What’s interesting for musicians, for example, is their description of the important difference between dogmatic, unchanging repetition (metre, for example), and the differentiated dynamics of rhythm.

So, one of the things that interest me in the shopping-mall scenario you describe is the way that it evolves over time - both in the shopkeepers’ use of live and diffused sound, and the shoppers’ experience of it. Repetition and duration are crucial to how we experience urban sounds - what seems like an initial contrast between the well-ordered European public square and the seemingly chaotic and noisy Asian mall changes over time as we get accustomed to the cries, welcomings, greetings, announcements, melodies, etc. of the Japanese situation. You spoke in your lecture last month about how this cacophony in Ishibashi gradually came to feel comforting when you lived nearby, passing through it every day, and we all know the comfort of extremely annoying sounds that we associate with our homes or daily routines.

“A milieu exists by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu” - that’s exactly the situation you describe in the variation of one system of sound diffusion by another, but also in the periodic patterns by which shoppers pass through the area, through a chain of interlocking insides and outsides (in relation to one sonic milieu or another).

For the musicians, I’d like to follow up here your reference to the fieldwork book by composer Vagn Holmboe about professional refrains in Copenhagen in the early 20th century: “Danish street cries: a study of their musical structure and a complete edition of tunes collected before 1960″, published by Kragen in 1988. This book includes a large number of notations of vendors’ calls, showing how musicologists documented urban sounds in the days when recording equipment was more bulky than a notebook and pencil.

The other reference is the background to how Jacob Kreutzfeldt got into all this repetitition and territoriality, and that is sound-poet Per Højholt. Some of this is set out in Kreutzfeldt’s article in the anthology Mellem ørerne: PERformer HØJHOLT. Medikunst 1967> (ed. Kreutzfeldt, Meyhoff and Søndergaard). Informations forlag, 2004.

Easter holidays are upon us and that, combined with the level of reflection we’ve got into on this diablog, means we’ll be turning down the tempo a bit the next couple of weeks. But we’re not finished with sound, refrains, territories and street cries …

These cases point at the transient nature of urban space. Planners often think of urban space as something well defined like Newton’s three-dimensional space containing objects. Interests in the auditory aspects of urban space introduce a temporary and flexible element into these spaces. In a way this is what Deleuze and Guattari do in their capture “1837- On the Refrain”: to destabilise notions space and place. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that even the most solid empire and all it’s democratic squares with solid monuments and modern sculptures is only the result of a temporary arrangement resulting from territorialisations.

Deleuze and Guattari’s point of departure is etology’s investigations of birdsongs, where the repeated song marks the territory for other individuals of the same species. The territory is not something predefined. It is communicated to and experienced by other birds through singing. Deleuze and Guattari focus on the refrain (fr. ritournelle), the repeated musical motif that they find in animal cries, in diverse areas as religious rituals, music, sales cries etc. Their central claim is, that just as it marks the bird’s territory around a centre, the refrain is always territorial; it always bares within it a relation to home. In a wider sense they talk about refrains not only as sound, but also as gestural and optical patterns, all amounting to structure and order space. This is a philosophy of habits and patterns, and about how they shape environments, even though that may not be their primary function. The primary function of the sales call is professional: to signal profession by the naming of goods. But, Deleuze and Guattari claim, it nevertheless has a territorial function; drawing a space around the sales man.

In this capture Deleuze and Guattari focus primarily on sound: partly because the aural radius of a sound in a very concrete way marks a space, partly because sound always escapes that space. Sound is more easily remembered and imitated than other types of expressions. The origin of sales cries is a good example. They are always specific for the person and the shop. But when asked about the origin of their cries street vendors often explain that they picked up pieces here and there and pieced together their own motif. Sapling is not just a product of modern technology. Even birds sample each other’s songs or sample the sounds of their surroundings. The street vender’s cries are temporary territorialisations with the potential to leap into something else: another vender’s cry, a song, humming, music. Messiaen composed from birdsongs and Vagn Holmboe composed from vendor’s calls. Sound has this inherent potential of improvisation, which Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialisation.

There is so much to say about this subject. But I could, provisionally, sum it up by saying that refrains draw spaces and facilitate improvisation. This is what happens in Ishibashi not only with the sales calls, but also with the music in the sound systems. I guess one could ask if the pop music in the speakers in excluding other sounds amounts to the same degree of improvisation as the calls. With their even distribution around the area the trade organisation’s speakers make up a neatly planed territory that strictly limits inside and outside. The calls on the other hand blend and consolidate with each other and the music in ever-new ways supplying variation within the living room.