Geografie del suono: per un’antropologia dell’ascolto nella prima età moderna

Luigi Collarile ¹, Maria Rosa De Luca ²

¹ Hochschule der Künste, Bern

² Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Università di Catania

Contributo presentato da Giuseppina La Face

Abstract

As a component of sensory experience, sound is an essential part of every urban space. It gives rise to a semiotic ecosystem that allows city dwellers to orient themselves, receive information, and participate in social life as members of a community of conscious listeners capable of decoding and giving meaning to the collective action that shapes the urban geography they inhabit. Upon the sonic dimension of reality, at various levels, deeper soundscapes are projected that contribute to a more complex process of semantic construction, not only of the urban collective ritual but also of individual sonic identity. These lines of inquiry were central to the research project that led to the publication of the volume Geographies of Sound: Sounding and Listening to the Urban Space of Early Modern Italy with a Contemporary Perspective (Turnhout, Brepols, 2023). In the ten essays included in the volume, the question of the sound of Italian cities from the early modern period to the contemporary age is explored from multiple perspectives. The aim of this paper is to highlight some aspects of the anthropological approach underlying the deciphering of the experience of urban sound listening, which is the result of analyzing several types of sources and implementing different strategies of inquiry.

Keywords

Geographies of sound, Urban space, Sonic identity, Anthropology of listening, Early modern Italy.

© Luigi Collarile, Maria Rosa De Luca, 2025 / Doi: 10.30682/annalesm2503n

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license