How to map sounds within a city? London was iconically represented when Harry Beck employed circuits to map intersecting pathways of the Underground, creating an icon of the city: the success of Beck's map among passengers shifted Londoners' attitudes to urban space. The rewritten version of thenetwork of the London Underground was apropos to how the London Sound Survey located a hidden network of non-tidal streams, brooks, creeks, pools and channels, partly exposed, partly underground, on which users could click to open soundfiles that let us hear the degree to which such waterways were heard, and how they now intersected with urban space. If a minute of sound stand in constant tension with showing the totality of the city, they reveal the difficulty of truly comprehending a synthesis of the city's variegated landscape as a continuous expanse, but they offer access to the metabolism of the city, in ways that a paper map is not able to do. Continue reading ![]()
