#2 - Sound and town planning : Interview with Michael Bull

DOWNLOAD        

After the arrival on the scene of mobile music players in the 1980s, urban spaces stopped being completely public and became “private space” in our everyday city life.

Michael Bull is one of the creators on a European level of the academic field designated as Sound Studies. By focussing on the importance of listening in the cultural context rather than in the field of music, the books he published ten years ago have become an essential reference for a new generation of researchers. Bull’s pieces of research have attracted researchers who have expressed curiosity regarding sounds and their social and political features from the fields of historiography, cultural critique, sociology and art.

Even though his activities are currently based on the plurality of senses, the research conducted into “mobile sounds” has proven very helpful for understanding contemporary urban planning, public architectures and “non-places”. Bull shows us the sound spaces of cars and other types of public transport, which, in particular after the arrival on the scene of mobile music players in the 1980s, stopped being completely public and became “private space” in our everyday city life. His most well-known research cases were on the Walkman and the iPod. By highlighting the capacity of these two devices to develop audiovisual subjectivity when we relate to city spaces, he explains the trend in personalisation or privatisation suffered by the collective perception of the city through the senses.

In this interview Michael Bull analyses for us several forms of altered, intensified or reduced perceptions that put us in contact with our surroundings.

Recommended reading:
No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening. M.Bull.

13 min. : soinua ; 49 MB ; MP3

https://audio-lab.org/blog/2014/11/17/arkitektura-belarriz-2-soinua-et ...

Basque, English