Collab Week 2

Sonic commons

Week 2 of 2

Team

Sound is political. It announces power, marks territory, and fosters care. It is oppressive whilst also being a force of liberation. Walworth, with its layered histories of migration, markets, demolition, and regeneration, is alive with contested soundscapes. Design and stage a sonic intervention that amplifies, distorts, or reclaims public space in Walworth.

Diya Agrawal
Eric Chen
Nicole Shu
Niki Marathia
Sakshi Pansare
Waleed Malik

Recording

Equipped with microphones and recorders from the kit room, we returned to the market to collect sounds. Not wanting to make people feel uncomfortable, we each walked around recording the ambient sounds rather than people directly. Once we had our material, we started planning how we could use it (Figure 3).

Figure 1. Walking through the market to record.

Figure 2. Mission complete - happy! Taken by Waleed Malik.

Market sounds

Figure 3. Dots for speakers, squares for images. Drawn by Waleed Malik.

Market sounds

Setting up

Having sat with what we had learned from our research the previous week, we wanted our intervention to be a big celebration of the market. We tested playing our recordings with and without images from the market (Figures 4 and 5), and our peers fed back that the images made the experience more immersive. We figured that if the senses can sell, as Adam's customers demonstrated, then sound and sight could make people want to be part of our experience.

Figure 4. Getting Merrin’s opinion. Taken by Nicole Shu.

Figure 5. Lynn listening to audio without images. Taken by Nicole Shu.

Figure 6. Testing images accompanied by text. Taken by Nicole Shu.

Figure 7. Testing images without text. Taken by Diya Agrawal.

Ultimately, we wanted the intervention to encourage people to visit the market, as a counter to the decline Adam told us it was experiencing. We set up six speakers along the room, each controlled by one of us, playing a different recording. We laid out the speakers so that they mimicked the market corridor, and in controlling the sound, we were the vendors. As we were setting up, people checked out the room to ask what was happening (Figures 9 and 12), which made us think that noise does bring business.

Figure 8. Projector on.

Figure 9. Someone (back) asks what’s happening.

Figure 10. Gallery wall and speakers ready.

Figure 11. Gallery wall illuminated. Taken by Nicole Shu.

Figure 12. Students having a nosy. Taken by Nicole Shu.

Presentation

Within this little sonic market, we wanted to bring the entire class together and let people find what they wanted to focus on.

Figure 13. Projecting the market sign with a QR code of the route from the university to East Street Market.

Figure 14. Our classmates engaging with the gallery wall. Taken by Veronika Rovniahina.

Figure 15. Our market. Recorded by Yifei Huang.

Figure 16. Our classmates engaging with the gallery wall. Taken by Veronika Rovniahina.

Figure 17. Using the projector for our presentation. Taken by Yifei Huang.

Figure 18. Waleed presenting his part from the balcony. Taken by Yifei Huang.

Feedback

People noted that the experience made them feel like they were at the market. There was also an impulse among our classmates to take photos, which I found an interesting response to the space. However, given how central Adam was to our research, it was noted that his story deserved to be more prominent through sound. Ronnie was also ambivalent about whether we should have used images in a sonic intervention, though he was persuaded after hearing how others felt they amplified the experience.

Reflections

Our project was closer to immersive design than anything I had made before, and I liked that we let the location speak for itself rather than push a message. Working with Adam introduced me to participatory design, which I found far more rewarding than designing based solely on my observations. Designing with sound was also new territory for me, and both Ronnie and Rosie were great at keeping the group’s focus on the sonic dimension of the project.

Designers Amber Case and Aaron Day (2018) suggest that sound impacts how people interact with a product profoundly, because it conveys distinctions, emotion, urgency, and information without adding visual clutter. Additionally, Raymond Schafer (1977), who pioneered the study of the acoustic environment, argued that we are always immersed in a soundscape. Together, these views suggest that sound forms experiences in and of itself, which makes learning to utilise it an important skill for UX designers. In this project, we let people navigate the soundscape freely, but if I were to develop it further, I would want to be more deliberate about guiding users. For example, were we to lead people through Adam's story from beginning to end, we would’ve transformed the experience into a journey with a start, middle, and end. This project opened up areas of design practice I had no previous experience in, and in doing so, has made me eager to explore them further.

References
Case, A. and Day, A. (2018) Designing with Sound: Fundamentals for Products and Services. O’Reilly.
Schafer, R. M. (1977) The Tuning of the World. University of Pennsylvania Press.