Sounds of the City: Dramaturgy, Space, Identity

This article offers a response to the question, “How can we think about cities within the frame of a dramaturgy of sound?” Drawing on our scholarly interest in cities, we, the authors, consider how city meanings are produced and transmitted through music cultures. We tentatively explored this question previously, in a “Salon” discussion, recorded and available as part of the Aural/Oral Dramaturgies project, curated by the editors of this special issue at the website www.auralia.space. We recommend you listen to that discussion, here, before reading this article. Here, we reflect further on the relationship between sound and cities, offering a mixtape of tracks and parsing our personal experiences in relation to them to make sense of the ways music has shaped cities in our experience. The reflections below blend personal and critical perspectives to offer city stories, and stories of ourselves in the city. We have drawn upon notions of urban dramaturgy (Donehower; Ferdman) to find a style of writing which, “plays with the structure rhythm and flow of the city” in order to begin untangling questions of “what our cities are and for whom” (Dramaturgs’ Network, 2015).