Acoustic and Imagined Communities

Text: Heikki Uimonen

On Saturday 3rd May at 04:00, we started the traffic count and 24-hour recording with our colleagues from Cresson. We were determined to categorise all the vehicles and people in the centre of Lesconil: cars, boats, bicycles, pedestrians, etc., in order to detect any changes in traffic flow compared to the studies carried out in 1975 and 2000.

As well as counting traffic, we recorded 10-minute samples of the soundscape every hour and made a sensory evaluation of the environment. As avid ethnographers, we were interested in anything that could tell us about the life and people in the vicinity of the observation post. The post was deliberately chosen on the other side of the bay from the village centre and its restaurants. This was to avoid recording  the soundscape composed only of the diners and cars passing by.  

My shifts were scheduled to start at 8:00 and 9:00. The morning was exceptionally sunny and warm, the traffic was modest and even the ever-present wind of Lesconil did not manage to interfere too much with the recording of the soundscape. Lots of seagulls, of course. A couple of small pleasure boats sailed back and forth from the harbour. A fisherman was working on his boat, a camper was checking his vehicle on the other side of the pier. Metal ashtrays clanked as they were carried to the tables by the waiter. Cyclists passed by, pedestrians were on their way to the nearby shops.

The acoustic community of Lesconil seemed quite idyllic. However, it should be remembered that it is only possible for me to get a general idea of what I expect to happen during the ten minutes I observed the site and hoping not to jump into conclusions. The data collected in this way will be mainly quantitative and will support the qualitative data collected from local people.

During the first shift, my attention was drawn to a single sound event. A woman was sitting on the balcony of a nearby apartment building, looking at her smartphone. An opera aria, barely audible in the soundscape recording, could be heard from inside the building. At that particular moment and place, her affordance was constructed from a real-time acoustic environment and a two-channel mediated reality of 19th century opera and smartphone media feeds.

Imagine her on a balcony in 1975. The source of the music would have been a vinyl record, a cassette or a radio. She would have been reading about current events in a local or national newspaper. She might even have been reading a book, as it happened to be a Saturday and a day off. She would have listened to the news on the radio. Her acoustic community at the time would have been influenced by an Andersonian imagined community, either through print or electro-acoustic media. The news would have been reported on public radio, as commercial radio was not listened to at the time. The exception, of course, would have been if a European pirate radio station such as Radio Luxembourg had broadcast to Lesconil.

Media deregulation began in France in the 1980s. The changes appear to have been similar elsewhere, as all the villages studied were previously covered by publicly funded media. Deregulation was followed by digitisation, albeit at a slightly different pace in each country. In Cembra, Italy we managed to track down the jukebox mentioned in previous studies and found that its use is now restricted to special occasions in the bar, such as when customers want to sing along to the nostalgic music of their youth. Streamed music services are well on the way in public spaces, too. A quick survey among entrepreneurs revealed the use of international media conglomerate platforms such as YouTube or commercial background music services.