COMPARACIÓN Y RELACIÓN DE LAS RESPUESTAS DE LOS

A meta-question. What kinds of things is it possible to know about the soundscape? Concepts of what non-academic professionals working within the soundscape would do are few. There are two main concepts I have found: Schafer's Soundscape Designer, and Lefebvre's (1992) Rhythmanalysis.

2.7.1 The Soundscape Designer

Schafer's Soundscape Designer (Schafer, 1994) is the common paradigm for built en- vironment researchers. As we have already established, the majority of soundscape research has a heavy policy, planning and design focus. Schafer imagines that one day we have professionals who design soundscapes: someone who would work with an architect perhaps, or be consulted when new housing developments are planned, or construct sound contexts for a new library. The soundscape composer might also cross over with `sensory

branding', designing complete sound experiences for chain restaurants or shopping centres for instance.

Ideally the soundscape designer would have a background in acoustics, soundscapes and architecture. As a pedagogue, they would aim to teach others in the profession of sound- scape composer, advocate soundscape attention to other built environment professionals, and generally be advocates for listening as a key aspect in design.

While an undoubtedly invaluable job, it's worth thinking about the implications. The soundscape designer may have little or no relevance to laypeople. It is solely a professional occupation, and the soundscape designer must be careful to not project their own sonic tastes on the locations they design. There is a heavy emphasis on intervention to justify the job in itself, with less emphasis perhaps placed on learning about why things are how they are, or using the soundscape as a social barometer, a tool to judge other aspects. Nevertheless, design is something that can be taught, that people can get better at, and within which tastes are established. Opening dialogues on all these issues seems important in concert with the competency most laypeople have at judging visual design as well.

2.7.2 The Rhythmanalyst

Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis covers in great detail the author's ideas of how rhythms both literally and metaphorically permeate everyday life. Lefebvre denes the competencies and interests of the eponymous profession:

The rhythmanalyst will have some points in common with the psychoanalyst, although he dierentiates himself from the latter: the dierences go further than the analogies.

He will be attentive, but not only to the words or pieces of information, the confessions and condences or a partner or client. He will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning and nally he will listen to silences. (p19)

The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to jump from the inside to the outside of observed bodies; he should come listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the outside with the inside and vice versa.

For him, nothing is immobile. He hears the wind, the rain, storms; but if he considers a stone, a wall, a trunk, he understands their slowness, their interminable rhythm. This object is not inert; time is not set aside for the subject. It is only slow in relation to our time, to our body, the measure of rhythms. An apparently immobile object, the forest, moves in multiple ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it (the object, the forest). The object resists a thousand aggressions but breaks up in humidity or conditions of vitality, the profusion of minuscule life. The attentive ear, it makes a noise like a seashell. (p20)

This passage outlines the kinds of aspects a rhythmanalyst should and would notice, with a specic focus on the unwanted or unnoticed, and over dierent time periods. In this context, Schafer's soundmarks and soundscapes are spectacle in the true Debordian sense (Debord, 1983): Lefebvre invites the listener to notice the sound and rhythms of everything, not simply search for the `perfect', spectacular soundscape. Capitalist production has unied space, which is no longer bounded by external societies. This unication is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization (Debord, 1983, para 165). Perhaps Schafer, then, bored of the city, and as a lover of novel sounds, sought refuge in the border wilderness. Lefebvre however wants us to examine the minute, the unnoticed, the silences and murmurs.

Lefebvre also specically discusses rhythms outside the simply diurnal interesting, given that sounds take time as much as space to produce. Is time, and therefore rhythm, a neglected factor in soundscape research? I would argue it is plenty of research describes the what or the how under investigation, or even the when in very simplistic terms, but doesn't report the gaps, the timings, the ephemeral nature of the in-between aspects to a sound environment. Again, social context is a factor. Waiting for an intermittent alarm to begin again can be nerve-wracking if it is every day passing one on the street though

is unlikely to be noticed. Lefebvre also describes a job that is fundamentally about bodily experience, measuring and reporting on the environment as a music critic would respond to a recording in keeping with Cage (1961).

Lefebvre goes on to describe some useful nomenclature regarding the semantic inferences of analysing rhythms. In parallel with Butler (1990) he develops the concept of Dressage, a form of performativity akin to breaking-in horses.

Gestures cannot be attributed to nature. Proof: they change according to societies, eras. Old lms show that our way of walking has altered of the course of our century: once jauntier, a rhythm that cannot be explained by the capturing of images.

[. . . ]

Humans break themselves in [se dressant] like animals. They learn to hold themselves. Dressage can go a long way: as far as breathing, movements, sex. It bases itself on repetition. One breaks-in another human living being by making them repeat a certain act, a certain gesture or movement. (Lefebvre, 1992, p38-39)

Therefore Lefebvre implies that humans learn how to listen, how to perform sound, when to perform sound, and what is appropriate. In terms of understanding what is acceptable, right, or decent what an appropriate noise level is it is therefore vital to remember this is bodily, and situated knowledge. Similarly, our knowledge of what is an appropriate noise for something to make inuences our cultural sense of listening.

Lefebvre and Schafer, therefore, have very dierent approaches as pedagogues. Schafer epitomises the architecture-planning-acoustics school of soundscape thought, where design, improvement, measurement and recording are the key values. Schafer has a tendency to the spectacular emphasising the novel, geographically distant, or hi- over the mundane, geographically local, or lo- but nevertheless is an emphatically practical approach for soundscape evangelism. In contrast, Lefebvre epitomises the ethnographic, the social text, the critical theorist's attention to the unnoticed. This is an approach of detail, of sensitivity to the ebb and ow of life. There are few little practical applications

however: this is a guidebook for an essay writer rather than a city planner. Together, the two contrast well however, and provide a spectrum of pedagogical guidance.