Landscapes and gimmicks from the “sounded city”: listening for the nation at the sound archive

Abstract

By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City’s Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it. In doing this I invoke Angel Rama’s classic characterization of the ‘lettered’ city as a ‘sounded’ city and argue that this conceptualization may help us problematize how some of these forms of aurality are shaped, controlled, and circulated within older networks of national power. I also examine their potential to engage denationalized or post-national circulations of knowledge through sound that allow for the establishment of new networks of ‘cultured’ belonging and distinction beyond national borders.