Urban_Green_Soundscapes

is a section dedicated to Field recordings, realized in the city of Lisbon.

The aim is to illustrate the sonic environment surrounding the inhabitants of the city and their houses.

Also this section shares the same idea applied to the rest of the work: Urban_Green_Soundscapes does not aspire to be a scientific compilation and sound analysis, rather it hopes, appealing to a poetical metaphor and approach, to stimulate the senses and sensibility of the audience, suggesting a different way to perceive sound and the possibility of a new understanding of it in daily life.

Considering our cultural biases as the starting point for our aural experience, (we all belong to an auditory subculture, and this determines how we receive and process a stimulus we perceive) I wanted to propose the exploration of different contexts within the city of Lisbon, offering an infinity of shades sound.

     “Transforming physical sound waves to neural signals,     detecting the sensations they produce, perceiving the sound sources and the acoustic environment, and finally influencing a listener's affect, emotion, or mood....”*

For this project “GREEN SOUNDSCAPES” were recorded in four city gardens (Museo do Traje Graden, Gulbenkian Garden, Estufa Fria Garden, and Mouraria Garden) to provide a small idea of the kind of acoustic arena that could surround a visitor who would like to visit, rest or simply pass through these kind of spaces.

Other selected sounds integrate this section:

_The excerpt of sound recorded in Cais das Colunas symbolizes the border between nature and city.

In this recording the sound of the river Tejo mixes with the electronic sounds of an amplified band (playing a few hundred meters away from the place I was), with the voices of tourists passing by or sitting at the river side, and with the sound of traffic flowing incessantly.

_The Recordings of the Underground, of the Touristic 28 bus and of the Ferry between Lisbon and Cacilhas (on the other side of the river), are sounds representatives of the public transports people use daily to circulate around the city, to go to work and to go back home at the end of the day.

_Rossio_Brasileira_Rossio: A Walk proposes the sonority of some of the main pedestrian streets of the city center connecting the Rossio Square to one of the most known and touristic spots: “A Barsileira” the famous coffee bar where the writer Fernando Pessoa used to spend some of his time. The sound was captured during a sound walk from Rossio square to the Brasileira, sitting inside the bar for a tea and going back, entering some shops and passing beside some of the street musicians every day performing.

_The movement of a walk in a search for sound contrasts, for the extension of its acoustic horizon, with the experience listening to the sound coming in through an open window. “Janelas/Windows” presents some sounds recorded by the windows of the houses where I used to live during the development of this work, located in the historical Alfama and Mouraria districts (Lisbon, September 2015-April 2016).

*(B. Blesser, L.-R. Salter. (2007) “Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachussetts, London, England)