African Urban Aural Environments: Johannesburg
Issue #1: Membranes
African Urban Aural Environments (2021) is the first iteration of a project initiated by Johannesburg-based artist collective PLAYGROUP: B.J. Engelbrecht, Jurgen Meekel, and Jill Richards in collaboration with the NRF and SARChi Chair in Spatial Transformation: Positive Change in the Built Environment (Tshwane University of Technology).
Close attention has been paid to exposing and re-imagining the entrenched political and institutional mechanisms that cause ruptures in the urban spatial fabric. [1] Much of how the urban environment is experienced and sensed is auditory,
consumed subconsciously, yet gaps exist in critical engagement with the sound of Johannesburg and the potential for sound to offer “alternative methodologies by which to encounter the city.” [2] The first iteration of African Urban Aural Environments (2021) aims to use sound to reveal the social, economic, psychological, and spatial forces of Johannesburg. A sonic record of a transforming city.
The process began as a field recording project aimed at documenting different parts of Johannesburg, relating to all the conceivable varieties of sound, [3]
and creating a series of recordings that would act as an archive of “analogues of real-world experience”. [4]
However, beyond documentation, field recording reveals the listener/recordist’s momentary and intimate connection to the environment as an ongoing or ‘emergent’ process of attunement. [5] Thus conceived, listening as an embodied and affective experience has the potential to engage the built environment in ways that give voice to new subjectivities.
Different parts of the city have a distinctive sound. What we hear is not only the result of the deep etchings of apartheid spatial planning but also the platial resonance of how particular communities have made each space their own. What is immediately evident is that Johannesburg is divided into four acoustic zones: the inner city, the township, the leafy suburbs, and the industrial zone. Closer examination indicates that, through time, the boundaries between these spaces have become less absolute and more porous, resulting in in-between spaces.
These[JM1] so-called ‘ecotonal[JM2] ’ areas or “contested marginal areas” [6] are audible through the way in which sound from one zone bleeds into another; one horizon overlaps with another. An ecotonal area is typically a transition between two biological communities; however, in an auditory sense, sounds that one might expect to be specific to one region present in another. Furthermore, the push and pull between urban regions is a consequence of the physical features of sound, such as how it is layered, dissipates over distance and time, reflects off of, and is absorbed by different surfaces.
[JM1]The word permeable came to mind
‘a frog's skin is permeable to water’
[JM2]An ecotone is a transition area between two biological communities. Do we need to explain that further?
This occurs despite often being separated by acoustic boundaries such as a roadway, tree line or just by sheer distance and thus sound finds the point of permeability within the built environment. Furthermore, the collective experience of the city through the auditory, foregrounds how its many listeners are intimately connected by the sounds we all hear, much like one vast membrane.
Thus, on the one hand, each aural environment has an acoustic signature particular to itself because of design, and on the other hand, superimposed onto this framework,
is the sound of how each community has adapted. To zoom out, these zones are elusive and coalesce into the grander symphony and cacophony of what we could call ‘the sound of Johannesburg’. Positioning Johannesburg sonically, as a particular site of memory, in the process of negotiating the legacy of urban segregation, has the potential for mediating new processes of
interpretation, finding alternative means by which to orientate ourselves within its historical continuum and perhaps, as a result, reclaim and reinvent forgotten histories and identities. [7]
Bibliography
1. Osman, A. (2020), ‘We hear you! The Unheard, Marginalised and Excluded: Power and cities’, in, Osman, A. (ed.), Cities Space and Power (The Built Environment in Emerging Economies: Cities, Space
and Transformation Volume 1) Cape Town: AOSIS, pp 86-8
2. Barnes, S. (2014), ‘Sounds Different: Listening to the Proliferating Spaces of Technological Modernity in ity’, Space and Culture, Vol. 17, Issue. 1, pp. 5.
3. Tom Hall, Brett Lashua and Amanda Coffey, (2008) ‘Sounds and the Everyday in Qualitative Research’, Qualitative Inquiry Vol. 14, Issue. 6, pp. 1020
4. Truax, B. (2002) “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon Fraser University”, Organized Sound, Vol.7, Issue. 1, p. 12.
5. Paiva, D. & Cachinho, H. (2018), ‘The First Impression in the Urban Sonic Experience: Transitions, Attention, and Attunement’, Human Geography, Vol. 100, No. 4, pp. 329.
6. McCartney, A. (2016) ‘Ethical Questions about Working with Soundscapes’, Organized Sound, Vol. 21, Issue. 2, pp. 163.
7. Alderman, D.H. & Inwood, J.F.J. ‘Landscapes of Memory and Socially Just Futures’, in, Johnson, N.C., Schein, R.H. & Winders, J. (eds) (2013), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography: First Edition. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Pp. 189.
Designed by Abi Meekel
