LA Listens is a collaboration between a sound ethnographer, acoustic ecologist, and a composer/music technologist. Our project takes a multidisciplinary approach to listening to the interrelationships between the sensory, social, and ecological aspects of streets in Los Angeles.
This project started when I realized in my then new job as a Public Fellow at the City of Los Angeles the role that sound research can play in adding to the conversations about urban planning and development. At the time, open data initiatives were in fashion. Digital mapping became a common planning tool. But city departments had no conduit through which to learn how neighborhoods were doing on the ground.
So I began doing sound walks and collaborating with an oral historian in Boyle Heights where to learn about the various aspects of neighborhood development in East Los Angeles. We also did some rhythmanalysis of the vehicular traffic and found out that the traffic moved at a 2-second interval in the neighborhood — which could be a metric for street safety.
We made field recordings of the neighborhoods in downtown, Northeast LA, Boyle Heights, and Frogtown near the LA River. We created a database of the field recordings and made them available for public use via a Creative Commons license.
We explored broad inquiries such as: What are the sonic characteristics of a dangerous intersection? What is the sonic identity of street-side vibrancy as defined various stakeholders including residents, urban planners, and city’s officials? What is the sonic relationship between sanctioned and unsanctioned social activities? How do sounds (re)mediate neighborhood cultural identities? What is the relationship between human and non-human organisms in this urban landscape?
In collaboration with MIT Community Innovators Lab (Colab), we published our findings. We also worked with the fine folks at MIT to initiate a series of sound walks in many cities in the world including: Milano, Italy; Accra, Ghana; Mexico City, Houston; Nashville; Portland, Maine, and more.
More:
LA Listens website
LA Listens in MIT Arts
Listening to the City handbook
Credits:
Umi Hsu: ethnomusicology, soundwalk, field recordings
Steven Kemper: music technology, musical information retrieval, analysis
Jessica Blickley: ecology
Rounak Maiti: research assistance, social media