HOW DO we describe city spaces? There has been, in recent years, a prolixity of differing views on the treatment of this question in which two opposing general tendencies stand out: the reductionist and the phenomenological positions. Reductionist theorists argue that a city is no more than a lattice of physical enclosures, apertures, planes, intersections bound together by the regulatory force of the Cartesian grid. A phenomenological approach, on the other hand, can provide a theory of wider scope; it can include in the description of a city's attributes the corporeal, the sensual and psychological aspects of subjective experience, as well as the broader cultural characteristics of the different communities and subcultures which contribute to the diversity of city spaces. From this point of view, the reductionist position appears locked within its own rigidity, creating ossified spaces by relying on the method of deductive analysis, rather than on direct sensory experience. Non-reductive theories (of which there are many different kinds) align themselves with the notion that a city is not just the sum total of buildings and streets; indeed, it is not generated by the neat ontological division of container and contained: metaphorical space can supervene upon the physical divisions of the urban metropolis. The phenomenological view adopts a body-centred paradigm in which there is no clear dichotomy between the experiencing subject and the external world. On this reading, time and space are perceived as fluid rather than immutably constituted. Space does not have an a priori character; it is defined and moulded by the subjectivity and social consciousness of those who experience and inhabit it. This has significant implications for understanding the role of sound as a component of urban experience. For the phenomenologist there is no veil of sense-data interposed between the epistemological subject and the objects of perception. Instead of space in the abstract, we may invoke the much more mercurial concept of place. Place allows particular localities to be defined in terms of their history and social use, investing them with cultural meanings and values and making them available for active intervention and transformation. Place can be used as a concept to define a geographical area on the scale of nation-states, or the intimate domain of the home. It can mean the reconfiguring of social boundaries. For a Jewish community, for example, the demarcation of the Eruv redefines an existing public space and creates a sanctuary as an extension of the sacred space of home or the synagogue. Ritual and custom are attributes that have the effect of strengthening attachment to places. A sense of place can also be generated through subeultural re-appropriation, such as the use of the concrete ramps and steps underneath London's South Bank centre by skateboarders. Place fuses the real with the mythical, the virtual with the actual; it is a space which encourages flights of imagination, as for instance in Robert J. Yudell's description of the Chrysler building 'Here we have not only the vertical differentiation of the building but chunky setbacks which conjure landscapes or grand stairways. We can imagine scaling, leaping and occupying its surface and interstices' (Bloomer and Moore, 1977). The essential point, I think, of this phenomenological approach, is to show that it is not the space itself that changes; rather it implies a transformation in attitude to space and how we define it. Our climate, culturally speaking, is increasingly defined in terms of visual space. Media and communication for the most part are equated with billboards, television and recently DVD. Aural space has, for the moment, become merely a ubiquitous presence, to be registered peripherally. However, I will argue that sound, especially within the context of the urban environment, is never a neutral phenomenon. Each sound is imbued with its own lexical code: sound as sign, symbol, index; as ostensibly defining a personal territory in the case of the ghettoblaster or car stereo; as creating a portable soundscape in the case of the Walkman. Phenomenology has the potential to play a critical role in contributing towards an aural definition of space, but its impact has yet to be fully realized. There has been, however, a group of practitioners who have sought to articulate a humanist account of the sonic environment. Essentially, soundscape design alms to increase people's awareness of their own sonic environment in order that they might play an active role in its subsequent transformation: eliminating noise which desensitizes the ear, while preserving sounds whose semantic signals play a defining role for a community or churches respect the need for quiet contemplation. Churches and cathedral spaces are particularly interesting in cities because they are among the few spaces which stretch time. Long reverberation times affect actions within the space, slowing movement and speech; small incidental sounds are magnified, allowing the listener to appreciate internal harmonic fluctuations as the tone decays. The acoustic ability to stretch sound has several different effects: speech which allows time for the words to hang in the air before evaporating out of audible range can appear more weighty and monumental, even rhetorical. Within these spaces incidental sound material, sounds which we may treat as aural dust, footfalls or the occasional cough, are also given heightened presence through filtering and natural amplification. Lengthening a sound's life has invested it with a reverential sanctity that is usually reserved for ecclesiastical objects. The church as acoustic vessel tends to give the worshipper a multi-sensory experience of the sacred. Music theorist Kurt Blaukopf has suggested that sound could be seen as a mediator between congregation and sacred ritual. Low-frequency non-directional sound helps to bind a community together: This directness of sounds that cannot be located contributes significantly to the social effect of the musical-liturgical event. The anonymity of the sound source built into the architecture is the acoustic guarantee for the internalizing of church norms and, at the same time, the basis for the view that comprehends church liturgy as part of the heavenly liturgy. (Blaukopf, 1982: 182) So, what is an urban soundscape? I have described various aspects of what constitutes an urban sonic fabric. Schafer's approach has merit insofar as it has defined terms which enable a listener to decipher the aural landscape. However, embedded in his work is a romantic bias towards antiquarian or rural soundscapes, as if these are assumed to be more refined than their modern-day equivalents. While Schafer's energy is spent defending the case for cleaning up urban pollutants, other issues, such as whether sound can aid our understanding of social relationships between communities, get left aside. These aspects are examined in the work of both Corbin and Stoekfeld, and surprisingly these reveal similar tendencies in asserting the significance of acoustic territory. Important for me is the notion that aural space is both tactile and ephemeral: it cannot be contained within fixed boundaries. Sound objects can be electronically magnified, replicated and scattered like dust over an entire cityscape. Aural space should be celebrated as the most liquid of spaces, offering a model for the kind of fluidity that a whole range of other disciplines aspire to.
