When discussing the importance of decoding the city’s urban rhythms, Augoyard urges us to employ all our sensorial capacities, including the acoustic dimension:

‘Listen to our cities.Is it not the very nature of the urban environment to make us hear, whether we like it or not, this mixing of sounds? Dull murmurs, machine noise, the shifting and acoustic racket created by people - every urban moment has a sound signature, usually composed of many sounds together.’

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AUGOYARD, J. F., MCCARTNEY, A., TORGUE, H., & PAQUETTE, D. (2006).

Sonic experience a guide to everyday sounds. Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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The exploration of the on-site sonic experience was developed through the recording of the urban sound across four different locations in the city of Rotterdam.

An ‘urban soundtrack‘ was compiled for each location that was consequently translated through Processing, a sound visualisation software that involved the writing of a computational code based on variations in frequency (hZ), time (s) and intensity (dB). Each visual is paralleled by a 2D analysis of each sound-generating activity (whether human, mechanical or natural) that reveals the rhythms of daily life activating the site-adjacent urban grain.