- a Cultural Geography Chair Group, Wageningen University and Research, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
- b Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
- Received 30 January 2015, Revised 5 June 2016, Accepted 6 June 2016, Available online 14 June 2016
Highlights
- •
- Busking in public urban spaces has the potential to affect encounters with urban space and others within it.
- •
- Migrant music has ethical potential in its capacity to affectively and emotionally reconfigure space as more open and inclusive.
- •
- Encounters with music are subject to power-geometries and musician’s and audiences’ differential capacities to affect and be affected.
Abstract
In
this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be
understood in terms of ethical potential, where new sensibilities for
thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined and
practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by
migrants impact on inclusive forms of place (re-)making, affective
enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging and ‘the
other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American
pan flute musicians, performing music at Sergels torg, a central square
in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a combination of
qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory
methods such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace
the affective aspects of encounters with busking and the impact of music
on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience
of urban moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that
encounters with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and
inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a
positive encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable
social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves to
make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it
can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need
to take into account the full complexity of the dynamics between sound
and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window to the
ethical potential of the urban encounter.
Keywords
- Sound;
- Public space;
- Migrant busking;
- Affect;
- Ethical potential;
- Atmosphere;
- Diversity;
- Place-making
