Living soundscapes, historic cities and the design of urban landscape: a case study: soundscapes Oltrarno

The first woman cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, has given an interesting account of the perceptual experiences in space, reporting that she longed for the sounds of nature, especially those of rain, despite the fabulous visual landscape she enjoined, looking out from the space-station. Also, the space-station dweller, in Tarkovski’s movie Solaris, similarly deprived of such sounds, put silk papers in front of the ventilator in order to imitate the wind . Such stories underline the importance of the sonic environment in carrying memories and identities, and underline the way human beings associate meanings and values to sounds. Actually, the sonic environment, “is not just something external, as visual culture make us to think it might be, yet is also an emotional and mnemonic landscape.” Thus, the term soundscape, coined by R. Murray Schafer in the Seventies , refers to all the sounds we live in, as percettema, that is to say: the object of the perception referred to a subjetc. Such definiton (of soundscape) immediately recalls to our mind the definiton of landscape as written by the European Landscape Convention, drawn in Florence in 2000: the definition actually states that landscape means “an area, as perceveid by populations, which character derives from the action of natural and/or human factors, and from their interrelationships” . A pioneering definition that refers to an idea of landscape no longer static, “framed”, result of a strictly visual relation between the subject and the area, yet defined by experiences, uses, and by the most diverse ways of life of the populations living in; yet, if landscape takes its origin from the experience of everyday life, made by proximity and relations, and never mute aspeptic remote, it is evident that such experience should take into consideration the sonic dimension of everyday life. Aim of the paper is to foster the integration of the Soundscape Studies in the field of the Landscape Studies, and to show all the potentialities of the soundscape design, by a critical review of the most important case studies developed in Europe over the last decade. Specifically, the paper deals with the renewal of the urban soundscape in the historic city of Florence, by a review of the case study: Soundscape Oltrarno. In Florence, Oltrarno is a diverse neighborhood of social and economic activity including craft workshops, universities, restaurants, churches, and piazzas. These activities produce distinctive and fascinating sounds – a craftsperson soldering steel window grates, young people singing together at a bar, church bells ringing in the late afternoon. This sonic richness is obscured by noise pollution created by automobile traffic. In the future, the act of replacing noisy, gas-fueled vehicles with quiet city cars and scooters will allow Oltrarno to recapture its sound identity. The question is, what sounds will substitute for the motors and horns? Soundscapes Oltrarno aims to facilitate the creation of spaces through digital technologies that can mitigate or counteract the steady drone or deafening roar of automobile traffic. The audio-based intervention investigated in this study aims not only to address the traffic noise that obscures the sound identities of places in Oltrarno, but also looks to engage the burgeoning youth culture in the neighborhood. The immaterial yet highly creative nature of sound allows for self-expression while avoiding a physical imprint. Soundscapes Oltrarno also uses sound to activate, bring content, or call attention to the small spaces, or “nooks,” throughout the neighborhood that are often overlooked. Finally, by harnessing digital technologies such as audio spotlights, digital music players, mobile phones, and multi-track recording software – both in the city and on the Internet – Soundsapes Oltrarno establishes an ‘open source’ process by which neighborhood residents and visitors can create, capture, manipulate and expose sounds in the public spaces of the city.