Soundscapes as Urban Transformation: Introducing a notational language that represents the shifting relationships between sound, space, and movement

Abstract

Even though we have advanced technology that can reveal the complexity of cities, urban planners typically turn to the physical attributes of the built environment alone to design them. Instead, this research views cities as a system of continuous, temporal changes that determine how people actually experience and move through cities in their everyday lives. I argue that sound -- an integral experience of cities often treated as no more than urban pollution -- conveys vital information about the practices, events, boundaries, and characters of neighborhoods and streetscapes. Urban sound is ubiquitous, yet we have not developed an adequate language to describe it. Through a case study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I introduce a computational tool that can be used to understand and represent temporal, sonic changes occurring during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. More broadly, this work offers a notational system as a new language for representing the changing relationships between sound, space, and movement that embodies the complexity of the urban environment.