SOUNDSCAPES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
A Reflection by Henry le Feber Robertson

Hosted on December 7th and 8th 2022 by the University of Oxford’s SONCITIES project in conjunction with the Harvard Faculty of Music, the Soundscapes of Social Justice symposium featured presentations, listening sessions and conversations chaired by Yvette Janine Jackson (Harvard) and Gascia Ouzounian (Oxford). Each event highlighted how changes in technology, energy production, and human migration all have a profound impact on the soundscapes of a city or other urban centre, and that actively listening to these changes can reveal a great deal about our planet, its societies, and its histories both recorded and silent (silenced).  The greatest of thanks go to all the organisers and speakers at this event, as well as to the attendees, (over three hundred registered across the two days) who contributed to the lively and stimulating discussions.

Opening the conference was the Ethiopian-American urbanist, designer and artist, Olani Ewunnet, with an engaging account of the role of flowers in Ethiopian music and culture entitled ‘Ye Deji Abeba Negn: Sonic Floral Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’. Central to her presentation was the pivotal role of flowers in shaping the country’s economy and musical history, a powerful foundation for Ewunnet’s suggestion that listening to Ethiopia’s flowers can help drive ecological preservation.

To begin with, Ewunnet traced how flowers can shape cities and sound cultures through the floral anchi hoye scale, detailing its role as a musical signifier of self, city, nation, time, and God.  Of particular importance to Ethiopia is the Adey Abeba, or ‘mother flower’, which lends its name to Addis Ababa (‘new flower’), the country’s capital since 1889.  She also highlighted that the mass influx of people to this new capital at the time led to overcrowding and high costs of living, and that, to tackle this, the Ethiopian government chose to follow Kenya’s example in selling its flowers internationally, consequently becoming one of the world’s largest cut flower exporters.

In the latter half of the presentation, Ewunnet outlined how environmental listening – listening to the flowering plants of Ethiopia – drives ecological preservation.  Many of the flowering plants that are central to human nutrition are in jeopardy because of climate change.  Meanwhile, 95% of the forests native to Ethiopia have been lost in the last hundred years, so many of the cities already struggling with overcrowding are also undersupplied for food.  Ethiopia’s unique floral history, however, has shaped its musical traditions: Yared of Axum is believed to have played a fundamental role in developing Ethiopia’s liturgical music from around the 6th century, having compiled a hymnal of tunes based on the sounds of the country’s natural environment – including its flowers.  Therefore, Ewunnet implores us to listen to these sounds, hear in them Ethiopia’s rich ecological history, and strive to preserve it.

For the second chapter of the day, a panel of speakers were invited to present some of their findings from recent ethnographic work on sonic communities and placemaking.  Christabel Stirling led with a thought-provoking account of ways of sonic placemaking in dense urban environments.  Her key thread was investigating how people experience and produce urban sound environments and how they are inflected by intersecting ‘vectors of difference’.  Stirling called on Andrew Eisenberg’s 2013 study of Mombasa, in particular the Muslim-Swahili Old Town, and the ways sound is used there to transform ostensibly public spaces into private ones – such as with daily calls to prayer or recitations from the Qur’an played on speakers.  Through this sonic contrast with the rest of the city, the Muslim-Swahili community are able to forge a resonant communitarian space for themselves, but one that is in tension with the secular soundworlds and broadly liberal-democratic understandings of public space that exist outside the Old Town.  Hence, drawing on Georgina Born’s theorisation of public and private spaces, Stirling noted that sound here was able to ‘render the instability of “public” and “private” as spatial, political and experiential categories’ and disrupt different cultural and political understandings of those categories.

For her own ethnographic research, the culturally diverse neighbourhood of Brixton formed the ideal location for studying how different understandings of ‘what public space is and how it could or should sound constantly encounter one another’.  As Stirling noted, Brixton’s history with post-war African Caribbean settlement and the introduction of Reggae to the musical soundscape of South London forms part of a complex and ongoing sonic negotiation of neighbourhood space, cultural heritage, diasporic identity and belonging against a backdrop of rapid urban and social change. At the same time, public musical expressions in Brixton, regardless of genre, do not always cohere with certain conceptions of public space as a space of ‘respect’ and ‘consideration’, which in turn stem from a host of class, religious, and socio-cultural positions.  Stirling questioned the challenges that arise for architects and urban designers seeking to respond to a place’s sonic-social multiplicity.

Alison Martin followed up with an enlightening account of some of the events of the 2022 Juneteenth weekend in Washington D.C.: a weekend which was intended to celebrate Black culture but ended up being fraught with controversy.  To begin with, Martin spoke of Pharrell Williams’ ‘Something in the Water’ festival which, while conceived as a reminder of Black aliveness, reflected the culturally destructive gentrification of parts of the city. The festival’s high ticket price rendered it unaffordable for many of the local residents ($400 per ticket, equivalent to roughly 26 hours of work at minimum wage), so an alternative was proposed: the ‘Chocolate City Jubilee’, a free event which heavily featured D.C.’s famed go-go music.

Then came ‘Moechella’: founded as a response to an incident in which a local phone store had been forced to shut off its go-go music, this event was also intended to celebrate the musical culture of D.C..  While it began successfully, a shooting which killed one fifteen-year-old child and injured others tragically curtailed the celebration.  As Martin pointed out, however, the violence was misattributed to the festival organisers for improper planning, despite the local mayor’s support, which tarnished the reputation of the festival and of go-go music itself.  Evidently, this kind of scapegoating highlights the ever-growing need, as Martin argued, for specificity and accountability when investigating incidents such as these: it was partly misinformation on the purpose of the event (whether it was go-go related or not) that had led to the violence being falsely attributed.

The third panellist, Tom Western, presented ‘Covered mouths still have voices’ (based on a popular Greek slogan), an insight into the voice as method of space- and place-making in the context of Athens during the recent pandemic.  Broken into three sections, his talk concentrated first on the ideas of displacing and ‘dispolicing’ the voice and the city.  Western argued for ways in which we can rehear and deconstruct the assumed link between voice and space by unsettling the singular, static political voice, and focusing on the voice as a movement method or on ways of speaking that disrupt and refuse political hierarchies (such as Bell Hooks’ ‘liberatory voice’).

Using the pandemic as context, Western also brought to light the process of ‘dispolicing’ voices: while state responses to the pandemic involved clamping down on communities and silencing voices, it became necessary to push back against these border-making systems. Following on from this, Western considered the idea of globally differentiated struggle (‘you can hear these voices everywhere’, as he put it): the ways multiple voices sound across the globe, tuning into each other’s resonances and encouraging one another to develop new ways of sharing voices among the uncertainty or trauma brought about by the pandemic, wars, and other repressions.

Western then focused on a ‘global sense of voice’ as a synthesis of these ideas.  He questioned how different types of voice relate to one another across the globe, and how people who have been disarmed, silenced, or restricted can finally enact global change through collaborative voicing, while retaining the crucial layer of local specificity that allows each voice to be heard on its own terms.  He concluded by citing noise and dissonance as necessary parts of these global struggles and solidarities, and by reminding us that all mouths, whether covered literally by masks or figuratively by oppressive regimes, must be allowed articulate these stories, struggles, and messages – covered mouths still have voices.

For the final event of the day, Ouzounian chaired a conversational session with composer, artist and DJ Ain Bailey about her compositional processes and a couple of her recent works.  Bailey’s journey grew from her early career as a DJ, during which time she began to write her own music, and she later undertook university courses in sound art and composition to support this transition.  On many levels, her compositions engage with sonic modes of assembly – through architecture, place, history etc. – and with the formation of identity.  While not explicitly about identity, Bailey’s work actively attempts to provide listeners with stimuli and environments that allow them to think about identity in a more conscious way.  During the session, Bailey described some of the most notable projects or events she had been involved in, including a collaborative study week at the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge where, through music, groups with vastly different backgrounds were able to relax and unite in sharing profound emotional stories, such as ones of grief, loss, or estrangement.

Next, Bailey shared her experience composing AGORA, a work crossing the disciplinary boundaries between music and architecture.  AGORA was composed for three sites: the Rio Cinema in Dalston, St George’s Bloomsbury and the British Museum, the last of which we had the pleasure of hearing in full, with its pulsating, breath-like gestures, and its strong sense of spatial contrast. Bailey’s fascination with the Rio Cinema in particular had stemmed from a personal connection with the venue as a frequent visitor, which compelled her to capture the sounds of the empty cinema and of the bustling neighbourhood outside bleeding into it.

As was evident from her edit for the British Museum, and from her work with architect Sumayya Vally at the Serpentine Pavilion in 2021, Bailey’s composition is heavily motivated by spatiality in both a material sense and a social one. Her composition for the Serpentine Pavilion, Atlantic Railton – named after two streets in Brixton ­– tells a ‘sonic autobiography’ of the site and of people’s sonic memories of Brixton.  It paints a picture of the music people used to blast from their homes, the influential figures in Brixton’s community, and captures how that picture has changed over time. To do this, her compositional process involves site recording before manipulating these moments of sonic capture electronically to tease out such meaningful compositions.

The second day began with a listening session, in which composer-artist Edzi’u and environmental sound recordist Mike Bullock shared with us some of their key work.  After an engaging account of their two-spirit Tahltan & Tlingit heritage, their introduction to soundscapes, and an explanation of their music’s purpose for reconnecting with one’s ancestors, Edzi’u introduced us to Es kime ani, which roughly translates to ‘My coming home’.  This was the first sound work Edzi’u composed, and features recordings of their mother, of English and Tahltan speech, and of sung vocalisations, all underpinned by strong percussive patterns which entrance and carry the listener into the sound world Edzi’u creates.

Edzi’u also shared a second piece, entitled The wind carries their names.  This video work, inspired by several parks around ‘so-called’ Vancouver – Crab Park, Strathcona Park and David Lam Park – was characterised by slow, suspenseful action: Edzi’u applying bright red lipstick in bold lines across their body, removing of layers of clothing before striding into a lake, the words ‘Land Back’ clearly visible as they slipped below the water.  The powerful images conjured up by their work, in conjunction with the natural, yet somehow non-human, soundtrack, induced a profound sense of unease in many of us listening: an ‘unsettled’ feeling that speaks to the emotional burdens of settler colonisation and its impact on the Tahltan and Tlingit communities, as just two of many examples.

Mike Bullock’s recorded tracks focused on the sonic signature of the Étang de Berre, a saltwater lagoon near Marseille in southern France.  The tracks showcased captured sounds from the region, including a monthly warning siren, the sounds carried by the Mistral winds, a nearby oil refinery, a local town square and a market.  Particularly obvious from these recordings was the way the local soundtrack has been altered by clanging, humming, and whirring from nearby power stations, drawing attention to the sonic impact of humans’ energy production systems.  Meanwhile, the chatter and hubbub present in the recordings of town environments raised another important set of questions.  How does sound talk about where it is from? What signifies the south of France in these recordings?  Language played a large role in many of the clips, as the local Mediterranean dialects gave geographical clues, but what is left unheard or unspoken in these recordings, and how do such absences carry their own equally valid messages?

Changing pace, Jacek Smolicki set a mellower tone with a highly engaging presentation on sonic landmarks, or ‘soundmarks’.  Focusing first on sound recordings from war-torn areas in Poland, Smolicki described how the practice of soundwalking can help us uncover and understand these soundmarks, though critical engagement with each one, and consideration of who or what has been silenced there.  As an example, he traced his 2013 soundwalk project at a former Jewish ghetto and concentration camp, entitled Dzielnica(meaning ‘quarter’).  As Smolicki described, in this project, fragments of a children’s lullaby are torn apart, disrupting the tune’s natural progression towards resolution and capturing the listeners’ attention.  Smolicki’s second showcase, The lake that Glimmers like Fire, was based on recordings of two lakes in Sweden: Rissajaure, the clearest lake in the country, and Trekanten, the most polluted.  The aim here was to shed light on the moments of underlying noise behind the silence of the lake, such as the sounds of nearby transport, that differ from people’s expectations of purity and beauty.  Finally, he discussed his recent work, Intertidal Room, which argued, after Barbara Adam, for a more complex understanding of how time is organised: Smolicki framed the mechanical clock as a symbol of human intervention, and as a constraining or colonising force in many cases, one which can become what he terms a ‘soundscar’.  The piece itself used recordings of the inner mechanism of the Gastown Clock in Vancouver, with a chime mimicking the Westminster Quarters, to highlight this process of ‘soundscarring’ and allow us to listen to its turbulent history.

To close the symposium, the eminent author and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei presented a keynote speech on ‘Race and the Prosthetic Ear’.  His talk explored some of the politics of creolisation and assimilation through a technological lens that sees sound as more than just music.  As a starting point, he described the shift in Black racial practices from being acoustic and rural (which were associated with ‘Black femaleness’) to electric and urban (‘Black maleness’), which gave rise to a ‘vision of competitive sociality’.  Chude-Sokei drew upon Ralph Ellison’s suggestion that, in the US, when traditions come into contact, they tend to merge, expanding it to include the act of fighting back, as was evident from the local sound system ‘battles’ in Jamaica in the 1970s, which played a part in its eventual decolonisation. Since, as Chude-Sokei explained, ‘sound required countersound’, this new obsession with wires, knobs and sound, technology was an essential counterpart to the natives’ love of music, as well as a sign of a sort of modernity they could claim as their own.

Clearly, the focus in this talk was on sound systems, not music systems, on sound as going ‘beyond music’, but again one of the strongest messages was about silence, the absence of certain sounds in historical accounts of any society.  As Chude-Sokei poignantly reminded us, a society’s general acoustic trends reveal a lot about its history, particularly the silences and parts that have been ‘filtered out’.  Like a sensitive microphone (the ‘prosthetic ear’), we must aim to tune into the space around each object of study, and do so in a way that positions the listener as equal in the audition process – for example, via soundwalking rather than field recording.

Overall, these conversations and soundscapes explored the acts of listening to nature, listening to human voices, and listening to lack, absence or loss.  Nature, as some of the speakers suggested, is paramount to understanding human history and acknowledging our failings.  Humans, on the other hand, must be allowed their voices in order to produce societal change.  Further still, our job as listeners is to audition the unvoiced and the silenced, the barely audible, and the ghostly scars of trauma inflicted on societies.  Through critical reflection on our methods of listening, constant re-evaluation of their assumptions and biases, and an attitude geared towards specificity and accountability, we may begin to accept our complicity in acts of social injustice both past and present, so that our future societies can manifest tolerance and sensitivity to difference.

Henry is a final-year undergraduate student in Music at the University of Oxford, where he has cultivated a particular affinity for composition.  Within this, Henry intends to specialise further in sound art, urbanism and technological advancements in the field of composition, including AI and mathematical modelling. His experience in the Anglican choral tradition has also prompted him to explore musical representations of religion and other social parameters of difference.