Sound screens
Research project
Investigate the sonic evolution of cities and understand the origin of our modern listening.
Which of the metropolis or modernity came first? At the beginning of the 19th century, major changes in the way people lived in a territory profoundly modified the perception of their environment. Transportation, work and housing entered a new era. Cities became denser and were populated with new activities. New buildings tighten the streets, trains compress distances and industry gives rhythm to life in the metropolis. The relationship between man and machine only becomes closer, enslaving one to the other; new systems of reproduction have already begun their industrial phase (photography, sound recording); the very function of art is undergoing a profound upheaval and new mediums of artistic expression are emerging. The sound is not in rest.
By the new needs to which it had to respond, we can say that the city has generated modernity. In fact, modernity has become “the main theme” of the metropolis, modifying social practices and relations in the city, to the point where city and modernity are inseparable, even confounded. We can, moreover, reverse the functions of each of them, and consider the city as infrastructure, that it endows human beings with capacities that they did not yet have - in terms of social exchange, of the reduction of distances -, and that technology is space - insofar as it is capable of creating new spaces of expression (through the telephone), or spaces of contemplation and listening of which temporality can be modulated thanks to recording (through the radio, through the medium of the record).
What has the arrival of the metropolis modified on the human perceptive apparatus? What about these changes in the present time? In this research, I decided to focus on the city of Berlin - widely studied at the beginning of the century for its spatial, social and artistic upheavals - and more precisely on the sonic level. What has the metropolis brought to the auditory apparatus and what has it modified in order to profoundly change its relationship to sound, and a fortiori to music?
