ABOUT
When we encounter the city in an everyday commute we hear many different sounds — cars, lorries, buses, people walking and talking; loud ambulance, police and fire-engine sirens; underground and overground trains, airplanes and helicopters, motorcycles, building construction sites, at times music, rain and wind; in London even foxes and exceptionally loud robins.
An everyday commute through the city is also a commute through its distinct soundscape. If I stop, and actively listen, I recognise patterns that form within the overwhelming cacophony — there are sounds that occur more than others. One of the strangely recurring sounds when navigating public spaces in London is the sound of a female voice. The disembodied female voice projected through a set of speakers continuously guides, warns and informs people in their everyday — the underground, train stations and buses, even the supermarket self-checkout machines or the default settings for personal assistants on our smartphones. Why is the disembodied female voice so ubiquitous in the neoliberal city?
The everyday we live in is a world where knowledge formation as well as its transmission are inherently visual — written, drawn, seen, shown and displayed — to see, in a society that privileges vision, means to understand. To focus on hearing then is to imagine, to wonder, to speculate and to question. Active listening to various sounds throughout the neoliberal city allows us to discern the structural and societal mechanisms that determine our everyday lives. By neoliberal I refer to the political process that rendered urban assets and built environments as crucial in the current forms of capitalist accumulation. Most spatial changes occurring in the built environment are thus evidence of a hegemonic project. Listening to the recurring disembodied female voice in particular speaks about the notions of gender and forms of control in the modern city governed by neoliberal ideology.
I argue active listening to the neoliberal city is an inherently feminist project, since it is refusing to accept the everyday sounds as simply the way things are. In this work I critically attune to the city by way of active listening, to understand structural forces that comprise it. Listening is a useful investigative tool for the built environment, especially for the ways in which sociopolitical processes affect, and are in turn affected by, existing and changing spatial structures.
This website functions as an original sound archive for the disembodied female voice in public spaces - starting from London, expanding to different countries and languages. By simplifying the categories, users are able to easily interact with the archive and upload their own recordings from their own everyday. Its initial aim is to collect a bigger amount of recordings in order to be able to compare them, and draw conclusions. As the database grows, so does the structure of the archive change - more qualities can be juxtaposed, more public spaces compared.
Does the way the voice instructs depend on the typology of space in which it occurs? Why do security announcements sound the same as platform informations? Does the voice change based on the amount of people it addresses? Do female voices aimed at individuals sound more seductive?
Sound Archive notation
The archive is structured based on the public space in which the voice is projected, as well as the way in which it gives information, instructions and orders. The colour of the circle represents the type of public space, and the size represents how often an individual hears it in their everyday. Smaller circles show less often experienced spaces and their appurtenant disembodied female voices. The screen is used to visually represent the quality of the voice.
As the archive grows, its form will begin to morph around received recordings. Since sound perception relies on acoustic qualities of space as much as it does on psychology of the listener (what sounds benevolent and natural to me sounds perhaps authoritative to someone with a different cultural background). It is currently in its initial stage of the journey of adapting to new material and adopting new approaches of displaying and interacting with it.