Paper short abstract:

The processes of formation, change, and reinvention of urban soundscapes today are linked different forms of mobility, the constant crossing of national, social and cultural boundaries by actors at different levels. The research was conducted using the example of Saint-Petersburg public places.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on anthropological research project, which focuses on formation of urban soundscapes in contexts of mobility.

Spatial relations are one of the central variable influencing human behaviour and cognition. Sonic landscapes, or "soundscapes" (Colombijn 2007) is not obvious. Sounds are indexal relation to what represented. The soundscape is influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The perception of sound is also based by memory, personal experience and the media streams of images (musical themes, styles and trends, as well as sound images of TV, etc.). Cultural and symbolic forms of indirect perception of sound and noise of the city is extremely diverse.

The soundscapes of Saint-Petersburg are discrete and variable. Their characteristics determined by the infrastructure and activities of various social agents distributed in time. The resource for design scape becomes situational reification cultural experience of the agents that is tied to the perception of sounds - it comes from due to the concentration of global cultural and symbolic flows of cultural practices.

The emergence of new social forms of mobility defines the basic characteristics of the city soundscape. Sounds give impulses triggering characteristic of a locus of urban space chain of actions, specify the boundaries of the interaction, become a kind of social filter, contribute to shift the focus of, interpretation of various socio-cultural processes, are the basis for identification in the space of the city, a resource for the formation of urban localization.