bibliographic references
Arkette, S. (2004) Sounds like city. Theory, culture, & society, 21(1), 159-168.
Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bull, M. (2000). Sounding out the city: Personal stereos and the management of everyday life. Oxford, New York: Berg.
Deleuze, G. (2013). Cinema II: the time-image. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Schafer, R. M. (1969) The New Soundscape. Don Mills: BMI Canada Limited.
Wissmann, Torsten (2014) Geographies of urban sound. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Arkette (2004) writes:
Sound, especially within the context of the urban environment is never a neutral phenomenon. Each sound is imbued with its own lexical code: sound as a sign,
symbol,
index.
In the following video, you are about to hear the safe to cross sound informing that a passenger can cross the street (Zagreb, Croatia, 2016). After being in the presence of this sound for quite some time, it seems as is the sound in itself carries the vision of the movement, the sound of steps on the pavement mixing with it, the actual bodily sensation of one foot following the other. The sound is heard repeatedly various times during the day and at times feels as if it is captured within the solid material of the street, part of this fragment of it marked with white stripes, part of the body moving fast from point A to point B, the sound of a crossing.
Traffic, music, language, and nature, as primary examples.
Help to create unique soundscapes essential to the place-based character of each city.
(Wissmann, 2014)
One could claim that cinema carries within itself a great capacity of affect. It is nothing else than life itself just sightly twisted, bent, expanded, shortened, ours or the one that we will never live, would never even imagine if not thanks to it just appearing in front. However, not just in front of our eyes, in front of all of our senses, entering our perception and twisting it once and for all, implementing anotherness in how we see, smell, hear, touch, think. There is a sort of endless pleasure when abstractifying the perception of real (of real how we predict it) and playing with it. Urban experience because of a great diversity of elements it consists of along with us as if vanishing in their coexistence or merging with it can be full of this pleasure just like cinema is. Deleuze (2013) writes:
If cinema does not give us the presence of the body and cannot give it to us, this is perhaps also because it sets itself a different objective: it spreads an "experimental night" or a white space over us; it works with "dancing seeds" and a "luminous dust"; it affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception. What it produces in this way is the genesis of an unknown body.
Sound influences how we engage the city as place, especially in terms of daily routines. (Wissmann, 2014)
abstract
The Role of Sound as a Component of Urban Experience is an audio-video essay that approaches urban sound as study material for sensorial analysis. An experiential experiment is carried when retransforming/playing with sensorial components of an urban dweller. Research focuses on the record of urban sound in relation to image and its proximity to cinematic/cinematographic experience. Playing with sensorial components reveals not only their influence on our ever-day perceiving of urban space but also the aesthetical nature of casual walks in the city. In other words, an analytical approach to urban sound reveals how cinematic everyday urban experience is or how cinema's sensorial base finds itself in the one of an urban dweller.
keywords
urban sonic space, audio-visual essay, urban exploration, cinematic experience.
Taking into account both the urban soundscape and the impacts of sound on the urban dweller, sound can be understood not as a by-product of urban life
but as a fundamental part of urban life - something essential for understanding the city's
sense
of place.
(Wissmann, 2014)
Anything in our world that moves vibrates air.
If it moves in such a way that it oscillates at more than about 16 times a second this movement is heard as sound.
The world, then, is full of sounds.
(Shafer, 1969)
A STILL IMAGE
ZAGREB, CROATIA, 2016.
This sight from the very beginning because of its yellow full of shadow ambient and our position in it might cause a rather unusual sensation. The rode ends up with doors, there are aligned lamps hanging in the central upper part surrounded by trees from both sides as if on a stage by curtains. We are in the middle of the street with light embracing only fragments and emphasising white paint on the street. There are lines separating us from what is on both of our sides, xs causing a sensation of stopping/blocking and arrows indicating the movement towards us. Movement of cars that we see none. A sense of night is present. Nights are still but we can sense the movement (of potential cars coming, of arrows moving towards us, wind moving lights). It seems that we can sense the movement of the image, and it might just be that it is because we know it is moving, cities are always full of movement.