ENTREVISTA A EXPERTOS EN REPOSITORIOS Y RECURSOS

While there is a lot of writing on music, there is little on soundscapes. Attali (1985) has produced the closest thing to a crossover, analysing music production and more specically, commissioning from the perspective of political and cultural demands. Schafer's input has already been covered: a whistle-stop tour from the sacred sounds of the gods, through industrial to the present day. More recent histories are much more specic. Corbin (1998) writes about the culture, class and religion connotations of village

bells in 19th century France. Corbin outlines the roles church bells took in French rural agrarian societies. The acoustic radius of a church dened parish limits, start and stop times for workers, weddings, funerals, special events: indeed, what they were rung for and when became a source of social conict. With the church going out of favour as the seat of local power, but yet church communities being vital elements of local identity, there was an uneasy relationship between the owners of the church bells, village councils, and people.

The bells become highly symbolic symbols of social power. Villagers conspired with the clergy to hide village bells when the calls for war required them to be melted down for cannon. Bells by necessity were forged in situ, in public spaces where pits were dug and families added some of their silverware for luck. Parishes with overlapping acoustic radii became rivals, and constantly tried to `out-do' each other, ringing them more often, more loudly, and for longer.

Bijsterveld (2001) examines noise abatement in Europe and North America from 1900-40, which is much more than simply a rundown of the legislation, taking in as it does the historical and social contexts of the individuals self-tasked with introducing noise abate- ment legislation. It examines changing attitudes to sounds and soundscape preferences, and how these came about through social values at the time. Social text again is key to the analysis: what sounds represent in this case, the move to an industrial landscape is much more important than the sounds themselves.

There are other historical texts: these two are given as examples of acoustic readings of historical documents. We do not have recordings from the time about the sounds discussed, and are reliant on archival evidence. There is a heavy emphasis on sounds as social text, something which seems abandoned in modern quantitative contexts. Perhaps it is worth considering modern soundscape research in a historical context: the direct lineage much of it has to the European noise directives, and the political context from whence they emerged, would be an interesting area of study.

century sounds: what will they make of how our cities sounded? As a pedagogical approach, considering the tastes of the present time in context could be an interesting way to attempt the mode of listening that Schafer associates with the tourist, surely a valuable skill for any critical listener. Even with a recording, the social values of our time will clearly be lost, and the skills that Smith (2004) suggests will still be as important as now.

2.4 `Hearing' sounds into non-soundscape texts

This is a very awkwardly titled section, but further following Smith (2004) and his pedagogical focus reading listening styles into antique texts, I attempt to read soundscapes into other authors' works. The most obvious candidate here is the classic âneury of Jacobs (1961), who produced one of the most engaging, free-form and compelling texts on the urban experience and urban planning, cited over 10,000 times in other works (according to Google Scholar3_{). In many ways this is a clear match with Schafer (1977),}

but for the built environment rather than the soundscape: many bold ideas, held together convincingly, using a combination of life experience, statistics, media analysis, and at times, unadulterated personal taste: but tempered with a lack of self-reexivity and a Western, middle-class overtone. As Nash (1996) points out, landscape imagery and the ability to view landscape according to ideas of picturesque taste, helped secure the social and cultural authority and status of white, upper- and middle-class men in Britain in the late eighteenth century.

Jacobs focusses on city use and safety, and has a premise that the latter can only be assured through making the streets a place people want to be. Contrary to the architectural practice of the time and its focus on vast, single-use developments, Jacobs highlights the need for city blocks to be mixed use. People then act as the unconscious police of a space,

she argues an example being the amount of, in her view, unsavoury behaviour that happens in city parks: in other words, places away from the streets people inhabit. While Jacobs does not mention any sensory mode, her idea of self-policing streets seems unerringly about acoustic surveillance, even though the book itself focusses unerringly on the visual. Many buildings she speaks of that are designed to compartmentalise and separate people are badly acoustically designed from a safety perspective it is unlikely a person shouting on the street would be heard by someone on the 15th oor of a tower block, for example unless the window is open and then they are very unlikely to take action.

Jacobs' analysis has many drawbacks however: not least the concept that if she feels safe somewhere, then everyone will. In the grander scheme of things, violence meted out to sexual dissidents and ethnic minorities is almost sanctioned in some places (Namaste, 1996, Vanderbeck, 2005). As an upper-middle class, white western women, doubtless her bias is inherent in her writings. However her attack on the paternalistic city designers who also seem to want to decide how people live their lives, or just move everyone to the country, is insightful and cutting, and it seems slightly remiss of Schafer (1977) to not acknowledge her contribution to theory, when they seem obvious contemporaries.

It would be interesting to see how sound propagation aects people's perceptions of public safety. A study by Valentine (1990) highlights the architectural features that women nd threatening in public spaces. Like most works, it is very visually focused, yet the acoustic subtext is there. The statement women feel safer in the presence or visual range of others (p288) seems to be to be lacking the crucial acoustic dimension. What is more likely, that someone would be in visual range when an attack occurred, or someone would be in aural range? In Jacobs' example, is it more likely that someone would hear something on the street, or see it? I would suspect that the imagined help that could be summoned acoustically was a factor in feelings of safety in Valentine's study.

The places women felt uncomfortable were: multi-storey car parks; public transport bus and train (both waiting for the bus or train, and during the journey); open spaces (parks,

woods, canals, the countryside) and pathways (alleys, subways). To me these reduce to two archetypes where there is noone to hear (open spaces, waiting for a bus, car parks) and where there are acoustic reasons sounds cannot propagate (alley and subways, car parks). One participant said: I hate public toilets and other closed places. I mean nine times out of ten the lights don't work. It's like subways and they're most dubious anyone could attack you there, and nobody would see (Valentine, 1990, p291). `Enclosure' and `lack of other people' are the two key themes: and while these can be attributed to visual factors it would be interesting to further research people's perception of safety in dierent environments. For instance, it seems doubtful that people use portable music players or sing to themselves in places they feel threatened.

Examples of reading soundscapes into texts which do not mention sound are legion, but this section gives an idea of the kinds of readings possible for soundscape researchers. Again this is an example of how other disciplines can give hints to dierent cultural and social readings of the same soundspace. It may be that increasingly reverberant spaces actually create a higher degree of comfort due to how unsettling loud footsteps are at night. It may be that the same spaces feel like more communal areas in the day, reinforcing the sound of human chatter over that of trac. Regardless, a thorough examination of the trade-o between increased noise level, feelings of safety, incidence of crime, sound propagation and architectural design could be of great value to soundscape research, and doing this would require a literature review covering many disciplines.