Urgency is not always loud

Text by John Bingham-Hall in response to the symposium Quiet Urgency: Disturbing Sonic Ecologies (5 June 2024)

Urgency is not always loud. Yes, it is now always ringing in our ears. But it is also there in a mass extinction that is barely audible in its extermination of billions of non-human voices that once made nature so noisy (see Gascia Ouzounian’s presentation Listening in lockdown in the colloquium Sonic Urbanism: listening to non-human life). There is urgency in an absence of sonic justice, a concept almost never heard from those responsible for the policies and designs that shape our sound environments. 

Planning policy tends to privilege the quiet, and to see nature as a way to absorb excess the excess noise and pollution with which we make our environments unliveable. But sonic justice is also about the right to be heard, for both humans and non-humans. There is an urgent, overlooked need for new frameworks of urbanism that can work with the more-than-human and its sonic vitality, without silencing or controlling it.

This symposium responded to these quiet urgencies by assembling work addressing the complex ecological formations that constitute our worlds, as part of a broader constellation of critical practices of sonic urbanism. By engaging the term sonic ecologies, the symposium looked consciously beyond soundscapes of nature and towards the multiple dynamics (nature, including human bodies, but also infrastructures, technologies, politics, and cultures) that intersect to shape one another through a web of sonic affect. Dynamics that are sonic but may not always be audible to the human ear. 

This was abundantly clear in the symposium’s opening presentation from sound artist and theorist Jacek Smolicki, who described the ways that a national border between Poland and Belarus simultaneously silences the sonic ecology of a forest its protective fence cuts through, and is upheld through technologies that are sonic but inaudible. “Deterrent listening,” as he describes it, is a sonic form of surveillance that is itself silent but textures in the sonic ecology of a nation by repelling migrants wanting to cross the border. The sonic effect of the border fence is a silencing of the voices of both human and non-human who either do not stray or dare not to speak near it. The devastating effect of the border on life is not itself a sound but demonstrates how urban soundscapes are imbricated in complex webs of infrastructure and ecology that extend themselves deep into natural hinterlands. 

The first panel of the day brought together practices that are all, in different ways, attempting to bridge worlds. The three artist-researchers assembled look for new practices of listening to languages that might enable us, as humans, to understand non-human political voice as it is expressed through both sounding, and through this silence or absence. Ella Finer’s work on recordings of “wildlife” digs into the blurring of taxonomies in sound archives. We hear a swan captured on record by the owner of a wildlife sanctuary. But rather than its “voice”, the calls that are our familiar sonic markers for birds, we hear beyond the surface of the skin to its heartbeat, speeding up in fear as it is held by the human recordist. What does “wildlife” mean as a taxonomic category when what we hear of the swan is a web of human, bird, fear, heart and recording device? Catherine Clover’s artistic practice aims at collective voicing between birds and humans. By transcribing birdsong into the roman alphabet through an “imperfect” process of deeply attuned listening, she creates scores that invite us to take a step towards what it might mean to be a bird, by unlearning human voice and attempting to speak a non-human language, however little we may understand it. In doing so, she reminds us that like our own, birds’ voices vary across landscapes and in relation to cultural ecologies of sound in place. Alex de Little’s theoretical reflection on more-than-human listening picked up on this spatial dimension of collective voicing, pointing to the inherently political nature of anchoring sound in place and marking out sites where different languages can gather. Recordings and scores, he pointed out, are tools for bridging beyond the human in ways that may not be what we expect, where the meanings of those are always changing. The refusal of plants and animals to grow or to live in ecologies that have been devastated are imperceptibly quiet urgencies, but their capacity for noisy disturbance is also political. It is imperative we learn to tune in to both.

The second half of the day looked beyond an explicit focus on sound towards wider definitions of ecology and of listening. Maan Barua and Mriganka Madhukallya’s performance-lecture explored the amphibious as a way of thinking cities through their ecological extensions, as water seeps between different realms of the urban. Marshes, for example, that are often the feared underbellies of city life, drained to make way for “civilisation”, but are also zones for subaltern modes of human dwelling. Wetlands that channel flows of toxicity as they drain out of rubbish heaps and into surrounds. Water that fills incomplete architectures, giving them new life as infrastructures for informal economies. Barua and Madhukallya’s films invite us to see the city in the reflection on the surfaces of puddles, reminding us that when “we perceive the thing minus that which is not useful to us, it becomes a virtual representation”. A sonic ecological urbanism requires us to look and listen beyond: beyond the skin of the swan, beyond the surface of the puddle that reflects back an image of the city, to pay attention to the amphibious and fleshy underbellies where the boundaries of natural, toxic, infrastructural have long since dissolved. "What becomes of planning when opacity rather than revelation is at stake?" An amphibious approach, they argued, allows us to survive in toxic political times

The final panel focused on modes of design that engender sonic justice, wellbeing, memory, and attentiveness. In describing her Silent Room project, Nathalie Harb spoke of a desire to create a space accessible to all. One that is not only about protecting aural senses – which can feel under attack from the acoustic violence of cities like Beirut – but also filtering the information overload of our saturated media-spheres. Here, the urgency is loud, and it calls for silence. But silence, for Harb, is not about the absence of noise so much as having access to a setting that supports a quality of attention: to quiet sounds, to oneself, to the body’s need for rest. Sarah Lappin – presenting the projects responding to Silent Room by Queen’s University Belfast architecture students – highlighted the diversity in what sonic justice or well-being might mean: the ability to be heard, to retreat, but also to be in connection. Sound, says Lappin, offers a productive destablisation to architects used to focusing on sight and touch – it is so pervasive and familiar, yet brings a different set of parameters into play, where affect can cross through walls and beyond visual boundaries. Ellie Ratcliffe’s research on perceptions of birds also demonstrated this heterogeneity of perception. The ways that memory and association shape how individuals hear the songs and calls of different birds, show that it is not enough to simply say that birdsong supports well-being. Human subjectivity is part of sonic ecology, and can render it melancholic or even full of foreboding. Nature is often employed in urban planning as a panacea, Ratcliffe pointed out, as if it is “available on prescription”. But recalling again the puddle and the swan, we must look below the surface not only of ecologies themselves but of our own emotional and cultural resonances with them. Finally, Adriana Cobo Corey framed an approach to design practice based on a deep and patient listening that allows community memory and power structures to surface and become audible. She described listening for rather than listening to, making oneself useful as a designer to those who are being heard, being attentive to needs rather than imposing a vision. This turned the conversation concluding the day towards the way that the burden of listening in institutions such as universities – essential for the maintenance of relationships and memory –  is placed on women, and a failure to invest resources to support it. 

The same might be said of urbanism – how and where in the professional spaces and processes of city-making can time and space be carved out for attentiveness to quiet urgencies: ecological destruction, violent bordering, more-than-human communication, sonic justice, and diverse conceptions of wellbeing? These questions were in part addressed by design responses developed by a group of CSM students through design workshops surrounding the symposium. They propose modes of design that amplify global networks of sonic meaning traced through migration, make lost indigenous craft practices resonate, and support contemplative listening in green spaces; or forms of practice that critique quiet zones to engage with sonic disorder, or show how photography could help score for urban soundscape.

John Bingham-Hall is a senior researcher on SONCITIES and an independent scholar engaging performance, infrastructure and ecology to understand how bioclimatic urbanism is transforming the public cultures of cities. His work unfolds through teaching, writing, and creative practice in London, Paris and Marseille.