A Town for the Senses (Soundscapes, Scents, and Time Warps)

There's a book I bought 15 years ago that one day I will make up my mind and spend the time to read (as I perceive this action as fulfilling a useless longstanding desire and therefore a luxury, up now I never allowed myself to). This book is The Soundscape, by Raymond Schafer. I'm not only dislocated in a new visual reality here, but also in a new audio reality. When we are not professionals of the sound we rarely notice it, as the power of the visual is much stronger. And there's quite a huge number of sounds we are exposed to, in urban areas, that are pretty common in most of the towns where we live. Noises produced by cars and motorbikes, the ones of the planes flying over our heads and landing in the local airports, and - further less enjoyable - the cracking-nerves noise of the garbage bins empitied in the dust-cart. But sometimes, something unexpected can brake the common mixture of noise/silence we are used to, and reveal us the place we are in is not a familiar one.

There's a kindergarden right in from of my room. I can't see anything as the flat is on the ground floor and there's a wall surrounding the building that covers the view, but still you can get the sounds of the neighbourhood. And the sound, today, comes from the kindergarden where - among the crying of the kids and the rolling of bikes, balls and anything they play with, someone is giving a workshop in xylophone, and the music is amplified by loudspeakers. I say "someone is giving a workshop" as you can distinguish specific audio sequences played once, and then repeated by less experienced people. So I presume it's something like that. The result is quite enjoiable, but unusual to my ears. A different soundscape.

I got the same impression a few days ago, whilst - getting out of my place on a Sunday morning - I was exposed to the music and choirs coming from the nearby Baptist church. The voices coming from inside were mainly feminin. I'm not specifically moved by this genre of songs, nor by this audio experience itself, but behind the sound there are people, and I felt somehow less lonely and more protected although the human presence could only been assumed, but not seen. So I stopped for a while and enjoyed, as churches always give me the same effect of isolated places - far from everyday life - where one can experience a feeling of a strong energy given by the gathering of different people who have a common faith in something (the same description can be applied to different gatherings of people - it's what Csíkszentmihályi calls "flow experience"). I was perceiving from outside the result of the flow experience others were living.

Then, suddenly, my attention turned to be grasped by the visual - that recalled its power on me. Right on my left - in front of the church - a phone box was covered by an unusual advertisement. A white circle on a black background included the words "A ring of salt will protect you". I looked at the phone box, then looked back at the church on the other side of the street, then again concentrated on the phone box to eventually realise, at the end, that is was (probably - but who knows?) only by a coincidence that the two opposite communications were sharing the same crossroads.

Besides the hearing, another sense competes to grasp a person's attention whilst travelling: the sense of smell. Any place has a different smell, and - like in another book (Picturing Culture, by James Clifford & George Marcus) was noticed - ethnographic diaries are full of references to smells that are never present in the final monography we write about the situation we studied/researched about.

The sense of smell is the most powerful provoker, in me, of frequent time warps - as it leads my mind to memories, sometimes far in years in the past, I completely forgot, and make the visual images associated to those time distant situation flowing in front of my open eyes and superimposing on the real ones I'm seeing in a specific moment. That's probably the reason why I look for these sensations - that can be negative or positive (it's up to the way to judge a scent) - and enjoy so much those places where smells/scents/perfumes are strong and can lead my imagination to other similar situations experiences in the past. And - let me behave as an anthropologist for a minute - the judgement of a scent as nice/bad is again culture-based (the same could be said about the appreciation of something you hear or taste). I was quite surprised so, when I was living in Germany, to buy a handcream that was exactly the same I was used to use in Italy, and once opening it realising it had a very different scent. The ingredients were the same, only the chemical composition of the perfume was different - to localize the product among the place it was sold. But I was quiet young, I couldn't realise someone else was already aware of the phenomenon ans was also able to build a marketing strategy on it.

Yesterday I went to a building that is going to be demolished soon, but before this happens it is hosting the Market Estate Project - an art experience and a series of events with about 75 artists - that will end the 6th of March. The project is connected to the idea of helping the local people - formerly living in the social houses that are going to be destroyed, as crumbling and impossibile to refurbish anymore, who had relocated nearby - to emotionally overcome, by the support of arts and artists, the loss of a place were they led their lives up that moment. A collective "rite of passage".

I had a tour in and around the building, actually in unaccettable conditions. The water was dripping at every floor from cracks in the ceiling and gathering in little pools on the corridors, the electric cables were hanging from walls cracks - giving me an uncomfortable, precarious sensation. But then, I had a wonderful time warp.

Humidity + chill + concrete. Humidity and chill is a smell I know since the first (squatted) social centre I joined in my late adolescence, places where I grew up and where I still go to meet most of my friends - for concerts, dinners, talks. Humidity and chill recall as well the memory of the flats my friends, coming from villages in the region, rented during their university years, and where it was quite common to have lunch and pretend to study together. The smell of concrete comes from the experience of different houses' restorations I had been exposed in my life, both in case of family's flats and because of my father's work - for which he was always in company of bricklayers whose clothes were impregnated of powder. Where I feel that smell, I feel "home". And then, I first perceived these three scents together many years ago, one day I got out of the overground train connecting the airport to the city centre in Hong Kong. Humidity was 95% and a few people were involved in the restauration of the building. I couldn't breath properly as the powder and the humidity were so concentrated - so this might be the reason why I remember it so neat.
The scent I breathed yesterday was right the same one. I climbed the stairs in this empty building, listening to the water dripping and the pieces of concrete craking under my shoes. The shadows of two chinese guys carrying a beam overcame me smiling. I smiled them back, although there was nobody around.