[Commlist] Call for Papers: Listening to the City. The Cinematic Metropolis and the Soundscape of Modernity

Cfp

/Listening to the City. The Cinematic Metropolis and the Soundscape of 
Modernity
/

Journal: /Imago. Studi di cinema e media, /no. 34/2026
Editors: Lorenzo Marmo and Arianna Vergari
Deadline for abstract proposals: May 4, 2026

At the conclusion of his essay /Modernity: The Troubled Trope /(2011), 
Thomas Elsaesser underscores the necessity of a paradigm shift in the 
study of urban modernity, emphasizing the significance of the 
soundscape—an analytical component that has been historically overlooked 
in favor of the dominance of the visual dimension. Building on the 
pioneering reflections of Raymond Murray Schafer (The Soundscape, 1977), 
numerous studies, particularly post-2000, have focused on the cultural 
meanings, transformations, and stratifications of the acoustic fabric of 
daily life, identifying it as an indispensable element for a more 
profound understanding of modern experience (Emily Thompson, /The 
Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of 
Listening in America, 1900-1933/, 2002; Veit Erlmann, ed., /Hearing 
Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity/, 2004). The field of 
Film & Media Studies has also contributed to this discourse (James 
Lastra, /Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, 
Representation, Modernity/, 2000), though there remains a need for a 
more in-depth analysis of the relationships between the diverse sonic 
dimensions of the metropolis, cinema, and other media, framed within the 
updated perspective of contemporary media archaeology.

This dossier, therefore, seeks to accomplish a twofold objective. First, 
it aims to investigate the ways in which cinema has represented and 
staged the city as an acoustic environment. By engaging with both silent 
and sound cinema, with avant-garde, documentary, narrative, and genre 
films, the goal is to map the polyvalent sonic discourse of modernity in 
its myriad socio-historical and political implications. Simultaneously, 
from an intermedial perspective, the dossier aspires to fully capture 
the intertwining between the aesthetics of film and the 
historical-theoretical contributions of other disciplines: from musical 
discourse to the material history of sound technologies, from radio 
studies to architectural considerations on the acoustic design of 
spaces. Our intention is to strengthen the dialogue between the analysis 
of cinematic sound, pioneered by scholars such as Michel Chion 
(/Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen/, 1994) and Rick Altman (/Sound 
Theory/Sound Practice/, 1992), and the broader frameworks of Sound 
Studies (Jonathan Sterne, ed., /The Sound Studies Reader/, 2012), 
situating this dialogue within the specific context of the modern 
metropolis.

Sound constitutes a fundamental element of environmental perception, 
which cinema and other media adopt in order to evoke and re-create a 
particular urban spatiality. In this regard, the concept of atmosphere 
(Tonino Griffero, Agostino Petrillo, eds., /Atmosfere urbane/, 2024; 
Christian Borch, ed., /Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and 
Politics of Architecture/, 2014) proves to be particularly productive, 
as it synthesizes the complex negotiation shaping the spatial experience 
of the subject: a negotiation between interiority, the realm of 
language, and the forms of sound most closely related to corporeality. 
Moreover, the German term for atmosphere, Stimmung, etymologically 
connected to the voice (Stimme), effectively highlights the interaction 
and foundational dialectic between the dimension of Logos and other 
acoustic-sonic manifestations: from music to various noises, from cries 
to the texture of the voice itself (Roland Barthes, /The Grain of the 
Voice/, 1977). The sonic atmosphere of modernity is of course deeply 
intertwined with technology. The acoustic life of the metropolis is 
populated by auditory devices, ranging from the radio and gramophone to 
the telephone and microphone, from loudspeakers to alarm sirens. In this 
context, the transition from silent to sound cinema represents merely 
one stage in the broader history of sound’s metamorphoses as a cultural 
technique and technology (Friedrich Kittler, /Gramophone, Film, 
Typewriter/, 1999; Steven Connor, /Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of 
Ventriloquism/, 2000; Wolfgang Ernst, /Sonic Time Machines: Explicit 
Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity/, 2016).

Geographically, this investigation embraces the transnational dimension 
characteristic of modernity as a whole. Temporally, it spans the decades 
from the 1920s to the 1960s. The discourse is metaphorically opened with 
the verses of Walt Whitman which inspired /Manhatta/ (Charles Sheeler, 
Paul Strand, 1921), and extends to the songs of /West Side Story/ 
(Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, 1961), passing through the female scream 
that morphs into the whistle of a train in /The 39 Steps/ (Alfred 
Hitchcock, 1935), and the recorded voice of Hitler reverberating amidst 
the ruins of Berlin in /Germany, Year Zero/ (Roberto Rossellini, 1948). 
This narrowing of focus is motivated by a discernible trajectory that 
marks the aesthetic experience of the metropolis. From the early 
twentieth-century celebration of urban dynamism, we transition to a 
sense of failure and impasse in late modernity, followed by a sense of 
euphoric revival in the metropolis of the 1950s, even as the logic of 
postmodern simulacra begins to take hold. The ways in which cinema, 
radio, and the emerging discourse of television have re-mediated this 
tension between celebration and crisis constitutes one of the central 
interpretive junctures that the dossier, through its focus on sound, 
seeks to explore.

In particular, we aim to reflect upon the following key issues:

1)The city symphonies: from the aspiration of silent cinema to 
synesthetically convey the rhythms of the metropolis (Ruttmann, Vertov) 
to the playful and discrepant refractions of the second avant-garde 
(Pennebaker, Menken, Klein);
2)The use of sound in the genres that portray the city (musical, noir, 
melodrama), as an essential component of the ambivalent approach with 
which popular cinema has often engaged with the metropolis, seen as a 
dangerous yet fascinating context;
3)The city as a sonic body: the specific role of voice and sound within 
the longstanding organicist metaphors that continue to permeate the 
discourse on urban modernity;
4)The function performed by radio, and even more so by telephone lines 
(consider, for example, the archetypal imagery of the switchboard and 
its operator), in mapping the city as an increasingly interconnected 
space, increasingly permeated by a logic of communicative speed and 
simultaneity;
5)The role of sound in relation to the public/private dichotomy that 
structures the metropolitan experience: the collective, communal, and 
choral dimension in contrast to the sphere of anonymity, isolation, and 
intimacy;
6)The sounds of capitalism: the noise of labor as a fundamental element 
of the modern urban soundscape, but also the role of sound in leisure 
time, as a form of recreation (for instance, through various 
technologies for music reproduction, from radio to records);
7)The voice, both in its concrete and symbolic senses, in dialogue as 
well as in voice-over, as a powerful tool for narrating the new 
configurations of subjectivity linked to urban modernity, primarily in 
relation to gender;
8)The linguistic differences in the metropolis’s melting pot: the city 
as a layered fabric of discursive and dialogical practices in relation 
to migration and subalternity;
9)The way in which various non-verbal forms of bodily expression 
(screams, crying, sobbing, exclamations, whistles) and the emotions 
associated with them can evoke specific configurations of urban experience;
10)Silence and its expressive-symbolic potential: on the one hand, as a 
refuge from the cacophony of the urban clamor; on the other, as a means 
to convey the anguishing dimension of fear and isolation;
11)The creative, often contrapuntal use of the relationship between 
image and soundtrack, or between dialogue and other auditory components 
in sound cinema, in order to account for the multisensorial aspect of 
the urban experience;
12)The relationship between cinematic soundtracks, both intra- and 
extra-diegetic ones, and the metamorphoses of music, in both its ‘high’ 
and popular forms: music as a powerful tool for condensing the urban 
atmosphere, from Gershwin to the sonorities of jazz;
13)The multiple functions of radio broadcasting in the metropolitan 
space: from entertainment to information, to the widespread and 
efficient dissemination of authoritarian ideological discourses;
14)The acoustic dimension of architectural design, particularly in 
relation to spaces such as cinemas and concert halls, balancing 
spectacle with scientific rigor;
15)The role of sound in the theoretical reflection on cinema and media 
of the historical period in question, from Eisenstein to Benjamin, also 
in relation to the growing attention currently being given to the body 
in reflections on the spectator experience;
16)The sonic simulacrum: sound’s participation in the interplay between 
absence and presence, its powerful evoking of the immaterial, 
evanescent, and potentially deceptive quality of the mediated narrative 
of the city;
17)Oral history as a methodological tool for narrating the lived 
experiences and traumas that have shaped the urban space;
18)The use of the soundscape as a medium for the immersive (and more or 
less nostalgic) conjuring of the past, in subsequent narrative works set 
in the era under consideration.

Submission details

Proposals, accompanied by an abstract in Italian or English (max. 250 
words), 3-5 bibliographic references, and a brief biography, should be 
submitted no later than May 4, 2026, to the following email addresses: 
(redazione.imago /at/ uniroma3.it) <mailto:(redazione.imago /at/ uniroma3.it)>, 
(lorenzo.marmo /at/ uniroma3.it) <mailto:(lorenzo.marmo /at/ uniroma3.it)>, 
(arianna.vergari /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(arianna.vergari /at/ gmail.com)>.

The results of the selection process will be communicated by May 11. 
Complete essays (up to 40.000 characters, including spaces, abstract, 
and bibliographic references) in Italian or English should be sent by 
July 31, in order to be submitted to the double-blind peer review process.

The call is also available at: 
https://www.consultacinema.org/2026/03/30/ascoltare-la-citta-la-metropoli-cinematografica-e-il-paesaggio-sonoro-della-modernita/ 
<https://www.consultacinema.org/2026/03/30/ascoltare-la-citta-la-metropoli-cinematografica-e-il-paesaggio-sonoro-della-modernita/> 


No payment of any kind will be required from authors at any stage of the 
submission or publication process.



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