About the Futures Soundscapes Lab*
What might the future sound like? This is the central question behind the2 Futures Soundscapes Lab; a learning experience carried out for the past five years in the postgraduate program of Futures Studies at Centro de diseño y comunicación, an educational institution located in Mexico City. How is this workflow, what results has it produced so far, what is the learning experience of the students who have taken the laboratory, what topics appear in the sound pieces, and how can this work model be improved? This work addresses these questions to describe the model, its scope, and areas of opportunity.
The most usual way of communicating future scenarios in the framework of a foresight process is in written form. However, in recent years organizations such as Arup (2019) and the Institute for the Future (2016) have created long-term scenarios with audiovisual elements.
By emphasizing the language of sounds (noises, music, dialogues), students increase the repertoire of skills to narrate a long-term story, facilitating the immersion of the analyst conducting the study and the visualization of alternative futures, as well as the audience interacting with the final result.
The working model of the laboratory is based on Murray Schaffer’s (1977) framework. He describes acoustic design as an “interdiscipline in which musicians, acousticians, psychologists, sociologists, and others would study the world soundscape to get her order to make intelligent recommendations for its improvement.” (p. 4). Michael Southworth coined the original concept (1969); however, Schaffer amplified the reflection on acoustic design and encouraged the analysis and production of soundscapes, stating that the entire world is a single musical, then the soundscape is a fragment that narrates a series of listenable events.
The approach proposed by Schaffer is a response to noise pollution; our adaptation of his approach responds to the need to expand the resources for communicating the outcome of the foresight process, resources that facilitate the understanding and scope of long-term scenarios.
Just as Schaffer states that the world sounds, we will consider that the futures have sounds. Alternatively, to be more precise: it is possible to represent a present idea about possible futures using sounds (incidental noises, music, dialogues) that tell a story. To design the story, students take elements from the phonosphere (Tarakanov quoted by Volniansky, 2017, p. 1), consisting of sonors (grammatical particles or single tones) that surround ordinary human life. Through incidental sounds, music, and speech, soundscapes suggest an environment and a series of events that unfold in some direction. In this order of ideas, in the laboratory of future sounds, attendants explore the phonosphere and create future scenarios by collecting, transforming, and organizing sonors.
The registry and analysis of soundscapes are not new; for example, Josep Llorca-Bofí, Vicent Llorca-Bofí, and Ernest Redondo Domínguez (2019) explore soundscapes as a leitmotif of the architectural work in Representation of the soundscape in the architectural design process. In turn, the composer and technologist Marco Alunno (2018) describes an installation with parametric loudspeakers called The Soundhouse in Sound Straight Ahead: Parametric Speakers in Two Soundscape Installations.
In the paper Soundscapes of an Outbreak (2020), Mikki Kressbach explores the sonic experience of silence in the opening scene of Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days; on the other side, Yanan Hou et al. (2022) uses soundscape analysis as a method to evaluate the conditions of an ecosystem in Acoustic Sensor-Based Soundscape Analysis and Acoustic Assessment of Bird Species Richness in Shennongjia National Park, China. In this same logic that takes advantage of the soundscapes for the environmental study, Iván Rodríguez, Jonas Philipp Lüke, and Fernando Luis Rosa (2022) address the case of an instrument for the registration of the biophony, anthrophony, and geophony of a particular area in MASE: An Instrument Designed to Record Underwater Soundscape. However, the value of soundscapes in facilitating immersion in the future scenarios produced in a foresight process is a field with many opportunities for exploration and discussion.
Regarding the Futures Studies framework, this educational experience takes up Joseph Voros’ (2002) model and Candy and Dunagan’s (2017) approach to experiential futures. Considering Voros’s sequence, 1. Inputs (analysis of what is happening in the system), 2. Prospective analysis (analysis of what could happen); 3. Outputs (synthesizing the results of the prospective visualization) and 4. Strategy (proposing what should be done based on the findings), we can state that the futures soundscapes lab focuses on stage 3 (outputs).
According to Candy and Dunagan:
[A]n experiential scenario is the manifestation of one or more fragments of an ostensible future world in any medium or combination of media, including image, artifact, and performance. It involves designing and staging interventions that exploit the continuum of human experience, the full array of sensory and semiotic vectors, in order to enable a different and deeper engagement in thought and discussion about one or more futures than has traditionally been possible through textual and statistical means of representing scenarios (Candy, 2010 quoted in Candy & Dunagan, 2017, p.5).
In this order of ideas, the Futures Soundscapes Lab intertwines the approaches of Candy, Dunagan, and Schaffer to facilitate communication and immersion in future scenarios, although elaborating on these sound pieces can be challenging for the students.
Methodology
The laboratory is an online experience conducted once a year during the second semester of the Futures Studies program as a complementary activity to the fixed curriculum. The teaching-learning model is evaluated and optimized yearly to offer better results. The deliverable of this lab is a 1–5 minute soundscape of the Future produced by each student, inspired by the stories the participants wrote in the previous semester during the creative writing of future scenarios course.
The students’ stories explore possible futures of a topic that each student has freely chosen (pedestrian mobility, pollution, the electoral process, etc.). The attendants wrote the stories in Spanish; they were encouraged to design a sequence of facts that rescues the local look and feel. These attributes shaped the scripts that later became soundscapes.
The laboratory has a total length of 16 hours divided into weekly sessions, according to the following sequence:
- Acoustic design, conceptual framework, and technical guidelines to create a soundscape.
- Exploration of the phonosphere: noises, music, nature sounds, voices. Fieldwork to listen and distinguish between different sources, stakeholders, and levels of sound experience.
- Association of images with sounds. Exploration of art and mood boards.
- Exploration of sound libraries like Splash Sound (2022) and Pexels (2022)
- Elaboration of a script for a future soundscape. The students start with a science fiction story they developed in a previous sci-fi course. Exploratory research to transform the original story into a script. Breaking down the sounds that the story will need.
- Sonors collection. Noise and dialogue recording, search in public and personal archives.
- Production of a 1–15 minutes piece with Reaper software.
- Listening and feedback seminar.
- Optimization of final pieces.
Figure 1 presents a diagram developed by one of the participants (López, A., 2022) to illustrate the laboratory process.
We took special care to ensure that the lab would provide the participant with creative tools to experiment and communicate future scenarios without professional equipment or sophisticated software for acoustic design. That’s why the experience involves using accessible sound archives and software to facilitate the replicability of the model.
Participants have complete creative freedom to design the scenario, collect sounds from available archives or produce their recordings. They include music (no more than one minute of previously recorded music) and dialogue to shape the story. In this sense, the workshop gives greater freedom concerning the original meaning of the term soundscape, which is more a “cutting” of the phonosphere rather than a creative treatment of it.
Between 2019 and 2022, 31 sound pieces were produced, some of which were published in the Journal of Futures Studies (Santiago, 2020 & 2021). Most of these materials are archived on the Bandcamp digital platform (2022), where each sound collection corresponds to a cohort of students.
Discussion
We interviewed four workshop attendants between August and September 2022 to document their experiences. To recruit volunteers, we sent an open call for attendants from the most recent generation to have this experience. We asked students about the learning process, the challenges they faced, the possibility of replicating this procedure in other contexts, and the usefulness of the experience.
Students agreed that this is one of the graduate program’s most valuable and exciting workshops. Most interviewees had previous experience in storytelling and multimedia text editing, making it easier for them to learn Reaper. “Although I was not familiar with the software we used in this workshop, I had previously edited videos, and that experience was useful for this course” (Quiroga, S., 2022).
During the process, students discovered certain preconceptions about what the future might sound like: “I realized that we associated the future with laser beam sounds and robots because of the heavy influence of the media, so it was an opportunity to question that and look for other ways” (Quiroga, S. 2022). Another meaningful result was that the interviewees found it stimulating to explore sound libraries worldwide to build their stories.
During the sound search process, it was also relevant that the students recorded new sounds and retrieved materials from their archives to build the stories: “I used the ultrasound recording from when I was pregnant in my soundscape; I was thrilled.” (Lonna, 2022). It is true that thanks to the daily use of cell phones and applications that involve sounds, such as Spotify, iTunes, and Whatsapp, it is common for participants to possess a personal sound library that can help in the creative process.
Not all interviewees agreed on the ease and enthusiasm for the theoretical framework underpinning the learning model. For some, it was exciting and enlightening; for others, it was complicated and too technical; most considered that they would do a future soundscape again to facilitate the immersion of the audience shortly: “I would propose to make a kind of showcase to present the scenarios with words, videos and sounds, even extended reality, to achieve a more immersive experience” (López, A., 2022),” I applied the lab experience to produce a soundscape in another class and was able to communicate the message easily. As a creative challenge, it is worth posing the challenge to stop thinking in images and develop the scenario from the sense of hearing and how it can produce more unexpected results in contrast to what we are currently doing.” (García, F., 2022).
An external factor influencing the experience of the program is that since it is not part of the standard curriculum, which contributes to credits to the graduate program, not all students commit to the process and manage to bring the piece to its final version. In this regard, the laboratory will be included as part of the fixed curriculum to encourage students to commit to the process and take the soundscape to the final stage. Maybe the distance or skepticism happens since not all participants consider the relationship between the method and the foresight process obvious and those who do not have experience in the field can feel overwhelmed, or “perhaps the communication phase is not considered a crucial part of the entire workflow” (García, F., 2022).
Regarding the themes, we wrapped up a preliminary classification of all the soundscapes made so far, resulting in the following (figure 2). These sound pieces express the participants’ expectations and concerns about the future: society, values, health, wellness, education, work, and environment appear as the most recurrent threats in Mexico City and the world.
An unforeseen utility concerning this communicative tool is that it facilitates the collective imagination and has an ethnographic value as helpful material for studying desires, wishes, and beliefs.
Conclusion
One pending task for the Futures Soundscapes Lab is to improve the technical and narrative quality of the stories, reduce the use of copyrighted materials, and encourage the production of original sounds. We will also enable students to participate in soundscapes international awards and clarify the relationship between the sound pieces and the different phases of the foresight process.
A crucial next step is carefully analyzing the materials to understand the visions about the future and the criticisms and reflections about the change they contain.
Finally, a possibility to be explored is increasing the scenario’s term, which currently occurs for up to 20 years. Still, the next edition will consider scenarios over 100 years to contribute to the student’s long-term thinking skills (Krznaric, 2020).
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Leonardo Santiago, Francisco García, Ivonne Lonna, Adair López, and Sebastián Quiroga for contributing to this work. We would also like to thank all the Design of Tomorrow program students and alumni who have participated enthusiastically and creatively in this workshop over the years.
References
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*Paper in press.
