The sound of shopping
af Juliana Hodkinson
À propos pedestrian crossing signals: Jacob Kreutzfeldt has analysed these and many other urban Japanese sound phenomena in his research on acoustic territoriality. At one of Kreutzfeldt’s lectures on the subject a couple of years ago, I was fascinated by his analysis of a melancholy low-pitched Japanese crosswalk signal, bringing together reflections on traditional melodies as well as cultural specifics in Japanese pedestrians’ use of urban space (for instance, those mega-crossings, where all the traffic stops simultaneously for pedestrians to walk in all directions at once).
More recently, Jacob Kreutzfeldt has embarked on an in-depth analysis of the interaction of amplified sound-design with other sonic events in a suburban shopping arcade in the Ishibashi district of Osaka - one which is perhaps typical of many similar arcades in Japan. He presented some of this work at a recent seminar on Sound and the City at CRASSH in Cambridge.
We’ve agreed to blog about Jacob’s research over the coming days.
Jacob, do you want to start by saying a bit about this arcade, and the way that recorded sound is used?
4. marts 2008 kl. 23:42
Hi Juliana, and thank you for the introduction – and for inviting me to your field recording territory.
The place I have been studying is pretty much a typical suburban shopping district in a Japanese metropolis. This one is situated about 15 kilometres north of Osaka centre, close to Osaka University. Like in many other commercial areas in Japanese cities, the shoppers in Ishibashi are accompanied by a soft voice and easy-listening music while walking the narrow streets and arcades. The applied sounds are highly functional in creating a lively and what the local tradesmen called “prosperous” atmosphere in the area. They rarely attract attention, but are always audible and seem very much to be a natural part of the environment
What interests me is the connection between territorial identity and the applied sounds. We often think of commercial background sound as a kind of strategic weapon aiming to seduce the costumer. But we rarely consider the spatial function of systems like these: how they distinguish an interior zone (where the designed sound mask exterior sounds), how they support territorial differentiation, and how they compress and homogenise the street for the walking costumer. I investigated the history of Ishibashi and found that the local trade organisation started using the applied sounds started around 30 or 40 years ago somewhere along the line of increasing suburbanisation around the old Ishibashi village. It seems probable to me that the system is not only meant to hypnotises the visitors, but also has the important function of shielding the human scale shopping area against the surrounding suburban highway noise and suburban sprawl.
Another thing that interests me is the way shopkeepers in the area adapt to the condition of their acoustic environment. Some play loud music inside their shops to build a private zone, where they don’t need to listen to the endlessly repeated tape. Some even play their own music in the street to compete with the trade organisation’s speakers. And some make sales calls in the old fashioned way to attract attention and create difference.
I think I better stop here for now. But I guess the main thing in my study of Ishibashi is the interest in sound not from a “naturalist” point of view (arguing for a naive silence in the middle of the roaring metropolis), but from a functionalist point of view looking at practises involving sound as strategic interventions in space. It seems to me sounds here are just means to inhabit the world.
5. marts 2008 kl. 13:03
I know from your work on acoustic territoriality that you also recognise the long tradition of merchants’ cries, which Deleuze & Guattari call ‘professional refrains’. As critical consumers, we tend to be much more sympathetic to the noisy and sometimes even quite aggressive (but also stylised) shouting of stallholders on Grøntorvet (Copenhagen’s outdoor veg market), than we are to the smooth repetitive muzak played in shops. So, it’s interesting that you introduce the idea that selling may not be the only important strategy of the applied sounds. You seem to be saying that the sound-ecologists’ censorial stance on urban noise and muzak is an inappropriately nostalgic response to metropolitan challenges, or at least that not all attempts to create commerical sonic environments are necessarily purely cynical.
Do you have any idea what kinds of things the ’soft voice’ says, how it addresses itself to people passing through the mall? I think most of the voices I can hear on your recording are on location, but I remember there’s this whole culture of the ‘welcoming address’ in Japanese shops. My Japanese teachers used to go to great lengths to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between inside and outside in all kinds of grammatical and social relations - so the welcoming act is very important in establishing and completing a transition from out to in.
About half-way through your recording there’s a woman’s voice that could be from the speakers - she seems to be inviting the okyakusama (customers) to something, a special offer maybe, or just to have a look… I wonder (rhetorically) if this is a voice from the ‘organisational ether’ or from an indivdual shop’s speakers.
I guess that the shopkeepers are a part of the trade organisation at some level, so maybe the way that some of them create alternatives to the overall sound-design of the mall also says something about their competitive relations and the level of difference that they find conducive to keeping the mall busy and bustling. Did you talk to the trade organisation about how they regard the individual shopkeepers’ speakers - whether they think it spoils the overall design, or in fact contributes to the atmosphere of the arcade?
6. marts 2008 kl. 12:11
It’s interesting, as you note, that we tend to prefer human calls from applied repetitive designs. The same system of values worked in Ishibashi, where most of the shopkeepers I talked to liked the calls. But few shop found it suiting for their kind of shops and for the environment. The calling had slowly declined, they said. The shoe shopkeeper, Mr. Tsujimoto, thought his costumers would run away, if he started crying out.
It is interesting that Deleuze and Guattari in their text on the refrain in Mille Plateaux liken these professional calls to birdsongs. These calls are incorporated in professional styles with different expressional qualities: For instance the very energetic, colourful and fluorescent pharmacy from where a young salesman encourages sale in the beginning of the recording. In here they play loud pop music too, probably targeting young female costumers. The greengrocer and the fish shop are much more of the street vender-kind serving costumers in the street and having all their stuff lined up outside. In the last part of the recording we hear lady running the greengrocer laughing and chatting with the costumers. She used to be making all kinds of calls, as do the fish sellers at the central square (maybe we can upload a excerpt from a recording there?). The calls are obviously a part of a social conduct and not just commercial. All kinds of intentions and (sales-)instincts combine in these calls. And most notably they have style. They are the result of years and years of practice on intonation, rhythm, tone etc. I guess that’s a part of why we generally like it better than the often rather dull and uniform muzak.
I would like to distinguish between the spatial functions of the music and the calls. While the music literally create an acoustic space and mask outside noise, the calls rather create and point out acoustic places within a wider sonic environment. In the case of Ishibashi it seems, these two functions support each other: The sonic wall from the sound system protects the area from outside noises and establish a node in the larger scale urban network. The calls differentiate within the area. The music from the shop speakers establishes a space within the area.
Some of your comments raise the question about control: who controls the sounds in the city? and who is to judge if they are agreeable or if they are unwanted, noisy sounds? In Ishibashi the trade organisation has the power. The head of the organisation, Mr. Arkari, told me, there had been some disputes with shops playing music in the street. But they had developed into disputes about sound levels carefully negotiating the balance between private and public.
The notion of public space is a key issue here, I think. It was very inspiring that you mentioned the Japanese emphasis on inside/outside relations and welcoming rituals. I often think of Japanese urban space as a Chinese box system with all kinds of hidden spaces and adventurous territories appearing out of nowhere (or rather: inside somewhere). Within the western tradition we often conceive of urban space (the streets, the squares etc.) as a counterpart to private space (the inside of buildings, roughly). The public space for us has all these connotations of democratic and free exchange of meanings. It can only be privatized to a certain extend (for instance by visual and auditory signposting). Japan never fully embraced this vision of urban space as a public sitting room to be planed and designed for the public good. There are no public benches in Ishibashi, for instance. Instead of this clear separation between public and private space, the Japanese urban space express all these different degrees of enclosure. Here it seems sounds are often employed to lend definition to the space on a temporary basis.
This leads me, finally, to your questions about the way the voices in the speakers address the listener. In the Ishibashi sound system there are different statements being circulated. One of them is a welcoming greeting to Ishibashi others are shop-sponsored advertisements á la: Sushi-ten, the sushi shop now has a special offer on lunchboxes… Both kinds are highly instrumental in giving the visitor the feeling of being a privileged insider. The same goes for the voice you hear in the beginning of the recording, this one coming from inside a supermarket, which opens up with no doors or walls towards the street. That place is a good example of a dynamic space with no clear visual borders being defined by greetings and refrains.
28. maj 2008 kl. 10:55
[…] on from our dialogue The sound of shopping, here’s a link to Jacob Kreuzfeldt’s diary from his research trip to Japan last […]