The Soundscape of Lviv

The quarantine has changed the city routine for a while. The intensity of traffic on the roads has decreased, the number of people on the streets has diminished, most establishments have closed their doors, and public transport runs half-empty. We all immediately noticed this abrupt change. However, this experience is especially evident by the change in the sound of the city.

Attempts are being made to explain this extraordinary audio moment ("the city is quiet, as in Soviet times," "quiet, as if the weekend never ends"). These descriptions refer to impressions, present in memory and the imagination, of when the noise on the city streets was much lower. In particular, this is due to a significantly different amount of private transport. At the same time, industrial production in the city has been declining in recent decades, which has also changed its sound. 

However, this change is not limited to the "louder and quieter" categories. Composer and researcher Raymond Murray Schafer calls noises "the sounds we have learned to ignore." Documenting the soundscape in April 2020 is our attempt to record the course of the quarantine by recording places, situations, and experiences. In this experiment, we try to "unlearn" to ignore the sounds in order to distinguish different sources and categories of the city's sound from the spectrum between noise and silence.

We record streets, road junctions, railway and bus stations, parks and squares, medical and educational institutions, religious buildings, markets and businesses. At the same time, we do not view the soundscape as objects that we see, but as events that we hear. This differs from visual documentation of the landscape in that we do not try to capture a continuous panorama of the city in one way. Instead, we try to extract the individual details that together form a set of audio events and the audio environment. We intend to repeat the recordings of these places after the quarantine.

Recordings have a duration of at least 5 minutes. Each one has a mark on the map with additional information about the time of creation. Because our perception of the sound environment is through a combination of different senses, we begin each documentation with a verbal comment to describe the moment and place of the recording. Along with the soundtrack, there is also a photo of the place to express the perspective from which we are documenting. We try to record each place twice – during the day and in the evening.

Taras Nazaruk, Oleksandr Makhanets, Iryna Sklokina, Natalia Otrishchenko, Viktoria Panas, Bohdan Shumylovych, Sofia Dyak, Olha Zarechnyuk, Yurko Bulka, and Ostap Manulyak joined in creating the map.

In the future, new sounds will be published on the map.

Despite the intention to document the modern sound of the city, these attempts to record the sound in combination with a map, verbal commentary, and an image, open up opportunities for us to study the soundscape of the past. Although there are few recordings of the city from the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there are a number of other sources that allow us to study this sound. Interestingly, sometimes these sources can be more meaningful than direct recordings. This can be clearly seen, for example, in modernist poetry.

For example, in the work of Walt Whitman (Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;),

Julian Przyboś (Poet, an exclamator of a street!),

Bohdan-Ihor Antonych (The alleys of sounds run, planted in scales. As if on a chord a chord, fell a floor on a floor.)

And Bohdan Stelmakh (The sun flooded generously Sharp dieses of windows, Steps of steep crescendo Asking her to visit)

Various testimonies about the sound of the city are also given by visual sources and the press. 

The photo above shows Emperor Franz Joseph I and Prince Adam Sapieha at the  General Regional Exhibition  in Lviv in 1894. Part of the festivities took place next to the pavilion of the Edison phonograph, one of the first mechanical devices for recording and reproducing sound.

"It's quieter in the capitals of Europe," wrote the Lviv interwar newspaper  Chwila  on September 17, 1931. The press reported on how three European capitals – Berlin, London, and Paris – struggled with such an unbearable sign of modernity as noise. "Noisometers," the ban on horns or advertising megaphones, how the construction of "rubber" roads was going to "enslave the big-city hell." 

Thus, the artistic understanding of the concept of sound or the discussion of the noise of modernity is no less an important source for the study of the historical soundscape than sound recordings. Therefore, our attempt to document the modern soundscape of the city is one of the initial steps within the broader intention to map the historical soundscape on the Lviv Interactive map.

Projects and texts we were inspired by:

• R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of The World / Destiny Books, 1994.
• R. Murray Schafer,  European Sound Diary , 1997
•  The World Soundscape Project , Simon Fraser University
• Milena Droumeva,  Curating Everyday Life: Approaches to Documenting Everyday Soundscapes .
• Christopher DeLaurenti,  What is an aural safari? 
• Juan Ruiz Jiménez, Ignacio José Lizarán Rus,  Historical Soundscapes 
•  Europeana Sounds 
•  Aporee 

More details about the preparation and carrying out of the recordings can be found  here . More about the initiative of the Center for Urban History to create an archive in April 2020 can be found  here .

If you have questions about the soundscape map, please contact: t.nazaruk@lvivcenter.org

Cover photo: Entrance to the Research Institute of Applied Acoustics in Lviv.

Translation by Areta Kovalsky