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Sound portrait of a city

Not to find ones way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires
ignorance nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a
forest that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names,
passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig
under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in distance, like the
sudden stillness of a clearing with the lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me
this art of straying; Walter Benjamin
In 2001, Budapest did to me what Paris did to Benjamin. It taught me to explore the city
through the act of flaneurism, by simply letting go and wandering through its streets,
disobeying the preset route followed by every student excursion that came that year from
Serbia. At that time, and the situation hasnt changed much since, my main interest were
record stores and obtaining vinyl LPs was a priority. Naturally, the route I followed through
the city didnt involve tour guides and historical sites but rather neighbourhood locals and
stores hidden within small passages. Upon my next trip to yet another European capital, the
one that taught Benjamin the art of straying, I havent made much alterations to my Budapest
tested way of discovering a city. Only this time, I had a map with the drawn location of one
of the record stores which served as my starting point. Once I reached the store, I realized
that its offer consisted of mostly house music which I wasnt interested in. I asked the shop
owner if he could map all the record stores he knew in Paris for me. That is how I ended up
with a map of record stores of Paris that guided me through the city. I fell so much in love
with this unusual way of city adventurism that I have repeated this tour in almost every city I
visited since.
After I had completed my MA studies and returned to Belgrade, indoctrinated by the ideas of
Benjamin and Debord, the city and sound became my main fields of interest and I have
started to work on the Sound Map of Belgrade. The project has been active for three years
now and we managed to map two of the oldest localities in Belgrade Savamala and Dorol.
The idea is to encompass the entire old town area and, eventually, the whole city. Straying
away from the classical approach to sound mapping, conducted by many of the
phonographers around the world, we decided to map local stories and shift the focus from the
documentary field recordings to a more anthropological approach. The idea is rooted in the
recent cultural trend of preserving and digitizing non material heritage by documenting the
local oral history and sound portrait of the city. Our focus is not a mere documentary of the
city soundscape but rather an act of archiving fragments that compose this soundscape but are
in danger of vanishing or being transformed. As much as the notion of endangered sounds
might seem uninteresting at first, there are sounds disappearing from our daily soundscape,
with the technical and urban development. One of these sounds that will soon disappear from
the streets of Belgrade is the squeaky sound of old Tatra KT4 trams that have been one of the
symbols of Belgrade for the last 40 years. Given the fact that Belgrade doesnt have such a
powerful institution as, for example, the Department of Social History at the Museum of

London which collects all of the city artefacts from old lamp posts to trams that are out of
use, we identified the need to transform the way we think of archives and to shift towards
new digital means to preserve local culture. Sounds can be easily incorporated in other media,
they can be manipulated in little to no time and their effect on human imagination is greater
than any other physical perception. This understanding and the fact that Belgrade Sound Map
is cybercartography project led us to think of its possible implementation as an addition to the
current touristic offer of the city.
Last year together with the ImprovE2.0 collective1, we produced the first sound walk through
Dorol. The walk was designed to lead through sound spots, containing audio stories of local
inhabitants that we previously mapped on our website. While walking from the point A to the
point B, the participants are listening to musical tracks produced specifically for this route.
Authors who responded to our open call received an audio field recording of the route and
used these sounds as a basis for the production of their musical piece. The final product was
an album that in its own way represents a soundtrack of the neighbourhood. The idea
received a great response among public and that encouraged us to repeat it in Savamala in
August 2014. Our open call for music for the Savamala soundwalk resulted in the double
number of responses and we acquired enough material to create two sound walks. Sounds for
Savamala consisted of more musical pieces while the Sounds of Savamala presented the
works which fall under the sound and radio art genre. All three walks are available for free
download, as a musical album packages with maps and artist info and can be experienced
whenever one feels like.
Almost every capital in the Europe has a sound map, and through the implementation of this
already established set of cybercartography tools and cultural praxis on the local level our
aim is to offer visitors of the city an insight into what led to the formation of its identity. The
selected map locations have historical, cultural and local values that can contribute to the
branding of the parts of town they point to. Luckily there are many others who feel the need
to explore this new area of cultural praxis which led to the fact that B Tour, a Berlin based
festival of guided artistic tours, will be held in Belgrade from the 26th to the 28th of
September 2014. Hopefully, with the events like B Tour and the increase in the amount of
artistically designed tours, we will be able to break the monotonous and rather centralized
touristic path that the visitors of Belgrade usually take and help them explore our city through
the art of straying.
Further information:
Belgrade sound map www.zvucnamapabeograda.rs
ImprovE 2.0 www.i2.rs
B Tour festival www.b-tour.org
1

ImprovE 2.0 is a musicians' collective, based in Belgrade.


It is a monthly platform for creative performers, experimentations and electro-acoustic-visual
communication. The series is devoted to new music performance, by way of concerts, installations,
workshops and site specific interventions.

References:
Benjamin, Walter.(1979). One way street and other writings.
London: NLB

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