Most of us could name a city from a photo of its skyline. Fewer of us realise how easily we could name it with our eyes closed.
A skyline is what a city wants you to see. Its sound is what it gives away without trying. Towers can be copied, and plenty have been: on a postcard, the glass high-rises of Dubai, Shanghai and Frankfurt can look almost interchangeable. But nobody has managed to copy the way a place sounds at eight oâclock on a Tuesday morning.
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Cities have soundmarks too
In the 1970s, the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer started recording the noise of everyday life and wrote about what he called the soundscape. He also came up with a word I love: the soundmark. It works like a landmark, but for your ears. A sound so tied to one place that the people living there would miss it if it disappeared.
Once you know the word, you start hearing soundmarks everywhere.
London
London doesnât need Big Ben to tell you where you are. âMind the gapâ has been echoing through the Underground since the late 1960s, and it has become so iconic that it ends up on T-shirts, mugs and doormats. Add the squeak of bus doors opening and the roar outside a pub after a football match, and you have the London you remember long after the photos are forgotten.
The city has always measured itself by ear. According to an old saying, a true Cockney has to be born within the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow. In other words, belonging to London was defined by what you could hear from your cradle.
New York
New York is unapologetically loud. Taxis honk, sirens wail, the subway screeches into the station, and twenty languages collide on the same block. In most cities that would count as noise pollution. In New York it works more like permission. When everything around you is loud, nobody turns around if you are too.
Thatâs also why a quiet moment in Central Park feels like such a luxury. Silence in New York has to be earned, and the whole city seems to know it.
Berlin
Berlin sounds like a city that has rebuilt itself more than once. You hear it in the tram bells, in the clipped âZurĂŒckbleiben, bitteâ before the U-Bahn doors close, and in the bass lines still leaking out of clubs at nine on a Sunday morning. Berlin doesnât try to sound pretty. It sounds unfinished, and somehow that suits it perfectly.
Why a cityâs sound matters more than we think
Hereâs what fascinates me most: city sound is no longer something that simply happens. More and more, itâs something that gets decided.
Sound by design
Electric cars are a good example. They are so quiet at low speeds that the EU now requires new ones to play an artificial sound, so pedestrians can hear them coming. Somewhere, engineers are literally designing what our future streets will sound like. Should a city sound like a spaceship? Like a hum? Like nothing at all?
Sound as heritage
In 2021, France passed a law to protect the âsensory heritageâ of the countryside, after a rooster named Maurice was taken to court by holiday-home neighbours who found his morning crowing too much. The rooster won. A whole country decided that some noises are worth keeping.
Quiet as a luxury
Quiet has quietly turned into a luxury product. The calm courtyard apartment costs more than the one facing the motorway. Noise isnât shared equally, and the people with the least money often live closest to it.
The spring the cities went quiet
We got a strange glimpse of the alternative in spring 2020, when lockdowns emptied the streets and people in big cities suddenly noticed birdsong they had never heard before. The birds had been there all along. We just couldnât hear them over ourselves.
Close your eyes
Skylines can look alike, and they keep getting more alike. Sound is much harder to fake. It grows out of the trains, the weather, the language, the habits and the people who live somewhere. A city can hire an architect to change its silhouette, but it canât hire anyone to change how it sounds at rush hour.
So next time you travel, try this. Before you take the first photo, stand still for a minute and just listen. You might find the city has already introduced itself.
So how does your city sound? Tell me its soundmark in the comments.
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