Rather than sightseeing or cracking open a history book, why not listen to a city instead? Alex Rigotti explores the city of Bern, Switzerland, using only their hearing – and in doing so, uncovers new worlds of understanding perception and the environment.

Would you believe me if I told you I learned everything I know about Bern just by listening to it?

So much of the knowledge we accrue comes from a third party. We might read a book or listen to a lecture, all told to us by an intermediary person. This is also true of music: we might listen to Bernese rap and dissect the lyrics to understand the attitudes of the people. But perhaps there is a more direct way of understanding a city: through sound.

The value of listening to a city seems limited in comparison to using our eyesight. For those in the U.K., a study found that participants would rather have 4.6 years of perfect health over 10 years with complete sight loss (Enoch et al. 2019). We privilege our eyesight so much and we’re quick to dismiss what we hear. What different kinds of information can we parse, and what kind of connection might that forge with the city?

Though scientific evidence claims that memories about sound are less likely to be remembered than visual or tactile triggers (University of Iowa 2014), this essay is a space to keep these aural memories intact. Having lived in London and Sydney, I’m working in Bern for the month, and I’m determined to get to know the city differently by speculating with music and words to understand place and space.

Pacing Yourself

Some of the information we can extract from a city seems obvious enough. The «pace» of a city, for example – rat-race fast, grass-grow slow. In the city center, canvas shoes scrape on stone floors in fleeting polyrhythms, tourist chatter often floating above. Walk a few minutes near the river, and the soles become feet steadily slapping on smooth pavement – tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk…

Bern is the capital city of Switzerland, but it definitely doesn’t sound like it. Just take the traffic, for instance. In Bern, cars and motorcycles are merely accents in the soundscape, piercing the silence once every few minutes or so. That might tell me about its excellent traffic management system, but more likely, this tells a tale of a small population. Bikes, too, are sporadically heard on the roads, gently whirring across open stretches of concrete. This perhaps hints at the walkability of the city, where citizens prefer to amble instead of drive.

Natural Instincts

Here, the birds I hear most often twitter and tweet like they were plucked from Cinderella, warbling high-pitched lullabies, which is in contrast with the coo and gurgle of the pigeon that can be found in cities I’ve lived in previously. This street-defacer and snack-thief can often be found polluting the air with its deep, throaty calls. The silence of pigeons should theoretically be very comforting, but there’s a lingering undertone of dread and control whenever I listen too closely to the silence.

There’s also the river Aare; if you walk next to it, you can hear the drone of its currents continuously pulsing. These currents carry residents either to the ladders on the banks or to other more unsavory destinations. If you dip your head underwater, you can hear the «Aarerauschen» («Aare noise»), which is the sound of the rocks that tumble and clack over the undergrowth. That is a sound completely individual to the city; it is incomparable to the clogged flubs of the Thames, or the rising cymbal crashes of the Sydney coastline.

I could have looked at Bern’s architecture as a means of tracking its historical developments, or crack open a history book. But listening is an active skill that can thwart voyeurism, and if you take the time, it contains the potential to embed you more deeply into the movements and rhythms of a city than sight ever could.