8
Sonic Urbanism in Beirut
8.1 Hearing Architecture
In 1957 the Danish architect and urban planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen wrote, “I hope that I have been able to convince the reader that it is possible to speak of hearing architecture” (Rasmussen [1957] 1962, 236; emphasis in original). Rasmussen studied the acoustic effects of architectural structures in Copenhagen—museums, tunnels, churches, passageways, town houses—and connected these acoustic effects to specific social and cultural traditions. In a Baroque mansion he found a salon with silk-paneled walls that “absorbed sound and shortened reverberations,” which is to say, a room ideally suited for chamber music (234). In the same mansion he discovered a woman’s boudoir that he likened to “a satin-lined jewelry box,” an intimate space in which friends could gather and whisper the latest gossip (234). Rasmussen’s acoustic readings of architectural spaces were measured and methodical, a world apart from the Futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s fevered call to “cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes” (Russolo [1913] 1986, 26). Russolo hurled himself through the dizzying sensations of city noises, delighting in “distinguishing the eddying of water, the air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags” (26).
Through such sensorial encounters, architecture and urban design, once understood as the domain of form-making, have also come to be understood as practices of sense-making. Perhaps most eloquently articulated by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, who observed that we “stroke the boundaries of . . . space with our ears” (Pallasmaa [1996] 2012, 55), this sensorial approach has reoriented architecture and urbanism by repositioning them in relation to the human body and lived experience. As Pallasmaa wrote, “I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me” (43).
In parallel to this sensorial awakening there have been countless calls for architects and planners to embrace sound and “sonic thinking” within their practices. In 1969 the urban designer Michael Southworth warned that it was “no longer sufficient to design environments that satisfy the eye alone” and urged planners to consider the “sonic environments” of cities (Southworth 1969, 50). In the next decade, R. Murray Schafer cited Southworth in proposing acoustic design as a way of improving the soundscapes of postindustrial cities. Since that time, the calls for architects and planners to embrace sonic methods have persisted and even multiplied. In 1984 the musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa chided that the city remained “unheard,” with urban planners neglecting the “kind of tone a city has, that the habitants (are obliged to) hear” (Hosakawa 1984, 173). The philosopher Gernot Böhme offered another variation on this theme, writing that urban planning must move beyond a paradigm of noise control and instead “pay attention to the character of the acoustic atmosphere of squares, pedestrian zones, of whole cities” (Böhme 2000, 16). More recently, in an article titled “Dear Architects: Sound Matters,” New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman suggested that while smell had plagued medieval cities, sound had become the “unspoken plague” of modern cities due to its persistent neglect (Kimmelman 2015).
For their part, architects and urban planners have not denied the idea that despite the sensorial turn in theory, sound remains, at best, an afterthought in mainstream architectural and planning practice. Upon convening the 2006 conference Music/Architecture/Acoustics, the Canadian architect Colin Ripley declared that sound “has been one of the most neglected factors or components affecting the built environment” (Ripley 2006, 1); while the German architect Arno Brandlhuber has remarked, “Architecture is normally about avoiding sound,” and “sound as a layer within the master plan remains vacant” (Brandlhuber and Emde 2008, 166–167).
At the same time, there has been an undeniable turn in more experimental corners of the architecture world, the art world, and in the broader humanities toward reimagining the city through a creative and critical engagement with sound. The concept of the “acoustic city” (Gandy and Nilsen 2014) has gained currency across the urban humanities, and studies of urban sound environments, histories, and cultures are now so plentiful that it would not be an exaggeration to designate “urban sound studies” a full-fledged subdiscipline.2 Research groups on urban sound have multiplied, taking a cue from the interdisciplinary bent of Le CRESSON—a research center dedicated to urban sound that was established in Grenoble in 1979—as have sound art festivals that have a specifically urban focus. For the first installment of the festival Sonambiente in 1996, curators took inspiration from the “New Berlin” that was emerging post-reunification. They heard the pervasive sounds of construction work in the city as a marker of economic growth, a fertile backdrop against which to mount a sprawling exhibition of sound art (Kneisel, Osterwold, and Weckwerth 1996, 7). More recently, for bonn hoeren (2010–2020), a ten-year project directed by the curator Carsten Seiffarth, a “StadtKlangKünstler” (“City Sound Artist”) is appointed each year to create sound art for Bonn (Seiffarth 2012). When visiting Bonn today it is not uncommon to find visitors taking guided listening tours of the city. They follow Sam Auinger’s Listening Sites in Bonn (Auinger 2010), a handheld map of the unique acoustic features of the city. Another notable project, Tuned City (2008–ongoing), describes itself as “an artistic research project and festival trying to understand [the] city by the means of sound.” It has already taken place in cities including Berlin, Brussels, Tallinn, Nuremberg, and Messenne. Directed by Carsten Stabenow, it has involved the participation of several hundred sound artists and theorists; Stabenow writes that the project “should not be understood as the attempt to ‘tune’ the city in terms of improvement,” but rather as “‘tuning into the city’ as a different way of understanding city by the means of sound.”3
Critical attention to and creative activity in the acoustic city is thus flourishing, inviting further and deeper entanglements. This chapter emerges from this flurry of interest while taking perhaps a different tack with regard to the promise of the acoustic city. In examining urban sonic practices in Beirut, a city that has been described by local architect-planner Antoine Atallah as a “victim of ‘urbicide’” and a city of perpetual transformation (Atallah 2017), I suggest that the acoustic city of the twenty-first century might emerge not as a way of rescuing architecture and urban planning from their visualist orientations; nor as a route through which urbanists might reexamine the city and understand it anew; nor as a platform through which to create alternative experiences of the city, as is often touted in the art world, even if these may be laudable and often fascinating pursuits. In the context of profound global flux, one in which cities emerge as sites of intense economic, political, social, and cultural contests, where the displacement of human populations, poverty, pollution, and uneven justice find their most vivid expressions, the acoustic city might instead serve as a figure of profound instability, and might be most productively examined as a site through which various forms of power, citizenship, belonging, and community are negotiated. The impetus would no longer be to improve the soundscapes of cities. Rather, it would be to attend to aspects of the acoustic city that escape the fixity and authority of the master plan. Given the vast transnational movements, sudden territorial shifts, and uprisings that shape contemporary cities, particularly cities of the Global South, it is perhaps no longer even appropriate to speak of urban “planning.” We might instead understand cities as places where social, cultural, and political formations foment and burst, sometimes so suddenly that they can hardly be documented, much less analyzed. The idea of “listening” in such a context is already in doubt. While Pallasmaa’s idea that city and the body dwell in one another may be appealing, the very notion of dwelling in the contemporary city is troubled. The processes of furious acceleration, accumulation, and rapid movement that shape such places conjure a city not as a dwelling-place for bodies, but as a technology into which bodies are input and through which they are processed, often in violent and destructive ways.
The status of art—and the ethics of artmaking—in such a context must be carefully reconsidered. Although many cities remain hubs of cultural activity, the art born of the city-in-perpetual-upheaval is not necessarily emancipatory or redemptive. Rather, art might most productively be engaged as a force that can reveal the hidden processes and forces that shape the city, including those processes of exclusion that, for a majority of the world’s urban populations, determine everyday life (Sassen 2014).4 Sonic urbanism might then be understood not as a new layer to the city plan, or as a fresh approach to urban architecture, but as evidence of a city that is profoundly, and perpetually, unplanned.
8.2 Listening Ecologically: The Invisible Soundtrack
The city of the twenty-first century belongs predominantly to the Global South. It is increasingly poor, and increasingly young (Drieskens, Mermier, and Wimmin 2008). It is also heavily shaped by conflict, stemming from both internal and external forces, and not always in ways that can be easily tracked.5 Beirut, a city that was once seen as an idyllic cosmopolis—the “Paris of the East”—has emerged as such a city, following a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, resulted in over one hundred and fifty-thousand deaths, and was marked by sectarian division, paramilitary rule, political infighting, foreign invasion, population displacement, and mass exodus. After the war, further devastations brought renewed attention to Beirut: the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005; the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, which resulted in extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and the displacement of around one million civilians; a garbage crisis that stemmed from the suspension of the city’s waste removal services—a crisis that, for many locals, symbolizes the ineptitude and dysfunction of the Lebanese government; and the recent influx of over one million refugees fleeing the civil war in neighboring Syria, with over a quarter million Syrian refugees registered in the capital city alone as of June 2018 (UNHCR 2018).
The vast destruction of Beirut’s built environment during the Lebanese civil war, which Atallah estimates at up to 80 percent of the urban fabric, has been well documented, as have the recent efforts to rebuild the city, which have been widely criticized as insensitive to local contexts, overly glitzy and corporate, and literally molded by corruption (Wainwright 2015). Solidere, the entity charged with redeveloping Beirut’s city center, is a private business that, as Oliver Wainwright writes, “also enjoys special powers of compulsory purchase and regulatory authority, giving it the mandate to manage the city centre like a mini-fiefdom” (Wainwright 2015). Signs condemning Solidere are visible throughout the city, with one large enough to cover half the façade of a building. When I visited Beirut in March 2018 for the project Urban Sound and the Politics of Memory, which brought together sound artists, architects, and urban theorists from Lebanon and the UK, someone had graffitied the words “STOP BUILDING” on a billboard announcing a new development project.6 New developments in Beirut typically are financed by foreign investors and contracted to international “starchitects,” resulting in what many see as a strange and sterile remaking of the downtown area, the Beirut Central District. As Wainwright writes, “The grocer and fishmonger have been exchanged for the luxury boutique and high-end restaurant, while the apartments above the shops have mostly been sold to Gulf investors and wealthy expats, their sky-high prices out of the reach of the majority of locals, in a city with a desperate shortage of affordable housing” (Wainwright 2015).
Alongside these problems in the city center are those that plague the Greater Beirut Area (GBA). Some neighborhoods in the GBA are undergoing renewal and even gentrification, while most stagnate in various states of ruin and decay. Many have the haunted air of a city emptied of itself. Atallah sees Beirut both as a “ghost city” and simultaneously as a city of “accelerated transformations” and “perpetual mutation” (Atallah 2017). For Panoramic Beirut (2017) he visualized these transformations through a series of annotated photographic panoramas that capture the city at various critical points in its history. He remarked of Beirut’s most recent postwar phase, “The war and its destructions, the abusive demolitions of the Solidere plan . . . and the final exodus of families and businesses that gave life to the city mark an extremely violent rupture in Beirut’s development.” Government policy has turned Beirut into “a series of plots available to the highest bidder,” and “not enough freedom has been given to the city for it to resume writing its own story with its own hands.”
This stranglehold on local spatial practices is compounded by the widespread privatization of formerly public spaces, an issue that has mobilized local communities of artists, architects, and activists (Fernández 2015). One prominent campaign is The Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche, a mission to stop the privatization of a much-beloved, untamed rocky formation on Beirut’s coast (see figure 8.1). One of the last remaining public access points to the sea, Dalieh was slated for a luxury hotel contracted to OMA, the architecture firm headed by Rem Koolhaas (Battah 2015). In 2017 the arts organization Temporary Art Platform (TAP) teamed up with the Campaign to Protect Dalieh to stage a two-day art intervention at the site. The curator Amanda Abi Khalil, one of the founders of TAP, remarked that reconstruction efforts had not taken into account “the importance of commonness and shared spaces” (Khalil 2018). Reconstruction policy, she said, was rather “oriented towards real estate speculation.”
Figure 8.1
Photograph of Dalieh (2018) by John Bingham-Hall. Reprinted with the permission of John Bingham-Hall. Copyright © 2018 by John Bingham-Hall.
As part of the TAP intervention at Dalieh, the composer and sound designer Nadim Mishlawi made a series of underwater recordings at the site, using hydrophones to capture the sounds of underwater life—an invisible but, once heard, undeniable presence. To do this, Mishlawi returned to the site many times, recording sounds along the coast and in the sea, both above ground and below the water’s surface. He said of the vibrant underwater soundscape near the shore that “there was something very musical about the way the animals [underwater interacted]; it was almost like listening to a free improvisation of life because there were so many different sounds happening in such a confined space” (Mishlawi 2018). During the TAP intervention at Dalieh, Mishlawi’s The Invisible Soundtrack (2017) could be heard at a listening post at the site.7 Wearing headphones, listeners could hear the sounds of breathing, bubbling, spitting, creaking, bursting, and other acoustic signs of underwater life: evidence of the rich underwater ecologies that would be destroyed if Dalieh were to be turned into yet another luxury hotel. Khalil remarked that Mishlawi’s intervention was particularly compelling in that it showed “how can sound contribute to a social, political struggle, and not only art” (Khalil 2018).
The Invisible Soundtrack was a sonic embodiment of the deeply layered strata of Beirut, which require slow and careful attention to navigate and unearth—precisely those qualities that are in short quantity in the rush to capitalize on the postwar construction boom. In Mishlawi’s words, “It was like the area had a new soundscape, even though the sounds were all captured in that area. And because the work was part of a larger campaign, it also highlighted [that the location was] much denser than what appears on the surface; as if to say that there are many more possibilities here to consider” (Mishlawi 2018).
8.3 The Right to Listen: Silent Room
In Berlin Sonic Places (2017) the soundscape artist and researcher Peter Cusack argues that there is no such thing as “the tone” of a city. Rather, he suggests that the acoustic city is comprised of a series of distinct “sonic places” that are seamlessly stitched together to make an irreducible, always-evolving assemblage. While the idea of hearing the city as an acoustic whole might be attractive in theory, this is not how urban soundscapes are experienced in practice: cities are simply too large for that. As people move through a city they encounter innumerable sonic places, which Cusack calls “the building blocks of the urban sound environment” (Cusack 2017, 4).
As a virtual newcomer in Beirut (I was born there but my family emigrated to Canada when I was three), I certainly heard distinct sonic places that were marked by social, cultural, economic, and religious differences, and were equally marked by the same kinds of architectural and urban features that one might expect to encounter in any city, such as highways or alleyways. If there was a “tone of the city,” however, it seemed to me to be an intense mix of traffic and construction sounds that stuck to the city like a dense fog of acoustic smog. Construction work starts around 7:00 a.m. six days a week, and is audible across the city. The usual mix of traffic noises (cars, motorcycles, buses, etc.) is supplemented with the local habit of horn honking seemingly almost continuously while driving. Some drivers use their cars as informal taxis, honking to pedestrians to signal that they’re offering cheap lifts; others engage in what seems like a perpetual dialogue with other drivers. Another pervasive sound is the hum of electrical generators, which are switched on for several hours a day due to planned power outages—a problem that, like the garbage crisis, serves as a powerful symbol of political paralysis for many Beirutis. Studies of environmental noise in Beirut have found that, in most locations, average daytime environmental noise levels exceed 75 decibels, a level at which sustained exposure can lead to hearing loss (Chaaban and Ayoub 1996; Korfali and Massoud 2003).
Figure 8.2
Photograph of Silent Room (2017) by Nathalie Harb. Photograph by Taim Karesly. Copyright © 2017 by Taim Karesly. Used with the permission of Taim Karesly.
In 2017 the Lebanese scenographer Nathalie Harb—working in collaboration with the local sound designer Khaled Yassine, the architecture collective BÜF, and the acoustic consultants 21dB—created Silent Room, a free, publicly accessible acoustic refuge (see figure 8.2). Silent Room was an invitation to listen in a place where listening is often stressful and difficult. In its original manifestation it was installed in a parking lot at the intersection of a highway, an industrial site, and a low-income neighborhood in Beirut.8 Painted entirely in pink, the structure was so improbable relative to its surroundings, a landscape wrought in concrete and cement, that it might as well have been a flying pig. In order to enter the space visitors climbed a ladder that led to a waiting room where a sign instructed them to remove their shoes. Yassine’s sound installation provided a just-audible soundtrack composed of sounds captured in the city during the quietest hours of the night, around 4:00 a.m.: the sounds of air conditioners, water pumps, and electrical generators. Harb says, “We chose these unpleasant sounds because, paradoxically, they’re also comforting. They have a domestic, familiar quality” (Harb 2018a). Although the project is called Silent Room, Harb did not seek to create a space devoid of sound. Rather, her idea was to install quiet sounds, as well as wood, paint, fabric, and plants, to create a sensorially rich but muted environment. The interior of the structure was acoustically treated such that ambient noise levels were dampened to around 30 decibels. The city could still be heard, but at a distance. Harb says, “We decided to reduce the decibels to a comfortable level, as if the city is whispering” (Harb 2018b). Thus, Silent Room offered people an alternative sonic experience of their city as an imagined possibility.
Silent Room was a meditation not only on noise pollution, but also on the uneven ways in which noise affects the city’s residents. Harb says, “Our cities are often configured in such a way that underprivileged communities are the most affected by higher noise pollution” (Harb 2017). For Harb, the unevenness of noise pollution thus represents a social injustice. “Urban segregation,” she writes, “can be mapped through noise variations across the city.”
Harb conceived Silent Room during the garbage crisis. While she herself had the means to escape this sensory overload, she was aware that this was an unimaginable luxury for many Beirutis, especially those who worked outdoors. She says, “I was thinking of people who could not be inside. Not everybody can be inside” (Harb 2018b). Harb imagines that Silent Room could one day become a kind of public utility for underprivileged neighborhoods, “like toilets.” She stresses that access to such acoustic refuges should not be seen as a luxury but as “a necessity, something that’s needed in urban planning.”
Like the TAP intervention at Dalieh, Silent Room opened a window onto the ways in which official planning and reconstruction policies have failed Beirutis. While the Dalieh campaign addressed a growing lack—the dispossession of an urban commons, the devaluation of natural habitats—Silent Room addressed an overabundance (of noise) whose presence signals the failure of municipal authorities to protect civilians from preventable harms. Notably, both Silent Room and The Invisible Soundtrack invite people to listen: an everyday act that, in the context of a city that operates under what one person has called an “acoustic siege” (Wimmen 1999), can emerge as a kind of resistance, an alternative poetics of everyday city life.
In “Dissonance and Urban Discord” (2012) Nadim Mishlawi offers a nuanced reading of how noise has accumulated in Beirut. Mishlawi hears the city’s overloaded soundscape not as a sign of urban renewal, but precisely as the result of political inertia. He argues that, while in many cities “noise pollution is a side effect of excessive urban development,” in Beirut it is not a result of progress but rather “of paralysing stagnation” (Mishlawi 2012, 169). He writes, “The endless loop of the national anthem, the echoing of political speeches, the calls of equality from the lower classes, the tortured screams of thousands of massacred civilians, and the unresolved clash of opposing political factions, are all superimposed in a collage of garbled nonsense. And this situation denies the possibility of rediscovering the only solution to overcoming noise pollution, that act which prevents a society from falling into such a dilemma to begin with: listening” (161–162).
Mishlawi understands listening as a civil right. He stresses that in Lebanon it is not political speech that has been repressed. Rather, he argues, “it is the right to listen that has been scandalously denied” (Mishlawi 2012, 166).
8.4 Hearing Shadows: Concrete Sampling
On the evening of March 29, 2014, a crowd gathered at the perimeter of a construction site in downtown Beirut. From the depths of the site there emerged a mellifluous mix of percussive sounds, voices, drones, recordings of environmental sounds, sampled music, and the sounds of construction work—hammering, banging, drilling, hitting, dragging. All of the sounds bounced off the walls and crevices of the cavernous construction site. The performance was the culmination of a months-long project, Concrete Sampling (arrangement for derbekah and jackhammer) (2014) by Joe Namy and Ilaria Lupo in collaboration with a construction crew of twenty-two boys and men aged sixteen to fifty, all of whom were Syrian nationals and refugees (see figure 8.3).
In Lebanon today, Syrian refugees live in abandoned and unfinished buildings, on land that has been repurposed for informal settlements, and in temporary shelters that include, for many construction workers, the construction sites themselves. Although Lebanon does not hold a national census, and has not done since the establishment of the modern Lebanese state in 1932, it is widely believed that Lebanon is host to approximately two million Syrian refugees as of this writing (in June 2018). This is a staggering number for a country with a total population of around six million. Approximately one in every three people living in Lebanon today is a refugee, and Lebanon hosts more refugees per capita than any other nation in the world (UNHCR 2018). In a national political context marred by failing infrastructure and ineffective governance, and in a region unsettled by near-continuous conflict, the status of Lebanon’s newest refugee population is deeply uncertain. According to a 2018 report by Human Rights Watch, Syrian nationals in Lebanon face increasingly hostile attitudes from municipal authorities, with growing reports of discrimination, harassment, forced eviction, and expulsion (Human Rights Watch 2018). Most live a precarious existence. Homelessness, destitution, food scarcity, and lack of access to safe water are commonplace.
Figure 8.3
Photographs of Concrete Sampling (2014) by Joe Namy and Ilaria Lupo. Reprinted with the permission of Joe Namy and Ilaria Lupo. Copyright © 2014 by Joe Namy and Ilaria Lupo.
Lupo and Namy noticed that the sounds of construction work, much of it undertaken by Syrian refugees, had become a kind of “sonic landmark” in Beirut. They wanted to reorient this soundtrack of the city by using the tools of construction work as musical instruments, and by repositioning the construction site as a resonant space—as a kind of aural architecture whose properties could be explored through performance. It was important that the performance be developed by the construction workers themselves, who, Namy said, had become a “common fixture in Lebanese society” yet remained “in the shadows of the city” (Namy, cited in MacGilp 2014). Indeed, it is a terrible irony that a profoundly disenfranchised population—refugees who typically have no home to which to return—are rebuilding a city that increasingly rejects them. Although construction work is pervasive, Namy remarks that there is little interaction between Beirutis and construction workers, most of whom “stay behind the walled fence of the site perimeter.”
In preparation for Concrete Sampling Lupo and Namy studied construction sites in Beirut over a period of several months, making environmental recordings and speaking with workers and managers at various sites. Through Ashkal Alwan, a local arts organization that hosts vital artist development programs, they were introduced to the Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury, who granted them access to one of his construction sites. After discussing their idea with the construction workers and inviting them to participate in the project if they wished, and in return for compensation, Namy and Lupo returned to the site almost every day for two months to conduct rehearsals, which typically took place after the workers had finished twelve- or thirteen-hour shifts. Some rehearsals involved listening sessions during which Lupo and Namy played recordings of their favorite music and members of the construction crew shared theirs in return. On some days the group developed elements of the performance while on other days they simply gathered and talked. The process was improvisational and collaborative, focused on creating a group dynamic where, Lupo says, “every individual could find his voice in relation to the collective” (Lupo, cited in MacGlip 2014). Over the course of the project the construction site was alternately experienced as a work site, a shelter, an instrument, and a continuously evolving “aural architecture” (see Blesser and Salter 2007). It was equally reconfigured as a place that could connect the workers to other people in the city. Namy said of the performance that at first it “kind of felt like another rehearsal because we didn’t notice the audience above.” However, once the group heard the cheers of the audience, “we all looked up and the excitement level and focus just jumped 1,000 degrees, that was the moment when it all clicked” (Namy, cited in MacGilp 2014).
8.5 Hearing Violence: 50cm Slab
At Ashkal Alwan I met Mhamad Safa, an architect, musician, and artist who had recently embarked on a project examining noise legislation in Beirut. Safa’s project—which was realized in part as a video installation titled 520,579 m2 (Safa 2018c)—was inspired by the observation that noise legislation in Beirut is unevenly enforced along socioeconomic lines. While noise from bars and nightclubs was heavily policed in areas frequented by locals, it was more permissible in areas frequented by tourists. Safa understood this kind of uneven enforcement of noise policy as “a sort of orchestration about who can [and can’t] make sounds” (Safa 2018b). He was concerned that this unevenness particularly impacted vulnerable groups deemed “exceptional bodies” by the state, including construction workers, he told me, who are treated in such a way that they are deemed able to withstand higher levels of harmful noise than others. He said, “I started looking into the idea of the construction worker to explain this idea of orchestrated noise, and orchestrating it in relation to a specific person or body, and the idea that ‘this person can handle noise, and this other person cannot handle noise’” (Safa 2018b). Safa was also interested in the idea that the construction site was in itself an exceptional site, since construction work is critical for the Lebanese economy. He said, “You cannot call the cops at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. and say ‘I can’t handle this anymore, I have a sick, elderly person in my house and they can’t handle the drilling.’ They will tell you, ‘It’s a construction site. Millions of dollars have been poured into the project.’ So, this site is an exception, and in this site, there are exceptional bodies that are subjected to these sounds. The different players are related through how much each of them is subjected to noise and how much each player can handle noise” (Safa 2018b).
Safa’s idea that noise policy is differently enforced or even “orchestrated” along socioeconomic lines bears further examination. On the one hand, orchestration implies design; indeed, the concept of orchestration was central to R. Murray Schafer’s conception of acoustic design. In a passage titled “Principles of Acoustic Design” in his landmark study, Schafer suggested that the acoustic designer should examine musical compositions in order to learn how soundscapes “may be altered, sped up, slowed down, thinned or thickened, weighted in favor of or against specific effects” (Schafer [1977] 1994, 344). He proposed that the aim of acoustic design should be “to learn how sounds may be rearranged so that all possible types may be heard to advantage—an art called orchestration” (344). In Safa’s reading of noise management in Beirut, the idea of orchestration emerges in more nefarious ways. It evokes the uneven distribution of power, whether the power to make noise; the power to determine which bodies can be subjected to which levels and what kinds of noise; or the power (or lack thereof) to protect oneself from the harmful effects of noise.
Figure 8.4
Installation view of 50cm Slab (2018) by Mhamad Safa at the Points of Contact exhibition curated by Helene Kazan at the Goethe-Institut Libanon, Beirut, January 27–March 10, 2018. Reprinted with the permission of Mhamad Safa. Copyright © 2018 by Mhamad Safa.
In 2018 Safa created 50cm Slab, a sound installation that reflected on the experience of noise in conflict. It was originally presented as part of the Points of Contact exhibition curated by Helene Kazan at the Goethe-Institut Libanon in Beirut, from January 27 to March 10, 2018 (see figure 8.4). The exhibition grappled with the question “What are the points of contact between human bodies, the architecture of the lived built environment, and state and international governing forces?” (Kazan 2018). Safa’s contribution was a harrowing meditation on this question, conceived in response to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, and in particular to the suspected use of thermobaric bombs by Israeli forces in Beirut. Thermobaric bombs, also known as vacuum bombs, draw oxygen from the surrounding air to create high-temperature explosions. The process of removing oxygen from the air causes extreme damage to architectural structures, and it also sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. As part of a reconstruction project, Safa visited a building that was suspected to have been destroyed by a thermobaric bomb. The entire structure had collapsed onto a 50 centimeter-thick slab of concrete that protected the basement. He wrote:
In the 2006 war on Lebanon, the consultative council in the southern suburb was razed to the floor, where all its components were pulverized. Meanwhile, the underground floors were left intact, due to the protective nature of the thick concrete slab that was used on the ground floor. This prompted an engineer working for the Hezbollah affiliate reconstruction team (Jihad Al Bina’a) to claim that this building was hit by a thermobaric bomb, or as he put it, a “vacuum” bomb. . . .
The thickness of the shielding slab in question was in fact implemented and used in all reconstruction works. The 50cm thick slab is no longer limited to its basic role of supporting the upper levels but gains a protective quality and turns into a shield for the lower [levels]. Apart from [its] practical nature . . . it represents the inevitable coming war—be it with Israel or some other foe—and affirms its devastating results. And so this operation restarts the normalization of the “state of exception” by invoking the idea of war in the very foundation of the structure. Hence, the exception becomes the norm. (Safa 2018a)
For 50cm Slab Safa sonically recreated the experience of hearing a structure collapsing onto a fortified shelter. He used the Max/MSP programming language to generate randomized impact sounds and applied granular synthesis techniques to create extremely short “grains” from these sounds. The effect was one of short bursts of part-harmonic, part-enharmonic tones stochastically clustered and layered together, such that a single second might contain dozens of bursts of (mostly) high-pitched noises occurring at random. Inside the exhibition space these noises were projected from a pair of loudspeakers pointing directly at a metal sheet bent at a 90-degree angle. Listeners stood beneath this metal sheet in order to hear the noises as if they were being projected directly onto their heads. Safa noted that the experience of standing beneath the metal structure was so intense that many listeners, including himself, could only stand beneath it for a few seconds at a time.
8.6 Hearing Trauma
Beiruti artists have invented striking ways of processing acoustic and auditory trauma. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war the illustrator and musician Mazen Kerbaj famously recorded the track Starry Night on his balcony, what he described as “a minimalistic improvisation” between himself (on trumpet) and “the Israeli Air Force (bombs)” (Kerbaj 2006; see also Kerbaj 2017). For the installation Arsenal (2017), the composer and visual artist Cynthia Zaven disassembled an upright piano, lining up its hundreds of strings, keys, hammers, dampers, soundboard and other parts in a way that recalled an arsenal display. While many artists and composers have deconstructed or destroyed musical instruments—Zaven cites Fluxus artists’ irreverent destruction of musical instruments as a way of signaling their break with the Western musical avant-garde—Zaven’s particular reconfiguration of the instrument spoke to the ways in which everyday objects can become weaponized through conflict (Zaven 2017). With the series Public Hearing (2018–ongoing) the artist Joan Baz invites Beirutis to share their experiences of trauma using voice memos, interviews, and found sounds. She writes that Public Hearing 1 (2018), which focused on Beirutis’ memories of car bombs, “began as an attempt to create space for us to remember [but] ended up becoming an oral record of our lived history and collective memory” (Baz 2018). Public Hearing 2: dwelling upon dwelling (2019) evolved as a series of videos in which participants were invited to “rebuild” their childhood homes by using toy blocks. In these videos, the participants’ faces are not seen; only their voices are heard. Speakers’ voices thus become anchors for personal experiences of that are nonetheless familiar, widely shared but almost never publicly discussed. In Landline (2019), a composition by the architect and musician Omaya Malaeb, Baz provides the voice of an urban wanderer who is marked by the sounds of her high heels clacking upon city streets. Speaking in Arabic, with a lilting, mellifluous voice, she says:
Our dear listeners,
Before we begin these exercises
Exercises of goodness
We need to remember together
All the goodness
That is around us.
The goodness of the land
The goodness of the soil
The goodness of the air
The goodness of the wind
The goodness of the body
The goodness of the mind
The goodness of words
The goodness of love. (Rafat Mazjoub, cited in Malaeb 2019)9
In Malaeb’s composition this urban wanderer, whose movements create a steady rhythmic counterpoint to the chaotic soundscapes of everyday city life in Beirut, makes peace with the noise-city in order to transcend it. She invites us to listen to the city through her. In doing so, we hear the city—one so often represented as a city in disrepair—re-embodied in a figure of goodness and love.
8.7 Hearing the Acoustic City
In The Culture of Cities (1970) Lewis Mumford described the war-metropolis as “an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city” (Mumford [1938] 1970, 278). In Beirut, the sonic practices of artists, activists, musicians, and architects have emerged from the ruins of what some might call a non-city, but not as a way of “re-civilizing” it. The very idea of a civilizing mission would be profoundly off-putting for obvious reasons. Rather, projects like The Invisible Soundtrack, Silent Room, Concrete Sampling, 50cm Slab, Public Hearing, and Landline draw attention to the invisible processes that have kept Beirut in perpetual upheaval. Through attention to the acoustic city they give form to systemic problems such as corrupt redevelopment policy, the privatization of public space, and uneven law enforcement; individual and collective experiences of trauma and conflict; and, equally, the diminishment of the rights and dignities that shape civic life: the right to work safely, the right to citizenship, the right to protest, the right to gather, the right to remember, the right to speak, and the right to listen.
As such these sonic practices articulate a new paradigm for the acoustic city. They are not so concerned with improving urban soundscapes, or with articulating acoustic design as an alternative mode of urban design, as much as they are with revealing deeper truths about the city. We might therefore consider such practices not as ways of revivifying city spaces through art, but in a forensic capacity: as evidence of the processes that shape cities, and of the myriad local and transnational forces that come to bear upon the city dweller.10 By becoming attuned to the modes of listening they suggest, we become newly aware of what has happened, and what is happening, in the city. And, by listening in this way, we reorient our understanding not only of our surroundings, but equally of ourselves, finding new points of hearing and new perspectives through which to listen.