One Day on Earth: Music, Documentary Film-Making, and Global Soundscapes

Abstract

In Bruce Chatwin’s account of Aboriginal song and travel, The Songlines, the author asked ‘if a musical phrase is a map reference?’ ‘Music’, he is told, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way around the world’ (1987, p. 120). Borrowing from Chatwin, this chapter is concerned less with the sounds of a particular city (although cities figure prominently in its configuration) and more with ways of using music as a means of ‘finding one’s way around the world’. Of course, cities matter; the world is increasingly urban, and over half the global population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2012).1 As journalist, author, and psychogeographer Will Self quipped, this global urban shift has been ‘reflected in the cultural superstructure: there are increasing numbers of books, films and TV and radio programmes about the city’ (2013, p. 10) — including this volume. For authors, artists, and academics the metropolis continues to be the foremost space in which to (try to) sound out the human condition (Auge, 1999). The more people live in them, the more we are fascinated, puzzled, and frustrated by cities. In an increasingly globalized world, perhaps above all else, contemporary cities have become places of paradox and contradiction in immediate and extreme juxtaposition: scenes of vast wealth and abject poverty, great diversity but also shocking intolerance, symbols of hope and despair, fixity and flow, as well as collisions between the past (i.e., memory, heritage) and visions for the future.