Ambiance – the city sounds of Amsterdam – should be thought of as the boulevard street noise that superimposes onto the canal network. This far-reaching ambient noise includes streetcar bells, bus roar and train noise. Atmospheric – the proximity of Schiphol airport means that passing airplanes are a keynote. This description of the intimate to the broad soundscape is a kind of hierarchy of sound experiences. The intrusion of an atmospheric sound into your personal ‘ear-space’ will cause remark, but only with careful listening can a person be aware of the continuing background of atmospheric sounds. The Vancouver soundscape can be examined with comparable stratigraphy. Of course, what is missing is the intimate integration of water into the street network. However, False Creek and English Bay can be considered analogues. Street level – vehicle traffic dominates, the sound of buses accelerating, and multi-lingual conversations. The beep- boop of the pedestrian crossing. Ambiance – The city sound of Vancouver is mostly vehicle traffic, but has a marine connection, with foghorns in the dead of winter and the cruise ship horn in summer. The sound of Skytrain acceleration travels remarkably far – in my personal experience five blocks away is perceptible indoors. Waterbody – The motor predominates, as in Amsterdam, but the lapping of the waves is more pronounced in Vancouver. Gulls scream here. The large open water carries downtown hubbub across to the urban hilltown to the south. Atmospheric – airplane traffic predominates, although the frequency of helicopter traffic is relatively high compared to Amsterdam. Sirens deserve their own private description. In Vancouver: wee-ooo-wee-ooo-wee-ooo. In Amsterdam: weedle-weedle- weedle-weedle, although there are many variants of sirens in both countries – I have observed three in the Netherlands and as many in Canada. The average city-dweller absorbs an astounding mix of sounds everyday. The built and natural environment around us adjusts the volume and intensity of these sounds. It is an acoustic environment that has arisen by our society’s choices and by our negligence. It comes down to this: everyday urban noise is produced and processed by elements of architecture and landscape. These alloyed signals we perceive are mediated by the city’s form. There are possibilities and constraints, jarring and soothing events, and a low level drone to human activities to which we assign priority and meaning – without reflection. The more we accept the background hum of urban activity, and accept the daily toll of sound events, the more we grow to ignore the entire auditory sense… The listener’s plaint, so eloquently paraphrased in R.Murray Schaefer’s term schizophonic , is that the meaning of a signal – the idea of a sound, is nourished by the action at its source. A schizophonic world, where sound is recorded, disseminated, processed and displaced, is seduced by ghosts. So if urban design opens its ears, perhaps too today’s omnipresent white ear-buds will become museum pieces. j
ostensibly, our place in it. A soundscape is a kind of topography, another to add to the geological kind. Sound topography is an interpenetration of gradients. Sounds ooze around corners, leap tall buildings, intermingle, cohabitate one another’s territories, all in a throbbing matrix of fluids. We can’t selectively shut our ears and appreciate an isolated sound event – at least not without technological aid. The World Soundscape Project was conceived to catalogue that world of the ear. From their analysis of everyday sounds, WSP proposed that our acoustic environment is a form of music, and that the distinction between noise and music was a rarified concept of the sublime – it isn’t that there aren’t bad sounds (noise), but to toss out all sounds outside the concert hall is a bit drastic. These elements of the everyday acoustic environment can be composed and organised to form a part of the palette of the contemporary music composer. For the design world, if these sounds could be deployed to arouse emotions intentionally, then they can (and must) have unintentional æsthetic repercussions. At heart, by including the day-to-day acoustic environment in the context of formal music, the composers of the day were critiquing our inattention to our ears. In this way the World Soundscape Project is a kind of manifesto. When applied to the built environment, it calls for urbanists to open their ears to aural design. Karin Bijsterveld and José Van Dijk’s latest work Sound Souvenirs examines the phenomenon of a mixture of nostalgia and archive using recording technologies. Pinpointing the World Soundscapes Project as a seminal moment in this kind of audio archiving – by conscientious experts – Bijsterveld and Van Dijk suggest that a kind of democratisation of sound recording technologies has resulted in a widespread listening culture. Our society wants to remember soundscapes. As everyday citizens are now able to collect sound artifacts, we can easily compare soundscapes through time. As a designer of built form it is important to understand the repercussions of the built environment on the sound environment – because invariably someone is listening. What hypotheses can be proposed to explain the relationship between architecture, landscape and sound in Amsterdam? It could be suggested that, at least in the canal belt of Amsterdam, that the lion’s share of the city fabric is given over to water. It can additionally be observed that the level of the canals is lower than that of the sidewalk, roadway and canal edge. This stepped edge creates a kind of stratigraphy of sound environments. The passing canal boat’s pounding dance music is somewhat contained by the water level (I write during Pride weekend). This we might consider the canal soundscape – the puttering motors, calls of boaters to one-another, and the shouts and hollers of passersby on foot. On warm days, in a canal in the Jordaan, I observed a group of three separate boats pass in 15 minutes. It was quiet enough a water level for two women to conduct a conversation in their boat – despite street level traffic. Gulls hoot here. The street level, or canal edge soundscape, interacts across the water and although separated by 10 metres of canal, there is an interaction between these edges such that it constitutes an environment in and of itself. In some instances, although rare, people on the canal edge call to the canal users – from a bar to a barge, I witnessed a happy “hallo” from drinkers to boaters, hailing between strangers.
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