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Lesson 32

Soundscapes: Cinema, Place, and Belonging

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Introduction

Welcome back. In our last lesson, we established the concept of 'sonic identity' and explored how it is encoded in film through both the specific cultural content of sounds and the overall architectural form of the soundscape. We saw how filmmakers construct experiences of place, belonging, and alienation.

Today, we build directly on that foundation to address a more specific social dimension. Our learning outcome is to describe how sound functions as a marker of place, community, and belonging in cinema. We will move from the general sonic identity of a location to the ways sound actively defines social groups, forges bonds of community, and draws boundaries of belonging. You'll see that sound is never a passive background; it is a primary medium through which social life is conducted and represented.

1. Sound, Community, and Acoustic Anthropology

Before we turn to film, it's essential to grasp how deeply sound and community are intertwined in human experience. The field of acoustic anthropology studies precisely this relationship—how cultures understand the world through sound and how sonic practices shape social life.

A community's soundscape is a living archive of its social practices, power dynamics, and shared values. It's in the sounds of the marketplace, the rhythms of work, the calls to prayer, and the voices in the street that a community constantly performs and reaffirms its identity.

Cover of 'The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound'
The cover of "The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound" visually evokes this concept. The dense, bustling street scene is alive with activity. We can almost hear the children's games, conversations, and the general hum of daily life. The image suggests that to understand this community, one must listen to its soundscape.

A key concept from this field is acoustemology, a term coined by the anthropologist Steven Feld. It refers to a way of knowing the world through sound. Feld's work with the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea is a classic example.

Still from Steven Feld's 'Voices of the Rainforest'
This image is from Steven Feld's 'Voices of the Rainforest,' an audio-visual project documenting the soundscape of the Kaluli people. For the Kaluli, the sounds of the rainforest are not just environmental noise; they are a system of communication and a way of knowing their world. Birdsong, for instance, is perceived as the voices of ancestors. Their soundscape connects them to their environment, their history, and each other in a profound web of belonging.

This anthropological perspective provides a powerful lens for film analysis. Filmmakers, whether consciously or intuitively, tap into these deep connections. They use sound not just to signify a place, but to immerse the viewer in the acoustemology of a specific community, defining who is an insider and who is an outsider.

2. Crafting Community on the Soundtrack: The Cinema of Moumen Smihi

Your specific research interest in Moroccan cinema provides a rich context for exploring these ideas. Moroccan filmmakers often use complex soundscapes to navigate the country's diverse linguistic, cultural, and historical layers.

Peter Limbrick's research proposal on the director Moumen Smihi offers a concise yet powerful overview of how a filmmaker can use sound to articulate various forms of community and belonging, from the local to the transnational.

Moroccan Director Moumen Smihi (Film Studies)

The following document is a proposal for a book on Moroccan director Moumen Smihi. A short section describing one of the book's chapters, 'The Voice of the Arabs', perfectly illustrates how a film's soundtrack can be analyzed as a map of different communities.

Please read the short paragraph describing Chapter Two, 'The Voice of the Arabs'. You can find it by searching for that title. Focus on the list of sonic elements the author identifies and the conclusion drawn about what they represent.

This brief description of Smihi's soundtracks is exceptionally insightful. Let's unpack the different communities and forms of belonging marked by the sounds Limbrick identifies:

  • A Transnational Arab Community: The mention of "Radio Cairo's pan-Arab broadcasts of the 1950s" points to a sound that, at the time, connected listeners across North Africa and the Middle East, fostering a sense of a larger, unified Arab identity or umma.
  • A National Community: "Moroccan pop stations" represent a more localized, national community, defined by shared contemporary musical tastes and culture.
  • Religious Community: The "calls to prayer" are a powerful sonic marker of the Islamic community, defining the rhythm of daily life for Muslims and sonically demarcating Muslim space.
  • A Folkloric Community: The "popular stories of the halqa tradition" and "the music of Berber songs" anchor the films in specific, deeply rooted local and ethnic traditions. These sounds signal an belonging based on shared heritage and cultural memory.
  • A Cosmopolitan/Class Community: The use of "non-diegetic music of Chopin" introduces another layer. This sound does not emerge from the diegetic world of Morocco but is imposed upon it. It might function to align the film (or a character) with a global, European-educated intellectual community, creating a sense of belonging that transcends national borders, or perhaps highlighting a sense of alienation from the local environment.

As Limbrick concludes, listening to this "polyglot" soundtrack is to understand how sound constitutes "social exchange, political critique, and self-fashioning." Each sonic element evokes a different sense of place, community, and belonging.

3. The Sound of the Houma: Identity and Resistance

Now, let's zoom in from these broad cultural categories to a more granular level: the neighborhood. In Morocco, the concept of the neighborhood—lhouma—is a crucial site of identity formation, particularly in urban contexts. An academic paper on Moroccan hip-hop videos provides an excellent analysis of how the sound of the houma is used to articulate a sense of community and belonging.

Sound, Vision, and Urban Space in Moroccan Hip-Hop Videos

The article 'Hearing the Houma' analyzes how Moroccan hip-hop videos construct urban space. The following section provides crucial historical and cultural context on the significance of the neighborhood (lhouma) in Morocco.

Please read the section that begins 'Although hip-hop arrived in Morocco...' and ends just before the heading 'Neighborhood Vibes: Audio-Visual Constructions of l-Houma'. This section traces the history of urban/rural divides and explains why the lhouma became such a powerful 'site of affiliation and source of identity construction.'

This historical context is vital. The lhouma is not just a geographic location but a social and political space forged through colonial history and post-independence struggles. As the article shows, Moroccan hip-hop artists use the soundscape of the lhouma to define what it means to belong to that community. The author, Garrett Vandermeulen, goes on to analyze several music videos that function as short films about place and belonging:

  • Community as Shared Struggle (Muslim's "Dmou3 L7awma"): In this video, the soundscape is one of violence and despair. However, many of these sounds (weeping, sirens) are not made audible on the track; they are indexed visually. The artist teaches the audience a mode of listening, urging them to "open their ears" to the unheard suffering of the community. Here, belonging is an ethical act of attuning oneself to the collective pain of the houma.
  • Community as Authentic Origin (Don Bigg's "TJR"): This video contrasts the corrupting, "lo-fi" city with an idealized, "hi-fi" rural countryside. Belonging is found by leaving the city and reconnecting with one's rural origins. The video uses imagined sounds—the silent trill of a midwife, the implied call to prayer from a mosque—to mark the countryside as the place of authentic community and belonging.
  • Community as Collective Refusal (El Haqed's "Walou"): This video presents the soundscape of the peri-urban periphery—motorbikes, roosters, children's voices. When confronted by the camera (representing an outsider), the residents insist "Walou" ("Nothing"). The community is defined by its everyday sounds and a collective refusal to be packaged for outside consumption. Belonging means being part of this "nothing" that is, in fact, everything to its inhabitants.

These examples powerfully demonstrate that the sound of a community is not a monolith. It is a site of debate over what it means to belong, who defines the community, and how it relates to the wider world.

Conclusion

Today we have explored the intricate ways sound functions as a marker of place, community, and belonging in cinema. We've moved from the foundational anthropological understanding of sound in social life to specific cinematic examples from your area of research.

Key Takeaways:

  • Sound Creates Social Bonds: Drawing from acoustic anthropology, we see that sound is not a mere backdrop but a fundamental medium for creating community and knowing one's place in the world (acoustemology).
  • Soundscapes Map Communities: As seen in the work of Moumen Smihi, a film's soundtrack can be a "polyglot" tapestry of sonic markers that delineate overlapping communities—local, national, ethnic, religious, and transnational.
  • Sound Articulates the Politics of Belonging: The analysis of Moroccan hip-hop videos shows how the sound of a specific place like the lhouma can be used to articulate a community's identity, whether through shared struggle, a connection to an authentic origin, or a collective resistance to outside definition.
  • Listening as a Mode of Belonging: Belonging is not just about being present in a place; it's about knowing how to listen to it—a skill that filmmakers can model and teach to their audience.

Preview of the Next Lesson:

We've established that sound marks community. In our next lesson, we will dissect this process further. Our learning outcome will be to discuss the relationship between language, dialect, music, and ambient sound in constructing cultural identity on screen. We will examine how these specific sonic elements interact and are layered to create the rich and complex sonic identities we have begun to explore.