Sonic Placemaking: Three approaches and ten attributes for the creation of enduring urban sound art installations

Abstract

This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations’ capacity to augment a pre-existing ‘spirit of place’. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a site’s spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.

Using Virtual Soundwalk Approach for Assessing Sound Art Soundscape Interventions in Public Spaces

“…One of the major goals for soundscape planning and design is to achieve congruence between aural stimuli and context within a place [23,41], where a soundscape intervention might be capable of augmenting 'the pre-existing spirit of place' [42]. It is considered that learning about the perception of integrally designed urban open spaces with musical features would help defining the key design factors influencing the perceived congruence, i.e., if the perceived acoustic environment is appropriate to the corresponding visual experience.…”

“…Some of the above-mentioned studies were looking into the soundscape interventions 'as they are' [42,45]. Other were trying to assess their impact by defining a baseline condition and then looking into the conditions such as 'on and off'/'with or without' [44,57], 'before and after' [1,7] or comparing different scenarios and exposure conditions [4,5,38,58].…”

Sound and the healthy city

“…However, the words 'sound art' and 'soundscape' have proven robust enough to withstand the critique and are still widely used, their meanings becoming more honed through time and through the text of theoretical approaches. 4 For example, in relation to what might be thought of as the affective aspect of soundscapes, sound artists often place particular emphasis on working with the essence or mood of a place -whether called spirit of place (Lacey 2016, see also 'Placemaking and inclusion' above), haecceity or thisness (Stjerna 2018), urban ambiances (Thibaud 2011) or atmospheres, a 'tuned space' (Böhme 2017)while researching how they might successfully work with the individual and combined possibilities of the sonic elements of a particular acoustic environment.…”

contain yourself: technology, the city and atmospheric intervention

“…Entering into a relationship with the city requires the creative practitioner to be present in the moment and connected with the immediate’ (Lacey, 2016b: 25). Lacey (2016a) argues that it is necessary for sound installations to respond to site-specific conditions if they are to endure and achieve permanence. He suggests that it is the skilful manner in which sound-making materials (in this case transducers and electroacoustic technologies) are embedded into the landscape and respond to the immediacy of the surrounding environment that encourages a sense of an installation belonging to place.…”