Asakusa Ondo: Soundscape, Agency, Montage, and Place in a Dynamic Tokyo Neighborhood.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I offer a theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the ways people make sense of sound, music, and place in dense, diverse urban environments. Scholars often apply the concept of soundscape when considering matters of sound and place, but the term has mainly been used to refer to the entire mosaic of sounds in a usually pastoral, homogeneous environment. In crowded urban areas, however, people typically interact with and perceive their environments as heterogeneous, subdividing them into many socially and conceptually distinct places. The conventional application of the term, therefore, cannot adequately explain the reality of today’s world in which more than half of its now seven billion people are living in cities, and where the trend toward urbanization is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

To properly contend with these realities, I adapt the term soundscape to refer specifically to all of the audible sounds experienced in a place. Understanding place as the physical setting of a social activity, it is possible to analyze how differently meaningful sounding places come in contact with one another, and to examine human beings’ roles in creating and making sense of those settings. I investigate the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa to demonstrate this theoretical framework. In Asakusa, strongly contrasting soundscapes merge; sounds drift far from their sources, overlap, and complicate the perception of meaningful senses of place. In such an environment, differently situated individuals have the agency to create, experience, and negotiate the neighborhood’s sounds for themselves. People embrace and define certain sounds while choosing to not hear and silence others, constructing their own musikscape to fashion their personal sonic sense of emplacement. Investigating these processes on both individual and collective levels, I ultimately demonstrate that overlapping soundscapes act as a montage, allowing Asakusa to be understood both as a conglomeration of its variety of parts, and as a cohesive whole within larger Tokyo.