Som em Devir: Por uma cartografia sensível da paisagem sonora urbana.

Abstract

This exploratory study unveils emerging social and urban phenomena on a less visible plane: the urban soundscape. It approaches sensitive ways of breaking the visual paradigm in the field of architecture and urbanism, understanding the sound element upon difference, comprehended as “leaks” or ruptures in existing hegemonic systems. The developed methodology proposes the embodied encounter with the city as a way to overcome the sensorial numbness present in urban life and traditional planning processes. Moreover, it has been adapted in order to establish connections between urbanism, art and contemporary sound studies, having the philosophy of difference as a mediating field and producer of results. At the center of the discussion, the urban soundscape is approached upon three amplitudes: the urban musical production, the embodied experience in the city and the production of micropolitical sound territories, investigated through experiments carried out in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, and João Pessoa, Paraíba. Besides the experiments, each of the amplitudes contains approximations with local artists (from Pelotas) related to the subjects observed: a musician, a dancer and a pseudo-artist who create sound interventions. In addition to providing ways for reflection and critical analysis of the city from sound, their productions located on the edges of official circuits of music, dance and art impel multiple and circumstantial inputs to the themes investigated. Performing soundwalks with each of them, possible worlds were created, imagines and fabled, assemblaged in chronic throughout the research. The sensitive cartography between body, city and urban soundscape results in the mapping of the power of thought produced upon this invisible plane, unraveling tissues not apprehended in superior views or satellite images, exploring new tactics of appropriation of the urban space as alternatives to traditional processes.