Sound Maps and Their Antinomies: From Listening Subject to Audible Objects

Abstract

The article considers the heuristic and epistemological potential of the so-called sound maps. Sound maps are digital resources that allow any city actors to apply labels containing a sound recording of a selected location on the coordinate plane of a city. The purpose of creating such maps and their visual and audio content may vary in the course of filling the map with sound content. Users act here as a kind of “ethnographers of everyday life,” balancing between real and imaginary space. The distant view from above, allowing to cover a vast territory and forming a general idea of the represented area, discretizes the auditory dimension. The map has a certain degree of abstraction as significant fragments on it are highlighted by color, lines, texture, and symbols, while the rest of the space serves as a background or is absent. Due to internal demarcation and delineation by external boundaries, the user is positioned within the proposed “frame,” and sound reveals itself as antinomical, referring to the schematisms of sound perception and going beyond it simultaneously. Sound’s ability to communicate the specificities of space and to become a way of recording personal experience allows it to represent the audible “from the depth of the place” and to actualize the reduced and inaudible, while the use of other media (image, text, video) can hide the traces of mediation and immerse the user in the space of map and sound more fully. The ability of the sound signal to transcend boundaries, both landscape and cartographic, actualizes the question of what is on the “other side” of the map. The map takes the listening subject outward, while space holds it inward. In the case of sound maps, formed precisely as a result of this antinomic tension, in order to maintain epistemic parity and expand the field of possible cognitive operations, it makes sense to maintain a functional balance between the fullest possible disclosure of the content of the labels and the possibility of “hearing” these labels at a distance.

Text in Russian