On the train on my way to Manchester for a meeting with the ASN (Architecture Student Network) I am separated from my friends due to us boarding the wrong train and losing our reserved seats, resulting in me sitting on my own with no one to talk to for the three hour long journey to the Midlands. I therefore decide to listen to my iPod. Scrolling past John Coltrane and Tyler the Creator I end up listening to Air France, The Tough Alliance and Studio, all of them artists from my hometown: Gothenburg in Sweden. With just the music and the English countryside swooshing by, I am subconsciously teleported back to Gothenburg. The green hills and sheep covered farmland outside the train carriage is transformed into images of my hometown with the sound of seagulls and memories of places I’ve visited while listening to those particular songs.
All this makes me rather homesick, but I can’t help to think about the importance of music in the way that we perceive and remember spaces and places. This phenomenon clearly does not just apply to music; on the contrary the sounds and the noise that you absorb and makes you remember a place is most probably not music per se. Walking through Borough Market and the soundscape you are exposed to will be a lot different to walking around Whitechapel Market. Whether that is because of the acoustic quality Borough Market acquires from being enclosed, or that of a different type of clientele, is debatable.
‘Maybe, maybe I just got to take the days one by one, if I only could change where I came from’ **
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In the introduction to Geoff Manaugh’s superb interview with DJ /Rupture in his 2009 BLDGBLOG book, he writes: ‘Where the individual sounds of certain cities come from seems beyond our ability to calculate. Endless maps could be made just to trace each sound to its source - every voice, bird, and car horn. Spaces bleed into one another through sound. But is it the physical city itself we hear - the steel and glass, wood and stone, bricks and aluminium siding - or something altogether less tangible than that?’
I decided to ask Geoff a couple of questions to see he could help me understand the complex nature of the (possible) soundtrack of London.
PAPER: In a city like London, with over 7 million inhabitants, and almost every single culture represented in very condensed areas, is it even possible to talk about coherent sounds of different places? Or maybe that cultural diversity is exactly what makes it possible?
Geoff Manaugh: When people talk about the sound of a certain city, they usually refer not to the literal sounds of the streets but rather to something like Detroit techno, Chicago house or the Manchester music scene—and those are very different from what you hear outside on the sidewalk. It is funny when you get convinced that Chicago is synonymous with house music, and when you walk around the streets you expect to hear that type of music everywhere, as if you were walking through a movie scene. It is definitely possible to talk about parts of cities sounding different than others, but I tend to find that it is less because of cultural differences and more to do with the industrial activities that exists in a certain area. You will hear distant industrial sounds coming from a plant, factory or the highway nearby. It is interesting to see how those sounds get focused, accentuated or, for that matter, drowned out by the way that human beings interact with those neighbourhoods. In a loud industrial environment people make up for it by playing incredibly loud music from their cars, or they might get so annoyed with the retail music coming out of shops that everyone is listening to iPods and no one talks to each other.
On the other hand, the soundsystem phenomenon [talking about Notting Hill Carnival] is an interesting intersection between the architecture of the city itself and an influx of different cultures that use music technology in a specific, very social way. The soundsystem is like an audial Archigram installation that brings distant cultures into the city and lets a neighbourhood hear the resulting music for two or three days a year.
P: You are based in New York, working in San Fransisco and also visiting London on a regular basis, do you think that your audial experience of a place is different from the perception of someone who has been a resident for 20 years or so?
GM: If you live in an area for long enough you tend to tune certain things out so that you no longer hear the sound of the motorway, or the sounds of all the trucks and police sirens in New York City, for example. Conversely, you can tune in to certain things that no one else would pick up unless they’ve been there for 15 years; over time, you can come to notice that the harbour has certain sound, or how noise transmits through the air, or how high air pressure might affect the sounds of ships coming into dock in the New York harbour. But sonic familiarity with the local environment is definitely a factor in any city, for anyone. Aside from the length of exposure, I think there’s also a certain kind of person who listens to cities in a specific way—and I would suggest that it’s a minority of people who pay audio attention to cities on that level. Having said that, it tends to be the other way around that people really notice things. Think of the urban dweller who visits a farm or a small town, and the first thing they notice is that it is so unbelievably quiet at night they can’t sleep. It’s interesting when you go the opposite direction and you start steadily peeling away the layers of urban sound and then people start getting unnerved by how silent it is.
P: Does listening to music, and blocking the surrounding sounds, whilst traversing the city change your interaction with the environment since you are removing soundscapes of the areas you are passing through? Are you, if you will, distancing yourself from the city?
GM: I would definitely say that you are changing your experience of the environment and your awareness of a particular neighbourhood, but whether you are distancing yourself from the city is hard to say. It’s the audio equivalent of reading on the tube, I suppose. Are you distancing yourself from London by reading a novel set in Sydney while riding on the Central Line? I used to really dislike walking around listening to headphones, because it made me paranoid; I always thought that someone had said something that I missed or that a car was about to hit me! But when you have a certain style of music that you listen to on your commute home from work, or while you’re walking to a place you go to a lot, it doesn’t distance yourself from the city so much as create a different kind of memory connection between your music and that particular part of the city. For instance, if you’ve lived in a city for a while and you listen to a certain album, you can then find that, two years later, when you no longer have that job or you live in a different city and you listen to that music again, there can be a very intense feeling of nostalgia for a particular subway ride, street or bus route. The music becomes engrained in your spatial experience.
P: Can a particular music scene distort the view of a city?
GM: When you hear that a DJ is from Cincinnati, Ohio, or from Munich for example, your impression not only of the music, but also of that city, begins to change a little bit. An example of that in the US is when you think of Florida, you tend to think of Miami Bass or Hip Hop—a very urban style of music. But Florida, at least in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, also had a huge death metal scene, the kind of metal you would normally associate with Sweden or Norway. This is interesting because very few people in the world think of death metal when they talk about Florida.
P: There is a very prominent music scene from Gothenburg with a Balearic and maritime sound. It is like the music on its own has created a sound for the city. The same could be said about Manchester, with artists like Happy Mondays, Joy Division etc, and also about Detroit and its Techno scene. Can the music being produced be traced back to the architecture of the city, are they somehow related? And if so, in reverse, does this make London, a city with so many different music styles, as diverse when it comes to its architecture?
GM: In the first part of the question, I would say that, today, it’s probably not the case—but I would add that someone could write a really interesting PhD project or a long historical study exploring the connection between the city of Vienna and the music of Mozart. Did the ornamental detail or the mathematical proportions of the architecture of that time have an effect on Mozart’s music? Similarly, did the music of Mozart, Bach or even Wagner have an effect on the architects of those eras, and thus change the architecture they designed in those cities?
Listening to Jeff Mills or Juan Atkins—basically, 1980-90’s techno—while driving around the motorways of Detroit can feel as if you’re in an abandoned futuristic city with a 22nd century soundtrack, and it can even feel like there is no city in the entire world that requires this music quite like Detroit does. But, having lived in a somewhat rural environment in North Carolina, I can say that certain music works just as well when you’re driving around alone at night through pine forests in the middle of nowhere. It’d be interesting to do an art historical project that researches the types of album covers that are used to illustrate certain styles of music. If you see a giant tower block in East London on the cover of a new dubstep EP, is that implying that there is a connection between the architectural style of the London housing block and the kind of music that you would normally hear there? Or could you also show a North Carolina pine forest and understand that the music is futuristic techno?
P: The cover art of The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material seems to capture the atmosphere of what the music will sound like. It is really interesting to see how the music you are listening to is changing the way you interact with your environments. If you are jogging whilst listening to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and then switch to a minimalist techno track by Carl Craig that will surely change the way you move your body.
* Lyrics from My Hood by The Tough Alliance.
** Lyrics from 25 Years And Running by The Tough Alliance.
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Geoff Manaugh is the creator of BLDGBLOG and the author of the BLDGBLOG Book. He lives in New York and was interview by Samuel Michaëlsson over skype in 2011.
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