Soundscapes of the Urban Past

Sound Studies Series Series edited by Holger Schulze Volume 5 Editorial Board Sam Auinger (Linz/Berlin) Diedrich Diederichsen (Wien/Berlin) Florian Dombois (Bern) Sabine Fabo (Aachen) Peter Kiefer (Mainz) Doris Kolesch (Berlin) Elena Ungeheuer (Berlin) Christoph Wulf (Berlin) Sound Studies The book series Sound Studies presents research results, studies and essays on a rather new yet well-known field of research: How do human beings and animals and things live together with all the sounds and noises, tones and signals of their times? How do they shape and design sounds – and how do they act through sounds and explore their world, even in foreign or in maybe only superficially known cultures? The research field of Sound Studies is transdiciplinary and transmethodologically by nature: the publications of this book series therefore present artistic and design concepts from fields such as sound art, composition, performance art, conceptual art and popu- lar culture as well as articles from disciplines such as cultural studies, communication studies, ethnography and cultural anthropology, music studies, art history and literary studies. Artistic research as a whole is therefore an important approach in the field of sound studies. The Sound Studies book series intends to open up a discourse in, on and about sound – across the boundaries of academic disciplines and methods of research and artistic invention: a speaking about sound beyond the hitherto alltoo well-known academic discourse. Series editor: Holger Schulze A publication of the Sound Studies Lab at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative ini- tiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. © 2013 trancript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image: Moniek Wegdam, Dam, Amsterdam, February 13, 2012 Editorial Staff: Georg Spehr, Berlin Cover layout & typeset: Christina Giakoumelou, Athens Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2179-2 Karin Bijsterveld (ed.) Soundscapes of the Urban Past. Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage Contents 11 Introduction Karin Bijsterveld 31 Shifting Sounds. Textualization and Dramatization of Urban Soundscapes Karin Bijsterveld, Annelies Jacobs, Jasper Aalbers and Andreas Fickers 67 Why Historians of the Auditory Urban Past Might Consider Getting Their Ears Wet Mark M. Smith 77 Sounds Familiar. Intermediality and Remediation in the Written, Sonic and Audiovisual Narratives of Berlin Alexanderplatz Andreas Fickers, Jasper Aalbers, Annelies Jacobs and Karin Bijsterveld 117 The Chirping of a Little Bird. Some (Film) Theoretical Reflections Patricia Pisters 129 Sonic Artefacts. Reality Codes of Urbanity in Early German Radio Documentary Carolyn Birdsall 169 Radio Documentary and the Formation of Urban Aesthetics Evi Karathanasopoulou and Andrew Crisell 181 Soundscape, Landscape, Escape Jonathan Sterne 195 The Corporeality of Listening. Experiencing Soundscapes on Audio Guides Holger Schulze 209 The Eleventh of the Eleventh of the Eleventh. The Theatre of Memorial Silence Ross Brown 221 Authors 227 List of Illustrations Introduction Karin Bijsterveld 1. »Take a Closer Listen« It happened when his Ipod was out of batteries. Lying in a park in Geneva, on a mid- summer day, with his headphones still on, he suddenly heard the sounds of the park as if played on his Ipod: people talking, a dog barking, a truck passing, kids laughing, birds singing. The idea for a book was born. Artist Rutger Zuyderfelt invited people to »take a closer listen« to the sounds that normally go unnoticed to them, and asked them to think of their »favourite sound«. By the end of 2009, he had gathered fifty-two detailed descriptions of sounds, as well as a few accompanying stories. 1 Many of the sounds submitted were those of nature: the »flapping of birds’ wings«, or »wind blowing through trees«. Some were sounds of nature audible in enclosed, man-made spaces, like »rain falling on a tent’s roof« and »snow lightly hitting a glass window«. Other stories just referred to the sounds of people talking or things moving: »neighbours’ muffled conversation«, »umbrellas opening and closing« or a »far-off fog- horn from a ship at sea«. Still others, however, referred to the sounds of crowded, urban environments such as »rumbling train engines«, »constant traffic on a distant road«, a »busy playground several yards away«, or »echoes in a tube station«. And some seemed to be associated with joyful expectation, such as »mail falling on a doormat«, »a new pack of coffee being opened« and »a book page being turned«. 2 Some seven decades before, in the mid-1930s, residents of the city of Groningen, The Netherlands were also invited to take a closer listen. The organization involved was a 1 Zuyderfelt 2009, 3, 5, 7. 2 Zuyderfelt 2009, 10-73. 11 local noise abatement committee, one similar to those established in many other West- ern towns and cities in the first decades of the twentieth century, including New York, London and Berlin, to mention a few metropolitan examples.3 The Groningen committee publicly announced its plan to take action against unnecessary noise, and asked local residents to provide information on the sounds they considered annoying. This triggered a response of over one hundred letters.4 Most of the letter-writers complained about »street noise«, notably the sounds of the horns and engines of cars, trucks and motor bikes, but also the noises of municipal street cleaning services, carts, trams, trolley bus- es, trains, and people loading and unloading cargo. Others felt bothered by the sounds of local tower carillons, factories and steam whistles, street vendors, public loudspeak- ers, soldiers doing firing exercises, children, dogs, cats and cocks. Quite a few also had concerns about the loudness of their neighbours’ radio. The complainants often stressed the incessant and »piercing« character of the un- wanted sounds, their sheer multitude, as well as their untimely nature: a »screaming army« of flower vendors, rag-dealers and iron mongers passing through the street »day and night«. Each morning, a family woke up far too early due to milk factory workers »throwing with« their milk »tins« and »lids«. Other commercial activities, such as the outdoor second-hand car market, would start as early as in the middle of the night, with »slamming car doors« and »endless« starting up of engines »in vain«, for not all cars offered for sale there were »of the modern kind«. Motorized traffic contributed to the hubbub, but so did the numerous carts delivering milk or vegetables, which had »no rubber tires« while the street pavement was rather »uneven«. In their letters, the writers also voiced medical concerns (»I have been seeing the doctor for over a year now and suffer a lot from nervousness«) or claimed that »the sick« in their family could not stand the noise anymore, hoping that the committee’s members could do some- thing about it. Furthermore, the noise of motor bikes, driven up and down the road by the neighbourhood street kids (sons of the »knife-grinders and oil millers« and a few »pimps«) would cause houses to »shake«, while the drone of electric engines felt, as one letter put it, »as if my brain begins to tremble«. Hospital patients, one writer knew, suffered from sleep disturbance caused by a local carillon, as was true of »strangers visiting our town for just a few days«. The city was overcrowded with »twitter bicycles«, 3 Bijsterveld 2008. 4 Archives Anti-lawaai comité Groningen (ALCG, Noise Abatement Committee Groningen), File »Brieven op Persberichten« (Letters in response to Press Reports), 1935-1937; courtesy Hero Wit, now stored at Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. The committee itself numbered the letters to which we refer. 12 Introduction »car din« and an outright »chaos of sounds«. One complainant regretted that those from the nearby countryside (»buitenmenschen«) would often go into Groningen very early, at a time when the urban residents (»stadjers«) were still sound asleep, »as they go to bed later«. Another contended that it was usually »lower-class lads and girls« who felt a need to scream and yell.5 We do not present these examples to suggest that urban dwellers’ appreciation of urban sound used to be more negative in the past than it is today. It might have been just as easy to find negative stories about present-day urban sounds, or, conversely, positive ones about such sounds in the past. Rather, our interest is in how these stories are staged. Intriguingly, many of the stories about favourite sounds generally speak of sounds that are hardly discernible, such as muffled sounds or lightly tapping ones. These sounds also tend to be produced at a certain distance from the listener: far-off, several yards away, amounting to echoes rather than the real thing. We classify them as typical instances of the »comforting sound« topos, a description or staging of sound which foregrounds people’s experience of safety, a calm atmosphere, a sense of secu- rity.

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