Caroline Claus Urban Sound Design Process – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

How can we design future sonic experiences? How can we design public space that encourages listening? How can we define the conditions for a participatory tuning of our sound environment? How can we tactically undertake an urban sound design strategy?

The book by Caroline Claus can serve as an introduction to the topic of urban sound studies, presenting the current concepts and terminology used in the field of sound studies, as well as experimental techniques for studying and experiencing urban soundscapes. Learning these tools will be useful for artistic and scientific activities related to sound design. Caroline Claus encourages us to develop multi-layered strategies to model the sonic tissue of the city: from ephemeral artistic interventions, to spatial development plans.

However, the publication has much more to offer than just dry facts presenting the methodology of Caroline Claus. The second part of the publication describes how these assumptions were implemented during workshops that took place in the summer of 2015 in Warsaw, during the artist’s residence at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. A group of sound artists, architects and researchers, under the supervision of Claus, prepared a proposal of intervention into the soundscape around MDM in Warsaw. Thanks to the knowledge about the sonic context of Southern Śródmieście district gathered in the book, Urban Sound Design Process can serve as an alternative guidebook to this part of Warsaw.

Caroline Claus 

holds a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Ghent, and urban development and spatial planning at Erasmus University Brussels and VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Her work concentrates on issues of space, place and culture, the geography of lifeworlds, sonic experience and the design of urban acoustic environments.

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