface of the building, such that the sound of the building itself was tapped and sent through guitar pedals. He also used the architect’s drawings to generate scores - he shows an image of beautiful Siza sketches, coloured pencil drawings. He performed an electronic and acoustic piece in the space, and then mapped the space in sound based on readings from particular points within the building.

With this, he thought “maybe you can hear what the space looked like”. Then, claiming that “I’m not a musician”, he performs the Siza pavilion on a small glockenspiel, reading from his own graphical notation...

Not a musician--that is interesting. Here's another example of the employment of the sound/noise/music categorization on an individual level, interpreted in terms of the aims of a specific project or artist. And this post throws the idea of urban noise as an uncontrollable opponent into question. Working in concert (sonic metaphor intended) with the built environment to produce desirable soundscapes makes just as much sense to me as tilting at windmills of sanitized, quantified silence. Hill mentions the Positive Soundscapes project, which I've come across before, as an exemplar of this idea.

I wonder, though, why the blog--whose interests in the scope of urban design and environments seem to be very broad--is called City of Sound? I've left my two cents ... hear's hoping. Yeah, I can pun, too.

The Sound of Music?

It seems strange, I guess, that I haven't really addressed music yet in my posts. A couple of comments I received from our peer review session touched on this, and asked different versions of a really good question: how would I differentiate music from sound? For example, asked one person, "does music wafting out of an open window become a city sound, or is it still firmly music?" Another person wondered about the possibility of defining more sound typologies, like pet sounds. It seems to me that these two ideas have something to do with each other, so I'll try to discuss them together here (the sound typology idea is something I'd like to expand on further in other ways too).

From what I've read about sound in urban environments, it seems like the words "noise" and "music" are most often used to denote (pun intended) types of sound; sound seems to be the umbrella term under which noise and music reside. Sound seems like a reasonably neutral term, but music and noise usually come attached to value judgments. Whereas noise is pejorative or negative (as in "noise pollution," which, as of the time of writing, pulls in 1 660 000 hits on Google versus 140 000 for "sound pollution"), music is usually used to describe something pleasing--hence "music to my ears."

Of course, the music wafting out of your neighbour's window--or, as I experienced a few months ago, pounding so loudly in an adjacent apartment that it rattles the dishes in your cupboard--could provide you with a highly unpleasant experience. Here, though, music becomes reinterpreted as noise; you don't file a "music complaint" with your landlord or the city bureaucracy.

Music is associated with control, order, purposeful creation. As an art, as a creative pursuit, it's assumed to be premeditated to some degree. Even improvised jazz usually occurs within some kind of structural framework (a key, a mode, a time signature). But as I outlined in my previous post, sound in cities, and noise in particular is often presented as something uncontrolled, an inevitable fallout of urban life that has to be muzzled through regulations based on quantitative measures.

In a privately printed publication called The Book of Noise, Murray Schafer writes: “The modern city has become a sonic battleground. Man is losing” (1970, p. 2). But city sound is made by people. People make music, people make noise ... the connection may be more or less direct depending on the situation, but ultimately it's people that drive cars, operate machinery, turn on sirens, or what have you. So where does that leave us? I'm not sure. It seems as though we pin down our ideas about sound to suit our purposes in a given situation. Like so many systems of categorization, the sound --> music/noise framework is constructed in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, and it shows its seams when it's considered in terms of urban environments--hence the uncertain status of music drifting out of a neighbour's window. It's music, but it's also sound--and it could very well be noise, depending on who you talk to.

Wind chimes

Apparently there are wind chimes on the southeast corner of 109th Street and Jasper Avenue. Who knew? Not me--at least not until they were mentioned in our seminar--and not many of the friends I've talked to (or, as with some of them, they know of the chimes' existence but had never thought to actively take note of them). The chimes, a public art installation designed by ID8 Design Group, won an award from SEE Magazine--for "Most Perplexing Public Art" in 2004.

Appropriately enough, the magazine with the visual moniker focuses largely on vision in its evaluation of the chimes. The writer sarcastically suggests alternate projects that seem to have a visual focus: staircases, a balcony, disco balls--things that would improve or provide a different view of the landscape, making up for the visual shortfalls of the "ugly downtown corner." In the process, the review misses the point; although the wind chimes are clearly designed with a certain aesthetic outcome in mind, they are wind chimes. I agree that this particular intersection isn't much to look at, but it seems like prettying up the visual environment would be secondary to their acoustic mandate. If ID8's explanation of the project is any indication, this would seem to be the case. The chimes, ID8 claims, are meant to take one aspect of place-based identity--the distinctive prairie wind--and harness it to create a new kind of identifying marker, a "gateway" whose "soaring landmark ... speaks the language of the wind."

However, I wonder if the chimes themselves miss the acoustic point, at least in that spatial context. I visited the site three times this week, and at none of these times could I discern a contribution from the chimes in the soundscape of that street corner. Granted, it wasn't unusually windy at the times I visited; maybe I'll have to keep going back. But it seems like the very fact of its location at a busy intersection, where its visibility is at its highest, will ensure that its audibility is at its lowest. The more vehicles rushing by, the more growling motors will cover any potential sounds the metal pipes have to offer. One also wonders how much relevance an installation whose inspiration is "wind as one of the defining elements of the prairies" has in a busy urban intersection surrounded by tall buildings that affect wind patterns. While the idea is a nice one, it's perhaps a bit nostalgic ... In the end, I agree with SEE: this is a somewhat perplexing project. My reasons for coming to this conclusion, however, are very different.

So, a question to consider ... how could a sound installation capitalize on the "soundmark" (Murray Schafer's term) of that specific urban environment? What would the public reception be like for an installation that used the sounds of traffic? Would it be understood as glorifying undesirable city noises, versus the implicitly superior noises of nature?

Sound design

I spent a great deal of time last week trying to untie various kinds of html code in order to embed sound files in my blog posts. Blogger gives the option of embedding image and video into a post in the toolbar at the top of the window where it is composed, but no such handy icon appears for audio files. Instead, I've been up, down, and all around, starting accounts on multiple file-hosting sites only to discover that they won't load the mP3, or they only host audio files that have been recorded via phone onto the site, or or or or.

I find this conundrum very interesting. In terms of cities, sound is often viewed as an inevitable side effect, an inherent—and usually negative—consequence. Traditional urban planning and design practices have focused almost exclusively on visual design—even now, many of the design ideas we’ve come across in class have few hints towards what kind of auditory world might accompany their visual imaginings. Sound, it seems, is beyond the scope of much city design (visual metaphor intended)--although the Urban Sound Institute provides a recent example to the contrary.

If my experience with embedding sound files is any indication, the Internet is also designed to be a visual beast. Web pages contain visual content by their nature. But the status of online audio seems to be almost the opposite of urban soundscapes. The latter represent the often accidental consequences of processes that consider them secondarily if at all, whereas online sound represents the result of some careful programming and clear design intent. Granted, the case of videos may be an exception to this rule. The point remains, however, that sound must be designed into web pages to a far greater extent than it has been, so far, into cities.

A couple of questions spring to mind. Is it possible to conceive of an online environment in which sound would be accidental? What would that sound be—slick, mechanical, modern; the sound of chaos and billions of voices; something different altogether? And if sound were engineered more carefully in urban environments, would the effect be to sterilize them or to improve them?

Freesound

Oooh, this is neat!

And a very timely discovery. I'm writing a piece (it'll be up in the next day or so) about sound and the internet, and that site kind of puts a new spin on things...

Sound in Lefebvre's trialectic

In last week's seminar, we began talking about Henri Lefebvre's trialectic of space. In The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), Lefebvre identifies a "conceptual triad" (p. 33) that he employs to think about space and society:

• Spatial practices or practices of space (perceived) involve the everyday interactions of people in space, ensuring "continuity and some degree of cohesion" (p. 33). Practices of space affect and are affected by the social space of a particular society in a "dialectical interaction" (p. 38).
  

• Representations of space (conceived) are connected to the sense of vision, the hegemony of city planning practices, and language and the sign. Representations of space tend to be the "dominant space" in a particular society with a particular mode of production (p. 39).

• Representational spaces (lived) foster resistance to the imposition of representations of space and their hegemonic visions, challenging their apparent transparency while nonetheless often being dominated by them (p. 39). Representational spaces are "linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life" (p. 33) and provide room for creativity and imagination.
  

Lefebvre calls for an uprising of the body against language, the sign, and representations of space, criticizing their focus on the abstract mental realm at the expense of embodied lived experience. The knowledge of the body, he argues, precedes the abstract knowledge of the intellect (p. 174), and the trialectic of space must be able to "grasp the concrete" (p. 40). So, how might one think of Lefebvre's trialectic in terms of the embodied experience of hearing and sound in urban built environments?

Lefebvre writes, following Tomatis, that hearing and sound help us with the "lateralization of perceived space. Space is listened for … and heard before it comes into view” (p. 200). In terms of spatial practice, sound acts as a mediator that locates the body in relation to other bodies (p. 200) in the space of everyday urban reality. Packed like sardines in a crushed commuter train, we use the sounds of others' shuffling feet and voices to inform our own movements and actions (that is, if our ears are open).

Representations of space rely on vision and abstraction to attempt to determine experiences of cities. Writing in Steinberg and Shields's What is a City? (2008), C. Tabor Fisher notes that "[t]hrough abstraction, persons, space, and social relations are viewed metonymically as passive, objectified images" (p. 160; my emphasis). But regulatory structures and their effacement of sensory difference also operate in the sphere of acoustics. This dispute over 'noise pollution' in the pre-Katrina French Quarter suggests that the Big Easy had its fair share of attempts to standardize its soundscape. That article mentions quantitative measures of sound, which have been criticized as overly abstract ways to conceive of sound when unaccompanied by a qualitative consideration of context (see Raimbault, M., & Dubois, D. (2005). Urban soundscapes: Experiences and knowledge. Cities, 22(5), 339-350). Fisher points us to another useful quote from Lefebvre, where he cites "the silence of the 'users'" of space as the key problem with administrative planning entities (1991, p. 365; my emphasis). The silence of displaced residents of New Orleans, which I've written about, is one related example, where bureaucratic abstraction came to have very real consequences for people's ability to be heard.

Finally, spaces of representation, lived experience, the "object" of the body (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 201), are "'mixed' space[s]" (p. 203). The body "preserves difference within repetition" and "is also responsible for the emergence of the new from the repetitive" (p. 203). A focus on this aspect of space can reveal "an affective kernel or centre" in urban space (p. 42). Hmm ... affective kernel or centre--pet architecture? In terms of sound in particular, I wonder if this project is an example of a space of representation. Its product is a "symbolic work" (p. 42) that draws on Mancunians' affective relationships with their soundscape to represent a new way of understanding the sounds of everyday urban space.

Other ideas? ...

The sound of sirens

Tuesday afternoon, reading week, University LRT station, Edmonton.

New Orleans, late August 2005, just prior to Katrina.

What would these soundscapes have in common? Maybe a sound like this:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/56859945da463dde/

R. Murray Schafer, in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), describes the "civil defense siren" as a (potential) sound that is common to "almost every modern city" (p. 202). He writes that loud sounds evoke authority and inspire obedience; the LRT siren certainly did the trick for me. It was strange to travel to a campus I expected to be fairly dead, and then to walk off the train into this huge wall of acoustic urgency--not to mention seeing police in jumpsuits reminiscent of bomb squads on television. The police walked casually, calmly; their body language and averted eyes suggested that the auditory assault wasn't to be taken seriously. Had it been a different day, a different place, a different context, that siren, so loud it was almost tangible, would have left very little room for misinterpretation. As it was, I was already skeptical. Would something truly siren-worthy really be occurring here, now--in Edmonton, of all places?

Schafer writes that the civil defense siren is a proscripted sound, a sonic taboo "held in reserve for that fateful day, then to be followed by disaster" (p. 202). By banishing it from the soundscape except for true emergencies, "we do it the ultimate honor of making it all-powerful" (p. 202). When it does sound, its power comes not so much from its use as from its default state of absence. This is, perhaps, the reason I couldn't quite take it seriously on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of reading week--in Edmonton, of all places.

I'm trying to find information about acoustic alerts during Hurricane Katrina. So far, searching for hurricane katrina sounds, hurricane katrina alarm, and hurricane katrina siren, I've pulled up sound metaphors on news sites and blogs, and interesting pieces about how Katrina has changed the music of New Orleans, but very little that directly discusses what New Orleans sounded like during the calm (?) before the storm. I imagine the incredibly high winds and pelting rain would have dominated once the devastation hit, but what about while people were being evacuated? Were there alarms sounding? (Not here, and not here ...) If there was a siren sounded before Katrina, along with the warnings and states of emergency issued by all kinds of governing bodies, its message, I think, would not have been lost.

The siren sounds; following its sound comes disaster; and following disaster comes, in some ways, the most frightening sound of all, a reminder of human mortality: silence (Schafer, 1994). Whether or not a 'real' alarm bell sounded before Katrina, Jordan Flaherty's piece, "New Orleans Culture of Resistance" (Steinberg and Shields, What is a City?, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), makes clear the magnitude of the silence that followed. Socially marginalized and non-privileged residents of New Orleans, displaced and destitute, had their voices silenced. In turn, the communicative silence of government and other agencies about the state of relief efforts helped to reinforce the futility of speaking up. In the end, Flaherty expresses hope that acts of resistance will break the post-disaster silence and help to restore community voices to the New Orleans soundscape, but the power of silence has already done significant damage of its own.

RJDJ

For my Project 1 book review, I wrote about Michael Bull’s book Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2007). Bull argues convincingly that sound in Western culture has followed a trajectory of increasing privatization and mobilization, which can be traced from Odysseus’s sailors using wax to block out the sirens’ song to the present proliferation of white earbuds in urban centers (and non-urban places) the world over.

In Bull’s view, the sonic privatization of public space through iPod use allows users to exert control over increasingly chaotic urban soundscapes and the oppressive rhythms of capitalism. Users claim a sense of power over their individual soundscape, which is often likened to a personal soundtrack to the film of one’s life. This control, though, is at least partly illusory, taking place as it does within a highly structured framework of consumption and branding.

Both Bull and Paul Virilio (as cited in Matthew Tiessen’s essay “Uneven Mobilities and Urban Theory”, in Steinberg and Shields’s What is a City?, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press) discuss the complex interactions between mobility, power, and technology. Both find deep faults with the increasing digital mobility of society and the power that it promises to bestow. Virilio warns us of the possibility that mobility is, “in fact, breeding physical inaction and willed disability (i.e., immobility)” (Tiessen, p. 119), and Bull cites denial of the “ ‘physicality’ of urban relations” (p. 28) and “fear [of] unmediated experience” (p. 155) as two undesirable outcomes of the spread of musical mobility.

I have a feeling this nifty iPhone application might cast those arguments in a new light (oops—visual metaphor!):



This video also brings up questions of control in design. Yes, the experience of walking in the city listening to (or through) RJDJ is still mediated experience, absolutely. But it seems to me that getting your iPhone to spit out re-interpretations of your acoustic surroundings is a different matter than attempting to cushion your experience of grating urban noise with a soundtrack of your choosing. RJDJ prompts you to cede some control of your personal sonic bubble to a predetermined framework; after you choose the “scene” through which the application filters the sounds of urban (or non-urban) space, the rest is up to the urban environment that surrounds you.

The soundtrack it creates might not foster a feeling of invulnerability, like Bull identifies among iPod users. Rather than feeding sound from your iPod to block the city from your ears, RJDJ constructs a porous filter for urban sound that feeds the city to you through one of many possible acoustic fun-house mirrors. As the gentleman in the video explains, this connects “the outside world to your acoustic perception” rather than protecting you from it entirely, albeit in a manner that’s still structured, still tied to the rhythms of consumerism.

There’s a lingering strangeness about RJDJ that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the tension between spontaneity (the unexpected and unpredictable nature of the urban surroundings that determines the sound in your earbuds, and that may have prompted you to insert them in the first place) and structure (the preprogrammed “scene”, the iPhone interacting more intimately with the urban environment than a standard iPod would). In terms of design, it sits in an interesting place: the application was designed to let the (urban) environment design your personal soundscape. Maybe it’s the slightly eerie comparison drawn in the clip between RJDJ and a “digital drug.” RJDJ opens up a fascinating way to experience urban environments, but hopefully not at the expense of listening, unmediated, to the sounds that make this experience possible in the first place.

WALL-E

In a recent seminar, we saw a picture of a floating city designed to house survivors of a natural disaster. Someone compared it to the spaceships in the movie WALL-E (excellent--definitely watch it). That comment was perfectly timed, because I had been writing a blog post about this little nugget, a clip from a 20-minute short documentary that's included in the DVD's special features:



The movie has a few different messages, some fraught with tension. The fact that a film which is highly critical of North American big-box consumer culture has firm ties to the Disney corporation is one of the most obvious. But what I found so lovely about WALL-E, much like what I found endearing about the idea of pet architecture, was its appeal to affect and irrational feeling.

The spaceship on which the movie's exiled earthlings have been circulating for 700 years is the epitome of a rational, cold, hegemonic vision--Lefebvre's representations of space taken to the nth degree. Talk about city design--every part of its operation, from the jumpsuit uniforms of its residents to its robotic staff, is planned, leaving little room for spontaneity and effacing the sense of difference and diversity that's understood to be characteristic of cities. Its inhabitants circulate in chairs outfitted with in-your-face screens that move along seemingly predetermined routes, and we quickly discover that the real brains behind the operation isn't the well-meaning, bumbling human captain--it's a robot named Auto. Back on Earth, WALL-E putters around in the midst of a technological wasteland, the shining promise of futuristic visions covered in layers of dust and rust. Yet in the midst of the movie's technologically determined, robotic world, the simple, timeless act of holding someone's hand is still the ultimate goal.

The documentary clip above is, I think, analogous to this idea. Here is one of the most respected film sound designers in Hollywood, with techno-beeps and computer-generated boops at his fingertips—and yet (to my memory) a good one-third to one-half of the long-version documentary focuses on his delight at finding the amazing analog sound contraptions Disney had kept around since the days of ye olde Mickey Mouse. These sounds are tangible and concrete in a way computer-generated sounds may not be. They represent a playful ingenuity and resourcefulness that hasn’t lost its charm.

I found Ben Burtt's comment about creating a world of sound very interesting as well. I'll likely be writing about that one again.

Pet Sounds

What struck me most when I read Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s article on pet architecture was the idea of affect. I love the playfulness of pet architecture, its appeal to an irrational, emotional something that represents rather the opposite of traditionally rational, predictable approaches to city planning and design. Its playfulness is resourceful; if necessity is the mother of invention, the need to make use of leftover urban space has spawned pet architecture as a clever approach to design. Its demonstration of lighthearted creativity in the face of imposed and imposing structure makes it a very endearing concept.

I’ve been keeping an ear out for pet sounds. It might be hard to pick out one specific example--especially since sound itself is often presented as something willful and rule-flouting. Are all sounds pet sounds? Maybe not. There are sounds—clocks, train whistles, school or church bells—that uphold institutionalized temporal and spatial structures rather than playing in the liminal spaces those structures neglect. Sound marks rhythms, both cyclical and linear (Lefebvre, 2004).

As it happens, I do have a pet sound candidate in mind. Walking to the LRT, I like to cut through the legislature grounds, taking the underground pedway to Grandin station. The legislature building is designed in an imposing Beaux Arts style presumably meant to inspire feelings of awe and reverence towards what it houses and represents—the seat of provincial politics and site of important debates and decisions. Being such a place, there is a constant ‘murmur’ of surveillance in its atmosphere: security cameras, guards in booths above ground, and a hollow echo in the pedway that amplifies voices and their words.

Walking in the pedway one recent morning, I came to a set of doors where the visual identity of the legislature grounds proper—bricks and concrete in varying shades of brown—changes to the seafoam green and turquoise of the tunnel leading under 109th street to Grandin. The acoustic identity changes here as well; once through the doors, the echo recedes a bit and sound takes on a more muted character. The set of doors present a liminal space between the two underground sections.

Just before I approached the doors from the legislature side, I heard an eerie, swooping wind noise:



It seemed to approach the pedway through an opening above ground, sweeping down from above the left door to the lower corner of the right door. It moved downwards and forwards at once, like a playground slide set along the doors. It gained and lost strength, but broke off entirely only when one of the doors was opened. Entering the green pedway section, I noted that the sound persisted there once the door had closed. It was unsteady, dipping and soaring like a bird on an air draft, and changing its overall pitch from high to low to high again. Its playful quality (which might not come through in the above clip), its changing characteristics, and its occupation of a liminal space made me think of pet architecture. The sound immediately elicited an affective response from me—it made me smile. It was not a sound of surveillance, not the rhythmic footstep of a government employee; it had an irregular rhythm all its own. It felt like an animal, or a friendly ghost—a playful and winking aberration in an environment representing control and order. To play on a quote from Bull and Back (2003) in their Introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader: while this sound may have been no respecter of space, it certainly felt like a (re)spectre.

Sound itself might be playful as a rule (oxymoron?), but it was the affective nature of this sound, its “sense of presence” (Tsukamoto, 2003, p. 249), that makes me inclined to think of it as pet sound.

A welcome

Sssh.

I have a blog.

It’s a research blog of sorts, begun in January 2009 as a deliverable for SOC 445, The Built Environment—a course at the University of Alberta taught by Rob Shields.

Mostly, it’s a blog about sound. It will end up being about other things, too, but mainly sound and sounds in urban environments. Using concepts we've covered in the seminar, as well as other sources I've come across in my research on sound and cities, I want to explore ways in which design and control of urban sounds, or lack thereof, affects our perceptions and lived experiences of urban social space. In addition to general musings on other people’s thoughts about sound and cities, I’m hoping to post my thoughts about specific sonic experiences I have, as well as audio clips of those sounds, if I’m lucky enough to catch them.

I chose the name for a couple of reasons.

Sssh is the sound you make to ask for quiet in order to listen. This makes sense, because I want to write about listening. I also like that it feels strange to say: “This blog is called sssh.” The name itself is a sound. It’s a bit disruptive to the flow of speaking, and I like that.

However, Sssh is also commonly employed in order to ask someone to be quiet not for the sake of listening better, but for the sake of not having to listen (to that person). So it’s a sound that both spotlights and stifles other sounds. I want its two senses to figure into this project in their own ways; while I’ll be spotlighting sounds and exploring what I—or we, urban dwellers—do hear, I also want to consider what I (or we) don’t, and why.

Finally, I think it would be swell if this project were to spawn some lively—even “loud”—discussions. If you’d like to comment or suggest or rant or rave, you can do it via a.macdonald@ualberta.ca, or you can leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by.