Bodies, Spaces, Voices, Silences

Abstract

A good architecture should not only allow functional, formal and technical quality for urban spaces, but also let the voice of the city be perceived, listened, enjoyed.

Every city has got its specific sound identity, or “ISO” (R. O. Benenzon), made up of a complex texture of background noises and fluctuation of sound figures emerging and disappearing in a game of continuous fadings. For instance, the ISO of Naples is characterized by a spread need of hearing the sound return of one’s/others voices, by a hate of silence.

Cities may fall ill: illness from noise, within super-crowded neighbourhoods, or illness from silence, in the forced isolation of peripheries. The proposal of an urban music therapy denotes an unpublished and innovative enlarged interdisciplinary research path, where architecture, music, medicine, psychology, communication science may converge, in order to work for rebalancing spaces and relation life of the urban collectivity, through the care of body and sound dimensions.