Listening to the city

Trash trucks, car stereos, train whistles, construction noise: Sounds are often thought of as incidental to urban life. But how do they shape the identity of a place?

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That’s what Stanley Collins, a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow in City and Regional Planning at the Weitzman School, is asking his students to consider this semester. His course, an Urban Studies and City and Regional Planning elective that attracted a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, is called Listening to the City: Soundscapes, Music, and Place. An extension of Collins’s research on music venues and neighborhood identity and change, the course encourages students to think qualitatively about how urban sounds reflect complex cultural and racial dynamics. For Collins, music and sound are a window into urban life that even sophisticated geographic analytics methods don’t provide.

“We can draw statistical models that measure neighborhood changes, but what often is missed in that type of analysis is the lived experiences of race,” Collins says. “My goal is to help students develop a critical eye to the qualitative and the lived experience.”

The course is built around readings on pop music history, gentrification, and racial capitalism. Students discuss case studies of conflict around music and noise in changing cities. They include resistance to noise complaints in Oakland and the #Don’tMuteDC movement in Washington, D.C., a response to efforts by new residents of a gentrifying neighborhood to crack down on sidewalk music at a local electronics store. Students say the course has encouraged them to listen to the city more closely and critically.

As part of the course, students are keeping sound journals, visiting various parts of the city and recording their observations of what they sound like. One early prompt was to reflect on how background music—or muzak—is used in different urban spaces. Students spent time in different dining and retail establishments and wrote down the types of music they were hearing. Aki Di Sandro, a student in the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics program, found Vietnamese rap at a banh mi and bubble tea shop in South Philly, a soundtrack apparently chosen by the young people working the shift. For her final project—a research assignment on the question of what sounds say about a specific place—Di Sandro says she’s hoping to explore the sonic divisions between Chinatown and Chinatown North, the part of the neighborhood that was separated by the building of Interstate 676. A sound map of the area, filled out with resident interviews and geospatial information, could illuminate the history and culture of the neighborhood as it anticipates the Chinatown Stitch, a major federally funded infrastructure project building new public space over the highway, Di Sandro says.

This story is by Jared Brey. Read more at Weitzman News.