Listening cities, silencing algorithms: Who can sound in the algorithmic city?
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Abstract
This article investigates how the transformation of sonic events into data affects conditions of recognition, participation, and presence in urban space. The study adopts a qualitative, theoretical-critical approach, bringing together sound studies, critical perspectives on artificial intelligence, urban thought, and artistic practices. It proposes the concept of an algorithmic regime of audibility to describe the technical, cultural, and political conditions through which sounds acquire legibility and circulation within information systems. The analysis relates this problem to territorial inequalities, the right to sound, and algorithmic sonic gentrification, understood as an analytical possibility. A comparative reading of Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, Jana Winderen’s RATS: Secret Soundscapes of the City, and Holly Herndon’s PROTO traces a path from transduction and perceptual expansion to machine learning. These works are understood as algorithmic counter-scores, while the notion of ecologies of listening brings together technological materiality, territory, perception, and forms of life.
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