The sound of the future: listening as data and the politics of soundscape assessment

ABSTRACT This sonic ecology of cities has been highlighted recently by the effects of the global pandemic: fewer cars and people on the road are letting quieter layers of the soundscape to come forward, signalling unequivocally that the urban soundscape is a direct result of anthropocenic activity. This is a time, then, to listen and reflect, and perhaps heed new models for thinking of urban sound. One barrier to such a process is the persistent and entrenched disconnect between soundscape literature, public engagement with sound, and urban planning. By critically surveying literature on soundscape assessment as it intersects with cultural sound studies and acoustic ecology, this paper traces a number of important disciplinary ontologies of everyday listening in cities, ranging from attempts to standardise evaluation metrics and classification of soundscapes, to the emergence of subjective listening studies. More recently a ‘digital commons’ approach to civic engagement has led to crowdsourcing sonic experiences, soundmapping, and, at the infrastructural level – networked monitoring of noise levels. These rhetorical and practical developments fit within important contemporary conversations in critical data and algorithm studies and as such require a critical excavation of underlying values and conceptions of listening.