| Location | Bochum, Germany |
| Coordinates | 51.480386, 7.216152 |
| Recorded | 2021 |
| Format | Stereo |
| Duration | 23:19 |
Cities never fall silent. Engines, ventilation, construction sites and signal tones create a constant layer of sound that most of us have long stopped noticing. Yet after air pollution, noise is considered the second-largest environmental health burden in Western industrialized countries.
Urban Transitions is an artistic interpretation of the acoustic environments of Bochum. It explores how our everyday soundscape is shaped and the impact it has on us. Its conceptual foundation is a “soundride”, inspired by R. Murray Schafer’s concept of the “soundwalk”: I fitted a bicycle with microphones and rode from the city centre past the main station and construction sites, through forests and farmland to the Ruhr river. The recordings of this ride form the narrative thread and all additional field recordings originate from the Bochum area.
Rather than reproducing the city neutrally, the piece condenses and accentuates its noise. Traffic swells into a crescendo, the pounding of a pile driver marks the ongoing structural change of the Ruhr area, and chainsaws cut into the forest until the birds fall silent. Against this stand moments in which human sound disappears entirely and nature can unfold, making audible how rare such places have become in and around the city.
The coronavirus pandemic is part of the work as well. Three abrupt interruptions reflect the three lockdowns in Germany. The silence consists of recordings of Bochum’s empty city centre during the curfews: a brief insight of how the city sounds when it stops, and a pause in a society otherwise driven by technology and the pressure to perform.
Urban Transitions invites listeners to pay closer attention to the sounds around them and to understand sound not only as a disturbance to be reduced, but as a quality of our cities that can be shaped.