Sound environment: Prado Retiro Area
How did the city sound? What are the sounds that are left and which ones are gone? How has the urban sensory landscape changed? What traces have been left in our daily lives. Great History is always silent! Pictures words, but no sound.
For our study, we used the concept of soundscape that Murray Shaffer defined in his book The tuning of the world, which introduces subjectivity in the valuation of the landscape through listening. man ceases to be a passive spectator to become part of a landscape that is multisensory. Thanks to taking into account the sound experience, the landscape ceases to be a fixed and static scene to become alive and changing, perceived in time
This approach not only changes our way of thinking and analyzing the contemporary landscape, but it can also help us to read history in a more complex way. Around the concept of soundscape, a broad, transversal, and heterogeneous conceptual scope has been developed that allows us to address the complexity of the being-environment relationship.
The study area has had a very important role in the development of the city from the reconstruction of the characteristic sound environments of various moments in history.
You can learn about the mechanisms that give life to the city, complementing the iconographic and documentary data that we keep. We propose a listening of the daily activities through its anonymous protagonists.
The search for a historical-cultural identity of the city based on sound in its architectural and urban environment provides us with a fundamental value: that of the convergence of different perceptions and disciplines, the adoption of new values in which the daily experiences, identities, culture and memory sometimes submerged in the collective unconscious, integrating traditional values with current ones.
