Dr Christabel Stirling, a former postdoc on SONCITIES and a current British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal College of Music, will participate in a panel themed ‘Music and Sound in the City’ at the Royal Musical Association 150 Conference. The panel will also include contributions by Jamie Savan, Susana Zapke, and Laudan Nooshin.

Dr Christabel Stirling, ‘Soundworlds of difference, displacement, and co-existence in South London’

What can an ethnographic approach to the study of cities and their complex sonic-social environments reveal about contemporary urban life? How can urban ethnography conducted in a sonic register contribute to our understanding of the problems and possibilities of life in the twenty-first-century city? This paper offers some reflections on these questions, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted 2021-22 as part of the ERC-funded project SONCITIES. Combining traditional ethnographic methods with experimental participant-centred ‘live methods’ (Back & Puwar 2012), such as audio diaries and hand-drawn mind maps, I explore how social and cultural locations traverse urban sonic experience; how sound gets entangled in the politics of place, belonging, and entitlement on the urban public stage; and how, in densely multicultural cities, previously unrelated people and soundworlds find themselves in proximity in ways that engender both complex negotiations and striking connections.

For more information, please see the RMA 150 Conference website. Special thanks to Simon McVeigh and Abigail Wood, Co-editors in chief of Cambridge Elements in Music and the City, for their support of this panel.