Radiasystem 2022, Berlin
Soundscape and Smellscape due to globalisation
For thousands of years, human beings have found food, escaped from dangers, fallen in love, and reproduced by perceiving the sound and smell of environments. Each of us produces different smell and sound signals during everyday activities and interconnect with our surrounding environment through receiving and analyzing the sensory signals of others. The sense of belonging and identification is a consequence of the familiarity of soundscape and smellscape.
This project is focused on the role of sound and smell as cultural objects in urbanism; by investigating ways of assessing the multi-sensory quality of urban spaces to determine the effect of immigration on the Soundscape and Smellscape of the cosmopolitan metropolises like Berlin.
The most challenging part of immigration is the loss of familiarity perception. The “alien” population of migrants had been uprooted from their old surroundings and faced an unfamiliar environment and a new status.
Unlike sight, where a viewer is able to choose what they view and look away if a sight or landscape offends them, our sense of smell and hearing cannot be switched off. Their signal and vibration penetrates into our body and brain; we are constantly immersed in the smellscape as we breathe in and out, and continuously reverberated by the soundscape’s vibration.
Although each city has a unique sound and smell due to its particular culture and model of life, which reveals its hidden identity, but immigration is responsible for the transformation of urban ecology concept and community identification processes.
As an Iranian musician and sound artist, who have been witnessing of compulsory or deliberate immigration of his close friends and family to west worlds, I am seeking identity through sound and smell in metropolitan cities.
As an Iranian musician and sound artist, who have been witnessing of compulsory or deliberate immigration of his close friends and family to west worlds, I am seeking identity through sound and smell in metropolitan cities.
Everything is noise, every sound or smell that can't be interpreted by your brain. As an unavoidable consequence of immigration, the silence of loneliness makes the city soundscape louder and more perceivable to your ear. You don't understand it, you can't communicate with it; Your ear is craving to hear a familiar sound; mother tongue, traditional music, or religious sound even if you are an atheist.
Most immigrants live their memories and try to bring them into their real life. They try to make everything close to their old home experience, and this journey leads to sensory changes in their new hometowns.
Even though I started the project by researching other migrants' life experiences, it became more personal and more autobiographical after I moved to Germany. Now it's more me and my endeavor toward finding familiarity with my hometown. My fears and wonders of new soundscape and smellscape. My way of adapting to new meanings.
As a sonic observer, I listen to anthropophagy sounds of cities and explore the immigration impact has on urban sound and smell. I talk with immigrants and listen to the stories of their endeavors to adapt themselves to new meanings.
