Soundspace: A Manifesto

The manifesto is a long-standing and powerful tool for challenge within architecture, deployed by those as diverse as Vitruvius and Frank Lloyd Wright (who proposed a Walt Whitman-inspired “Work Song” of 1896) to those publishing in blogs across the designing planet today. Manifestos are locations for dreaming, for the banging of shoes, for passion in words about the environment we invent. Our manifesto follows in that tradition of poetry and critical optimism in calling for a new architecture of soundspace.

Here we wish to act as Markus Miessen’s “uninvited outsider” (Miessen 2010), a transgressive voice that disturbs the status quo beyond comfortable familiarity and brings together different types of thinkers and various modes of critique.[1] In this article we seek to probe “fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced and … conventional frameworks or oldestablished rules and regulations” through the interdisciplinarity that sound studies demands.[2] The ear to transgression is open.[3]

Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center

This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.

Sound Art in Urban Architecture and Planning: An Introduction

This article will introduce a specially-commissioned edition of the JSS centering on articles developed from the International Symposium May 2014 by the Recomposing the City project.

Recomposing the City: A Survey of Recent Sound Art in Belfast

This article introduces examples of recent sound art in Belfast, a city that has undergone radical transformation over the past decade and is home to a burgeoning community of sound artists. The text investigates the ways in which sonic art can redraw boundaries in a city historically marked by myriad political, socioeconomic,
religious and sectarian divisions. The article focuses on sound works that reimagine a “post-conflict” Belfast. These include site-specific sound installations in urban and public spaces, soundwalks, sculptures, locative and online works, and experimental
sonic performances that draw upon traditional Irish song and music.

Sound Art and Spatial Practices: Situating Sound Installation Art Since 1958

This dissertation examines the emergence and development of sound installation art, an under-recognized tradition that has developed between music, architecture, and media art practices since the late 1950s. Unlike many musical works, which are concerned with organizing sounds in time, sound installations organize sounds in space; they thus necessitate new theoretical and analytical models that take into consideration the spatial situated-ness of sound. Existing discourses on “spatial sound” privilege technical descriptions of sound localization. By contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which concepts of space are socially, culturally, and politically construed, and how spatially-organized sound works reflect and resist these different constructions. Using an interdisciplinary methodology of critical spatial analysis and critical studies in music, this dissertation explores such topics as: conceptions of acoustic space in postwar Western art music, architecture, and media theory; the development of sound installation art in relation to philosophies of everyday life and social space; the historical links between musical performance, conceptual art, and sound sculpture; the body as a site for sound installations; and sonicspatial strategies that confront politics of race and gender. Through these different investigations, this dissertation proposes an “ontopological” model for considering sound: a critical model of analysis and reception that privileges an understanding of sound in relation to ontologies of space and place.

Recomposing the City: New Directions in Urban Sound Art

The editorial introduces the invited edition of the journal based around our International Symposium for Recomposing the City, an interdisciplinary group which asks how the sound of urban spaces might be considered in new ways.

Recomposing the City: New Directions in Urban Sound Art

This special edition, which we were invited by the journal editors to edit, highlights the proceedings of our International Symposium on sound art and urban architecture. We selected these and other authors from multiple disciplines and practices, including sound art, planning, architecture, and anthropology to analyze how sound might be better understood in urban environments.

Sonic Places: In Conversation with Peter Cusack

In this interview, Recomposing the City co-directors Sarah Lappin and Gascia Ouzounian talk with Peter Cusack about his recent work, reflecting in particular on relationships between sound, sound art, planning processes and urban communities. Cusack, a field recordist and sound artist, has been a leading figure in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies for more than two decades