Havana's falling tanks and flooded laneways

examining the acoustic community

Vincent Andrisani

pp. 131-151

in: Milena Droumeva, Randolph Jordan (eds), Sound, media, ecology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

The work of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) conceives of community as moments of acoustic intelligibility that emerge against a backdrop of industrial modernity, an approach that by no means exhausts all possibilities of community formation through sound and listening. This chapter asks, with a term that has as much descriptive potential as "acoustic community", how can it be deployed so that it accommodates research questions that extend beyond intelligibility alone? As a sonic ethnographer whose work is based in (and on) Havana, Cuba, I make use of the term in my research in the city. I argue that "acoustic community" remains a highly useful conceptual tool; however, its utility is contingent upon acknowledging and accommodating the historical geography in which it is used.