Resumen de Attending to space through sound: a different intake on everday cultures
My research is on soundscapes, 'community' and urban space.
I have focused my research specifically in London's East End. My work addresses the question of how an attention to the sound and the exploration of an area through sound helps access individual experiences of city life that are, otherwise, often lost in the kind of cultural and ethnic block thinking that community studies sociology is very much prone to. I have found that our ears are far more accurate than what we are consciously aware of. I have experienced that by having an accident that has left me partially blind. Ironically, this has become an interesting tool for my research. To try and illustrate it, if you close your eyes, you will feel how your ears take over. It is an uncontrollable instinct that presents space to us in a different way. With this paper, I am aiming at providing a multi-disciplinary methodology to examine a social phenomenon, a methodological argument for a multi sensory sociological imagination, potentially more adapted to the depiction of contemporary society. I will concentrate on analysing the intake of two case studies on their own everyday practices through talking and relating to the soundscape and how the micro-cosmos of urban culture emerges in their sonically orientated discourse. This mode of attention provides a platform for the surfacing of the rhythms of the area. I will argue that listening to those rhythms helps access a more diverse range of mainstream cultures and subcultures that cohabit in the same geographical space.
