Montreal Artist Envisions What Cities Would Sound Like if we Deprioritized Cars

Sound artist Nicola Di Croce wants cities to include sound in tactical urbanism projects. As Kea Wilson explains in Streetsblog USA, a 2022 project by Di Croce documented and manipulated sounds in and around Montreal’s Place de la Paix, tapping into the sensory experience of the city that often goes unnoticed.

“Di Croce argues that by starting with the impacts of our urban design choices that we can't see, though, we can open up a deeper conversation about how people feel in their places — and get to the root causes of why they move the way they do.” Understanding how people respond to sound, then, can help policymakers plan built environments that are more pleasant and inviting. 

For the Montreal project, Di Croce blended real sounds from the plaza, transforming and rearranging them into a new soundscape, dimming the noise of cars and elevating the sounds of nature and human activity. “The result is hypnotizing, strangely beautiful, and offers a fascinating sonic preview of how this corner of Montreal might sound if transportation leaders made different design choices — particularly those that deprioritize automobiles.”

For Di Croce, creating soundscapes that people want to hear is more important than policing urban sound, which can quickly devolve into discriminatory enforcement. “He argues that's even more important when neoliberal forces like corporations and repressive governments are aggressively shaping our urban environments — and dictating that certain sounds, like honking car horns, are perfectly acceptable, while others, like an unhoused person busking for change with her guitar, are not.”