City Sounds

7 min readOct 9, 2020

Listen at spoti.fi/36kDHz1• Collab 4 • 9 October 2020

Notes On Notes is a monthly listening exchange series. One collaborator creates a customized playlist, and the other listens and responds with a selection of non-musical pairings. Collaborators don’t know the themes or motivations beforehand, which helps to keep the process focused on discovery and surprise. “City Sounds,” the October 2020 collaboration, features Notes on Notes founding collaborators Pranathi Diwakar (playlist curator) and Josh Babcock (respondent). The playlist and pairings are accessible below. You can also check out previous collaborations on Medium and Instagram. Care to collaborate? DM or email us: notesonnotesonnotesonnotes@gmail.com.

Playlist by Pranathi

Many of us live in cities, and the sounds of the city are ubiquitous in our experiences of making sense of the jumble of people, automobiles, streets, and interactions that constitute urban life. In making this playlist, I was looking for songs that sample sounds I associate with life in the city, like cars honking, subway announcements, the rattle of a bus on a gravelly street. The city that is conjured up by this playlist starts at 6 pm when you exit the subway and stretches into poetry for the wee hours of the morning.

I discovered quickly that searching for songs with the keywords “streets” versus “roads” leads to musically different results: “streets” are invoked primarily by hip-hop artists and “roads” are a favorite of country singers. This dichotomy obviously elides the urban-rural configuration of cities in the Global South, but it was a useful reminder of the association of cities (particularly inner cities) with Blackness in the U.S. and the corollary link between country music and its white fan-base with roads and a sense of unhampered automobility. The association of blackness with the “streets” has often done more harm than good, resulting in stereotypes with very serious consequences such as the policing and killing of Black lives. I made this playlist shortly after George Floyd was killed, and songs in this playlist reflect the horrific antagonism against Black bodies in cities carried out by those sanctioned by the state to cause harm. But in hearing these records of city life and its constituent sounds through a predominantly hip-hop heavy line-up, I am reminded of hip-hop’s success in incorporating what is often dismissed as “noise”—traffic, crowds, machines—into its very aesthetic fabric. In doing so, the music also serves as commentary, protest, and critique of a society that systematically undervalues and persecutes Blackness.

Pranathi Diwakar appreciates good tunes, good naps, and good writing. She’s also a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Listen to the playlist here.

Response by Josh

For months, cities around the world were quieter than they’d ever been. Today, they’re getting louder again. As I listened to this playlist, what began as an almost nostalgic listening experience—a pleasant reminder of the once-frenetic aural energies of city life, now dampened by the pandemic—quickly became an omen: of “normalcy” resumed prematurely, of ongoing violence and Black death at the hands of the state, or to which the state turns a willful blind eye. The playlist’s high-energy, percussive, lyric-dense flows are punctuated by moments of meditative, instrumental calm and the occasional soundscape, the musique concrète of the daily commute: milling crowds, snippets of passing conversation, rainfall on pavement, heavy machines rumbling as they move bodies in metal boxes along underground rails.

I’ve selected pairings that elaborate my own experience of listening to this playlist, and which I think emphasize the many links between cities and embodiment, at multiple scales. Everyone knows that each city sounds different, but I can’t help but notice how the sounds of New York City dominate our aural imaginaries. Yet even though this playlist is NYC-focused, it still takes me elsewhere, to other cities that I have (or haven’t) been to. Though cities exert their agency on our lives, the unexpected still finds ways to flourish in the gaps. As our cities again become louder, I’m reminded that how we listen to the spaces around us is as important as what we listen for.

Josh Babcock is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago interested in place-based identities and experiences, among other things.

Notes on Pairings

Over the past decades, urban geographers, musicologists, and scholars in the field of interdisciplinary sound studies have called our attention to the importance of sound in our experiences of place. This is especially true in our experiences of cities. However, the urban soundscape is often relegated to a mere backdrop in our daily lives, more notable in its absence than its presence (for instance, when we leave a city and are struck by the quietness of nature). Sudden changes in the urban soundscape also rise to the level of awareness, if only briefly, before the novelty fades and it becomes an invisible backdrop once again.

In a piece titled “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart” (2020), the anthropologist Shannon Mattern points out that, in spite of our habits of erasing the urban soundscape, we’re nevertheless constantly re-tuning our ways of listening in, and to, the city. This re-tuning happens according to “contextual shifts [that] are not always as sudden as a viral pandemic,” but even if we’re not always thinking about them, we’re still responding to the sounds of the city.

This means that our experience of cities is always deeply embodied, both literally and metaphorically: our practices of imagining and listening to cities have historically drawn on the human body as its model. As sensor arrays replace scientists’ ears as tools for “listening” to cities, Mattern admonishes us to be attentive: to relearn how to listen—both to ourselves, and to the people and places around us.

The embodied experience of cities doesn’t just happen at an unconscious level. In The Condemnation of Blackness (2010), professor of history, race, and public policy Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes about the making of Black criminality in the United States. This was brought about through complex interrelationships among policymakers, academics, activists, and reformers, who (mis)used statistical discourses to link Blackness and criminality as an “urban problem” stemming from “Black culture.” This meant that race was submerged in the discussion, but wasn’t actually displaced as a causal explanation underpinning racist policies and strategies for policing Black bodies, which were increasingly associated with cities and city life.

To enlarge beyond my pairings’ U.S. focus, I’m also including the “hybrid documentary” directed by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielk, A Machine to Live In (2020). I should add the caveat that I haven’t yet seen the film, as it hasn’t yet been released (it’s still making its way through the festival circuit and doesn’t yet have a permanent, publicly available presence online). However, even in the trailer, sound, place, and space can be heard coming together in unexpected configurations.

The film is set in the Brazilian capital city of Brasília, which has long been heralded as both a triumph and a horror story of high-Modernist city planning and control: planned and purpose-built from the 1960s to the 1980s, the city is an archetypal expression of urban Modernism, using the spatial arrangement of the city itself as a tool for controlling social life.

Yet even in Brasília, the filmmakers excavate forms of life that weren’t anticipated by the city’s planners and policymakers, but which still found ways to flourish—in UFO cults, in new religious movements, in mystical architecture. The trailer alone is a visually and aurally stunning reminder that efforts at total control are never actually total in their effects, and that even a highly-planned, Modernist urban locale can still be transformed toward alternative utopias through acts of collective meaning-making, not just through acts of tactical- or insurgent urbanism.

Private Screenings for A Machine to Live In

We’re pleased to partner with the filmmakers—as well as with the Anthropology Students Association, Arts, Science + Culture Initiative, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Anthropology, and Sound and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago—to offer both synchronous and asynchronous screenings of A Machine to Live In in October 2020. The screenings will be followed by an optional, Zoom-based discussion among Pranathi, Josh, and interested attendees.

How to Watch

Asynchronous: We’ll provide you with a private, password-protected watch link. You can then watch the film at a time of your choosing between October 12–18 and join us on Oct 16 for the synchronous discussion (if you’re free/feel like it).
Synchronous: Join a Zoom meeting room at 6pm CST on October 16 to watch the film simultaneously with others. Following the synchronous screening (6–7:30pm) and a brief break (7:30–7:45pm), interested participants can join us for a collective discussion (7:45–8:30pm).

If you miss the October 16 synchronous screening and/or October 12–18 asynchronous screenings, look out for screenings of A Machine to Live In happening at a film festival or venue near you (by the time you read this, the film might also be permanently available online). Check for the latest information on the film’s website.

Goldstein, Yoni and Zielk, Meredith (2020) A Machine to Live In. (Runtime 00:87:00). Read the synopsis and watch the trailer at visionsdureel.ch/en/2020/film/a-machine-to-live-in.

Mattern, Shannon (2020) “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart.” Places Journal (online). Read at bit.ly/318wSxO.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran (2010) “Introduction: The Mismeasure of Crime” (but we encourage you to read the whole book). In The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, pp 1–14. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Photos by Daniel Costa and Jenna Day on Unsplash. Design by Josh Babcock.