Coin’s timbre

As noted in this website, one of the offshoots of the workshop Donostia Noise which was devoted to acoustic pollution and took place in the now defunct ARTELEKU in 2013, was the podcast published in Hots! Radio. However, this was not its only outcome. Another, not less important, were the dialogues between Mikel R. Nieto, Xabier Erkizia and myself during those days. We set out to compile interviews in the eighteen neighborhoods of Donostia.

The article “Moneda y timbre” [Coin’s timbre], published as a conclusion to that research project, is a first-person account of that field work and what people told us: the way they listened to the city and the words they used to express it. In that text, I start by alluding to something that I regard as worth repeating: the ineffective usage of the decibel as an unit of environmental sound and its subsequent monetization. In some way, that article ended up becoming an investigation on the meaning of words, since it is the words themselves that pave a very concrete history of a city, and present us some of the reasons of being of that urban space. Words that still reveal, like the projects in Donostia, Madrid, or Málaga Noise, the close relationship between noise and economic activity; or, to be precise, that of overblown tourism.

You can read it right here: