Emeka Ogboh
you need a sound in order to be heard
urbanism | sound by shannon werle
‘Lagos without verbal maps could sound like some other place in the world’ 1
What if the ambient sounds of each city were channeled on a sequence of radio stations? Casually rotating the dial, would the similarities between cities mirror that of the static in between broadcasts? Emeka Ogboh, a sound artist who has been recording Lagos since 2008, claims verbal maps – the system by which bus drivers shout out destinations and routes in lieu of digital displays – would set it apart. But with a population expected to peak at 12.43 million in 2015 and where inhabitants have averaged three hours per day in traffic jams, audible cartography quickly becomes cacophony. 2 3 The Lagosian soundscape, an orchestra of blaring radios, roadside hawkers and revving engines, has just enough ‘demented touch to give it a lasting tenderness and poignancy’. 4 Yet many of its defining elements, for better or for worse, are growing extinct. The city’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) program unveiled in 2008 intends to swap out the canary-yellow fleet of ‘danfos’—infamously rickety Volkswagen 12-seater buses—on all major routes, in effect silencing verbal maps, and transportation renovations will considerably eliminate accessibility for roadside hawkers. Stripped of these now familiar voices, will Lagos begin to sound like any other city? Perhaps it could be mistaken for Hong Kong. Sound artist Edwin Lo began recording sounds here in 2007, a year marked by persistent demonstrations against the government’s closure of the popular Queen’s Pier in favor of a land reclamation initiative and continued following its demolition in 2008. In 2010, he released a 46-minute-long track entitled Rabbit Travelogue: Central Region . Perusing his online archive of source material—which includes anti-demolition protests, construction noise drowning out exotic birdcalls at the zoo and traffic drones blanketing the chimes of Taoist rituals during an annual Ghost Festival – it becomes clear Hong Kong is saturated in a new sound. On the sounds of his childhood spent in the Wong Chuk Hang area of Hong Kong, Lo remarks,‘These sounds have ceased to exist… What is left is a big open space, awaiting the arrival of a large real estate development’. 5
52
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator