[ecrea] CfP: Conference - The Role and Position of Sounds and Sounding Arts in Public Urban Environments

*Conference Call for Papers

The Role and Position of Sounds and Sounding Arts in Public Urban 
Environments

Conference dates: 29-30 November 2016

Location: Leiden University, the Netherlands

Introduction to the Conference Topic*
Sound is among the most significant, yet least-discussed, aspects of 
public spaces in urban environments (Hosokawa 1984; Kang and 
Schulte-Fortkamp 2016). Architects, engineers, and urban planners 
invariably stress the visual and tactile aspects while (re)designing 
urban environments but often pay less attention to the aural 
consequences of their interventions; sound tends to be considered mainly 
as an inevitable byproduct of industrial areas, traffic, commercial 
centers, and/or human activities. If sound attracts the attention of 
policy makers and users of public urban spaces, it is often in a rather 
negative context: as noise pollution which should be avoided by somehow 
reducing the amount of decibels (Devilee, Maris, van der Kamp 2010; 
Elmqvist 2013; Kamin 2015).

In contrast, this conference aims to increase the attention to the role 
of sound, sound design, and sounding art in urban spaces – with sound 
considered both as an epistemological tool and as an aesthetic instrument.

Sounds in urban spaces – including the “omnipresence” of music – 
(co-)regulate our behavior, attract specific groups that give a space a 
specific identity, call for certain actions, make us nauseated, etc.; 
sounds thus have social, political, ethical, and economic power. 
Reflections on everyday urban soundscapes - their features as well as 
the way they are used and experienced – could lead to a new theory of 
sonic ecology.

Furthermore, sounding art has the potential to contribute directly to an 
improvement of city soundscapes, while a more fundamental and scholarly 
attention to sounds in public urban spaces can lead to a concrete 
contribution to already existing discourses in urban studies, history, 
anthropology, and philosophy.

In this conference three questions will play a central role:

1.    How do sounds in general and sounding art in particular contribute 
to the general atmosphere of a public urban space?

2.    How do users of that space - dwellers, tourists, people working in 
that neighborhood, passersby - experience its sonic qualities and how 
does that influence their behavior as well as the function of that space?

3.    How can we, on a theoretical level, develop a new sonic ecology?

*Keynote speakers: *Salomé Voegelin, Gascia Ouzounian, Holger Schulze, 
and Jean-Paul Thibaud.

*Conference Coordinator: *Prof. dr. M.A. (Marcel) Cobussen

((M.A.Cobussen /at/ umail.leidenuniv.nl) <mailto:(M.A.Cobussen /at/ umail.leidenuniv.nl)>)

*Abstracts: *Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to 
Gabriel Paiuk (acpa /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) <mailto:(acpa /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)> 
before October 1, 2016. Submitters will be informed before October 15.

The conference is sponsored by KNAW, LUF, JSS, and ACPA (Leiden University)

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