Between the music of the city and the urban noise

Abstract

Starting from the overvaluation of visual culture in the modes of representation of society, this article draws a time line that goes from the marginalization of sounds promoted by disciplines such as geography, architecture and urban planning, until reaching to the acoustic definition of the landscape. In this way we demonstrate how the landscape is reincorporated in the agenda of these disciplines, not only as something visible, but as a cultural construction of our sensory activity, which is also made of sounds. This explains the anthropocentric nature of the soundscape, using the concepts of “sonorous image” and “sonorous identity” to reveal how sound attributes character to space and humanizes it, that can be seen from a global or local point of view. This in order to conclude how the patrimonial identity of sound is capable of characterizing specific urban contexts, its space, its habits and customs, while the ordinary identity contains a trait of "detachment" that transforms the "music of the city" into an urban noise.