Image: Jon Tyson (2020)
Co-organized by Carolyn Birdsall, Linda Kopitz and Alex Gekker. For more information and registration, please contact Linda Kopitz (l.kopitz@uva.nl) | Dates tbd. – February to May 2026
Some cities are famous for their sound, from New Orleans’ jazz music and Manchester’s pop through to Amsterdam’s club culture. Even beyond these examples, sound plays a central role in the city – and yet often remains ‘invisible’ in academic discussions. Taking up the theme of ‘Sound Cities’, the 2025–2026 ASCA Cities seminar explores how sound not only resonates in the urban environments, but also how sound shapes our conceptualizations of and experiences in the city.
Urban sounds are not always specific, but frequently pervasive: Traffic, crowds and industries form a significant background or ‘keynote sounds’ to everyday life (cf. Schafer 1996; Bijsterveld 2008). The connection between sound and the city is at the heart of concepts like soundscape (Raimbault and Dubois 2005) and musical urbanism (Nevarez 2011), exploring how sound becomes meaningful in designing, building, navigating and promoting cities. Which sounds are accepted, or even desired, in the city, and which are considered ‘noise’? How does urban planning and design attempt to influence the sounds of the city? Sound can materially shape what the city looks and feels like, with city street sounds constituting “a shifting aural terrain, a resonant fabric” (Atkinson 2007), from radio towers and live music venues through to urban loudspeakers. Or, as Shannon Mattern has suggested, even seemingly ephemeral technologies like the radio have historically “reorganized the material urban landscape around them” (2017, 3), and arguably continue to do so. The spatial histories of sound, and sound-based media, also points to the interconnections between built environments and media (cf. Thiermann Riesco 2024). How can we analytically approach the “actual places of music” (cf. Jasper 2019), and what does an interdisciplinary perspective tell us about the relationship between architecture, sound and the urban? Tuning in to the city also opens up questions about our own experiences of and with sound: What does the city sound like to its human and non-human inhabitants? In what ways can we navigate the city with and through sound? And how does our experience of the city change when we are, almost constantly, listening to our own headphones or earbuds?
Engaging with and expanding on such questions, the seminar seeks to bring together perspectives from media and culture, cultural geography, sound studies and musicology, environmental humanities, anthropology and technology studies as well as architecture and design research.
Co-organized by Carolyn Birdsall, Linda Kopitz and Alex Gekker. For more information and registration, please contact Linda Kopitz (l.kopitz@uva.nl)
Dates
tbd.
References
Atkinson, Rowland. 2007. “Ecology of Sound: The Sonic Order of Urban Space.” Urban Studies 44 (10): 1905–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980701471901.
Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. MIT Press.
Jasper, Sandra. 2019. “Acoustic Ecologies: Architecture, Nature, and Modernist Experimentation in West Berlin.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (4): 1114–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1673143.
Mattern, Shannon Christine. 2017. Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. University of Minnesota Press.
Raimbault, Manon, and Danièle Dubois. 2005. “Urban Soundscapes: Experiences and Knowledge.” Cities 22 (5): 339–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2005.05.003.
Thiermann Riesco, Alfredo. 2024. Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin. The MIT Press.