‘The sound of the city became the score for a musical instrument’
Do the sounds that surround you as you cycle through the city sometimes annoy you? Don’t worry, because we can actively change the situation, says sound expert Edwin van der Heide. Students in his Honours Class are actively shaping the sound of the city.
It was uncertain whether this Bachelor’s Honours Class – The Sounding City is its full title – would actually go ahead this year. The course started in April, just after the lockdown began, so it suddenly had to be delivered online. ‘Will I be able to do that? And if so, how?’ wondered the lecturer, Edwin van der Heide. He quickly designed an online programme, which turned out to be successful: ‘Some really interesting things have come out of it,’ he says via video link, looking back at the end of the academic year.
Academic and artist
Honours Class teacher Edwin van der Heide studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He works for computer science institute LIACS and the Royal Academy of Arts of Leiden University, and runs his own art business. Sound in public spaces is a reoccuring theme in his works. For Leiden University, he produced the work Whispering Wind.
Van der Heide designed the class together with Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University.
The influence of acoustics
The Sounding City gives students the opportunity to engage with sound in a different way. ‘What sound does the city make, to what extent can it be “engineered”, what interventions are possible?’ Van der Heide thinks we don’t ask these questions often enough. ‘A lot of thought is given to urban planning and architecture, but sound is regarded as a by-product, something we don’t need to actively think about.’
This is, in fact, what the Honours students have been doing in their weekly webinars: actively thinking about sound, from the perspective of both the arts and the sciences. For instance, they ask themselves how acoustics influence people’s behaviour, or whether appropriating public space should be permittable. ‘This interdisciplinary approach is an excellent aspect of the Honours Academy's education,’ Van der Heide explains. ‘It allows students from different backgrounds to meet one another.’