Urban sound mapping in sound art and built environment practice

It presents a catalogue of web-based sound maps since the late 1990s, which serves as source material for a reading of sound maps as participatory platforms. This initial reading charts a recent history of sound maps as cultural phenomena that emerge from sonic practices, participatory practices, and new spatial media, and that exhibit heterogeneous purposes. Co-created urban sound maps foster a diffuse, restless quality of auditory attention across multiple scales, thus challenging any straightforward application, but nonetheless pointing to numerous possibilities for spatial analysis.<br><br>The thesis also asks how sound maps can be used in urban pedagogy: as tools for teaching and learning about urban space.

It examines top-down (vertical) as well as peer-to-peer (horizontal) modes of learning as facilitated through sound maps. It further questions how sound maps can be incorporated into more formal teaching contexts with architecture students, for example as a method in site analysis and urban design. Through field experiments, it investigates how acoustic cartographies can be applied in the context of distinct enquiries into urban space: integrating sound in a holistic public realm strategy (Linen Quarter,Belfast, Northern Ireland); as a method of articulating the range of “sonic places” (Cusack, 2017) to be found in a city (Halmstad, Sweden); and as a means of appraising the intangible heritage of a Modernist urban planning project (Craigavon, Northern Ireland).<br><br>The thesis concludes by proposing a new, speculative model of sound mapping that (1) is oriented towards the localized, specific scales that are relevant in built environment practice (i.e. architectural and urban sites); (2) is multimodal in the representational tactics that it adopts, such that participants can contribute field recordings but also several other forms of visual and textual materials; and (3) imagines the potentials and future transformations of sound environments.

Thus, the thesis offers a critical intervention for one potential direction for the future of sound mapping.