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economist Jacques Attali famously stated, ‘Change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society’.12 In order to perceive the changes, however, we need to adopt an acute sense of hearing and perhaps take cues from Lo, Ogboh and Kubisch. ‘Listening to the internal structure, specific occasions and different sound phenomenon occurring in the city or even listening to events such as political demonstrations, we can already perceive and generate different meanings for the city’, explains Lo in an email. In order to spur this dialogue, Ogboh often broadcasts his tracks internationally and has even invited other artists, some of whom have never stepped foot in his city, to remix his field recordings. Today it seems quite possible, after all, that a sound artist on the other side of the globe could predict the future sound of Lagos. g
Edwin Lo: www.rabbit-travelogue.com/fragments/ Christina Kubisch: www.christinakubisch.de Emekah Ogboh: www.14thmay.com
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1 Ogboh, Emeka, Email to author, 13 July 2010. 2 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 30 Largest Urban Agglomerations Ranked by Population Size at Each Point in Time, 1950-2025. New York, 2009. 3 Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso, 2006. p133 4 Nwagboga, Aza, Curatorial Statement for This is Lagos: Sound Installations by Emeka Ogboh and Paintings by Bob Aiwerioba. 12 February 2009. 5 Lo, Edwin. ‘History of Scenes #1: Fragments, Sound, Memory’, in Around, ed. Yeung Yang. Hong Kong: Soundpocket, 2010. p33 6 ‘Create Culture Interview from Nigeria: Emeka and the Soundscapes of Lagos’, last modified August 11, 2010, http://www.createculture.org/profiles/ blogs/cc-interview-from-nigeria. 7 Chui, Timothy. ‘Loud and clear lesson on earphone dangers’. The Standard, March 3, 2008. 8 Oduemev, Stella. ‘Fighting Against Pollution in Lagos’. Daily Independent, January 10, 2010. 9 ‘Invisible Cities: An Interview with Christina Kubisch by Christoph Cox’. Cabinet Magazine 21 (Spring 2006): 93-96. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
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Ogboh similarly credits BRT for an ‘extinction’ of the present soundscape.6 Yet the possibility of framing select portions of the audible spectrum and protecting it as if it were a historic building sets forth an impossible task. And an overdose of any sound, regardless of its one-of-a-kind nature, is noise – something both Hong Kong and Lagos already have too much of. A recent study in Hong Kong revealed that 14% of schoolchildren are unable to hear below 25 decibels (the sound of wind blowing through a tree) as a result of drowning out everyday noise with headphones amplifying tunes up to 100 decibels.7 In Lagos, over 60% of public school students have a noise-induced hearing impairment.8 Everyday sounds are simply unable to be collected, recycled or exported in a manner used for most waste products. But is it the mere multiplication of sound or furthermore the increasing sameness that poses a threat? German artist Christina Kubisch picked up on the latter phenomenon – ‘a globalization of sound’ – while organising Electrical Walks across Europe, Asia and both North and South America.9 This ongoing project initiated in 2003 invites locals to don headphones that use electromagnetic induction to amplify the charges of cash machines, lighting systems, transformers, security and surveillance systems, computers, etc. Each system emits a characteristic sound – WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS systems are ‘nervous, crispy, irregular’ and heavily trafficked areas such as a train stations are ‘full, heavy, and dusty with sound’.10 But as a result of widespread distribution of identical technologies, recurring rhythms can be traced across the globe: ‘You could just mark them with little dots. They even have the same sound systems all over the world… So this is something that I think would be very interesting: to see a network of little dots showing where things are and where they are spreading’.11 The morphology of urban sound is certainly an inevitable process, and in some cases for the best, but the potentially brief lifespan of soundscapes doesn’t negate their potential as a valuable research tool. Perhaps sound is a better mirror of today’s urban conditions than the slower pace of physical construction—French