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Linz is getting people to pay heed to acoustics. It’s the world’s first city to make our audible environment a political issue.

Our acoustic environment is a concrete manifestation of our living conditions. Sound affects us directly and unavoidably—after all, we can’t turn off our hearing. Nevertheless, society’s acoustic awareness is severely underdeveloped. And architects and traffic & urban planners have turned a deaf ear to people’s concerns. Technical revolutions have brought forth all-encompassing noise pollution and brought about the commercialization of hearing. Products ranging from cars to cookies are acoustically designed to accentuate their quality. Advertising counters visual stimulus overload by raining down audible messages on consumers. Stores, shopping malls, restaurants, waiting rooms, telephone on-hold loops and even public toilets are the scenes of the inescapable musical bombardment of millions of people. All this happens in a legal vacuum beyond the fringe of noise abatement legislation highly limited in its purview. We live in the Wild West of hearing, a lawless land where there is practically no binding regulation of our acoustic coexistence in a democratic society. ACOUSTIC CITY took the concept of Linz’s legendary Klangwolke (Cloud of Sound) to the next level, and developed unprecedented ways for the city to unfold its extraordinary potential in this area. Politics, business, culture, art, education and tourism must declare the human being to be a holistic entity, an acoustic being, the center of considerations, the measure of all things. We must listen to what’s beyond fashion and transient technologies.

ACOUSTIC CITY is an initiative seeking to achieve an audible environment intentionally designed to be fit for human beings. It consists of a campaign to STAMP OUT ACOUSTIC POLLUTION, the Linzer Charta that established guidelines for urban acoustic planning, and the Akustikon, a space in downtown Linz dedicated to hearing-related phenomena. The ACOUSTIC CITY agenda has the support of numerous individuals and institutions active in social and cultural life.


WAS // Conscious hearing
WHEN // Since 2007
WHERE // In Linz and various partner cities
www.hoerstadt.at

PARTICIPIANTS //

Category: Acoustic City, Public Space, Exploring the City



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