Case Study: The Sound Of Copenhagen

Welcome back to the Sonic Days Podcast. In this episode, Alexander Williams shares his work on the exhibit The Sound of Copenhagen: Noise, Voice, and Silence, a sensory exhibition that focuses on the 19th century Copenhagen, when some of the most dramatic changes in the city's soundscape took place. We'll hear plenty of examples from his work.

Enjoy I'm very pleased to have uh you two. Uh you're going to talk about this exhibition. Alexander, uh former student here from Sun College, who uh has been working together with the with the common uh company uh on this uh exhibition and also you Christian. Uh you are still a student here doing your bachelor's thesis now, but you uh did your internship at uh at this company called uh Yoke.

Uh so uh yeah. Uh so I think I will not say more, but uh thank you for coming and uh yeah the word is is yours for uh yeah and also thank you for coming.

I'll as Jonas said talk a little bit about the exhibition called The Sound of Copenhagen, which uh I was in charge of the sound production for uh together with also with uh Christian, who I will introduce in a bit. Yeah, I quickly go through the agenda. I'll this will be four main categories of the early concept ideation phase of the project, then the sound production implementation, and then uh a little bit about my role and collaboration in the end of this.

Yeah, so first of all, who am I? I'm a sound designer, as Jonas mentioned, and a sound artist working with storytelling through sound, and I've been doing sound installations, multi-channel audio, audiovisual art, and so on, and mainly been working with sound for museums and installations the last couple of years.

This exhibition is uh about and aims to convey sound and sound cultures in Copenhagen and the importance of sound and uh technology throughout the history of the city. And I will try to take you back to the early beginnings of this project, and uh I did it together with the design studio Joe, who has been designed the exhibition, and I've been working with them uh for many projects over the years, and that's why also uh Christian came in because he was uh intern at at Yoke at that moment uh as a sound designer as well.

So, yeah, we had to like manage and create uh the majority of the sound production uh for this uh exhibition. I started working on this project in in 2022 when I was uh working at at Yoke at that uh at that time. And uh the Sound of Copenhagen was like has been a research project since uh 2019 actually.

They wanted to bring these stories to life in an exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen. So when I came into this project with Yoke, uh we had our overall theme was to create an experience where you could experience uh Copenhagen with uh closed eyes, and uh it really encouraged people to to step into a world where sound takes the center of the stage and uh removing some of these visual elements that sometimes just distracts in a in an exhibition.

So in the early concept was to to mix the sounds from the past and the present of the city. But uh due to several factors, it was first in 2025 that it was actually possible to do the exhibition. So through the years the the concept of all the bit and refined a bit where I was not a part of this process, but the main concept of the exhibition was still the same.

But it focused on exploring the sounds and listening cultures of uh the 19th century from approximately 1800 to 1920. And uh it was really a rapid or a time of rapid industrialization and uh urban growth, which had a huge impact on on the sound at that at that period. The exhibition is divided into three main sections or three rooms.

The first room is called Noise, where you are bombarded with different sounds from the city of Copenhagen. The second one is about uh the voices of Copenhagen where they used the city as a small like an amplifier for of their world of their voice in this urban uh environment. And the third one is uh is uh this about silence and how uh the use of silence has been used in in Copenhagen as well.

So in terms of doing the production of this, I wasn't really a part of creating this final concept. Uh so when I came in, there was a lot of ideas and descriptions of uh what the museum and yoga wanted to do and use relevant sounds and objects and scene at that moment. Uh, but yeah, where do you actually start?

So I received like a huge document of all the descriptions of all the sounds that they somehow wanted to be used in in this exhibition. Uh, many pages long, but uh just to get this overview of what is actually uh possible and what is not, and how can we turn this into an actual exhibition. To make mine and Christian's life a little bit easier, I wanted to gather all the relevant sounds into one location so we would have like an overview of all the sounds that we had available for the exhibition.

So we created this uh sound production library, and luckily Jacob Ingemann, who has been the main curator from the Museum of Copenhagen and also the main uh one of the researchers on the project, uh, has been you know helping um creating this huge library with with a lot of uh sounds that we collected from different places.

So we wanted to use uh as many uh research recordings and original recordings as possible because we had a lot of specific sounds and scenes that we wanted to showcase, and it would of course be harder to recreate some of these things that was happening in the 19th century. So this also included pre-recording sounds from DR and BBC, and also uh the third sound designer Rasmus Zige has been doing some um some recordings and sound shape that uh matched into this exhibition as well.

Yeah, and this is a picture of uh some of the recordings that were made for the tram that I will get into in a bit, and that was uh Rasmus Zige has who has done who has done uh something similar with the tram museum earlier that we could use uh where he did this uh binaural uh recordings of the the original or the first trams that were used in in Copenhagen.

So these were some of the things that we were also heavily dependent on because we needed a really a big amount of of sounds, so it was really nice to use as much as we could from other museums and uh and sound designers. So um the one thing we started off with was creating this uh fundamental soundscape.

When you think about it, uh city always has like a its own background noise of mix of sounds that you would hear, like people uh talking or cars and birds chirping, and also you know, uh ringing bells and so on. So we thought of like creating this uh normal constant uh environment of a city, and that should also function like sort of a glue to all of the different sections that we had in the in in the room.

So this was the old the fundamental sound tip that was supposed to be in in both of the first two rooms and just create this environment of a city, and then we would put these extra sounds that will come into uh more uh on top of that. So um the first room was uh the noise, where people were bombarded with different kinds of noise or sounds from the city without having uh opportunity to interact with it.

And the the room was divided into different zones that represented different parts of the city. You would have uh a sound uh connected to that zone, or uh I did soundscape for every zone of that, and they would play uh simultaneously, so we would hear all the sounds together in in the room, and you could walk towards that zone and listen to that specific sound for that scene.

We had seven primary zones of the room: the harbor, the factory, the tram, Tivoli, uh Copenhagen Central Station, the car, City Hall Square. We also had some uh zone for bikes and cars, or uh and the cars and bikes and uh horse wagons that eventually emerged into these other zones as well in terms of sound.

Uh yeah, and I'll give uh quick introduction to some of the sounds or some some of the zones that we did. So the factory one was uh important one because it really reshaped the city introducing some new sounds to Copenhagen and especially these steam-powered whistles that marked the workday at that uh period of time starting from 6 a.m.

to six pm in the in the evening. And there was really a divided perception of these sounds, so uh some would symbolize it with some future music where it symbolizes some growth and uh progress of the city that breaks from from the tradition, and some uh focus more of the the negative impacts that it had that some would get uh you know stress or um hearing impairments and so on from these whistles, especially.

Um, so I really focused on the main part of this uh soundscape uh to that you could hear these uh factory whistles, and then they would turn on several at the same time in the morning, or in the start of this uh the soundscape, and then it would be like a whole piece of uh of music or like a choir of different whistles ringing on uh at the same time because that was also something that was described in many of the research or literature that people feel that it was this uh choir opening up uh every morning, uh sort of.

And yeah, I have a little bit of a snippet from uh the the soundscape where we can hear the start. So the point with this soundscape was to start in the early morning where the whistles uh started, and then we would go through a day of uh of of of a worker on the factory and hear different machineries, and then uh in the soundscape with people uh walking home from from the factory.

You would hear uh different kinds of machinery and also uh a lot of uh sewing machines later in the soundscape because it really had they had a lot of uh common factories at that moment in Come Hagen. Um then the people would uh walk home, and they also something that was described that they used they they were uh wooden clocks, so you would hear that more clearly than just normal shoes that we know today.

Um yeah, and then the tram also became a sonic landmark for the city, especially the ringing bell that they used uh on the early trams, and in the the around 1900, electric trams replaced the horse-driven ones. Uh so we used a lot of uh these recordings as also mentioned earlier with from the tram insume, and then we also had some early recordings from the BBC with more of the electrical trams that came later.

I did the soundscape for this with going through the evolution of it. So we're starting off with the the horse drum trams and then listening to more of the modernised or elektrolysed uh trams in the in the in the end of the soundscape. Yeah, and just a quick demo of that. And then it the ring bell is like the some of the iconic sounds that people would recognize from that period.

So when the the tram would stop it would ring only one time, and then when it uh drove off it would ring uh two times. Um yeah, and then later you would hear more of the electrolyzed uh trams. Tivoli is also like a defining soundscape of of the city with its uh carousels, coasters, and games, of course, and also the composer Hossu Lumbu uh crafted musical pieces for every attraction in the in Tivoli so visitors could hear that and also enjoy it in the concert hall later.

So we're allowed also to use some recordings from uh DR who made some recordings of some of Lumbu's work with their orchestra, and then I tried to put this in uh underneath a more general Tivoli's uh soundscape. So you in the soundscape you kind of like roll through different scenes in in Tulli, and also uh iconic sound is of course the fireworks that is happening every uh every Saturday, and also was packed in.

Um yeah, so I I yeah tried to put all these uh this uh Lombu uh words underneath uh some of the the attractions you could say that were uh running. Uh and you probably know you know the Champagne Gallup and the Jan Bene Gallup and also some of his iconic uh sounds that we used underneath uh this uh soundscape.

Um the last one I want to talk about is the City Hall Square, was uh established in the late 19th century, so it was designed like a hub for the city for trams and major streets and market and uh electricity and so on. And they also wanted to put an iconic sound uh for that, so they were inspired by Big Ben and created this uh bill that probably most of you know as the the City Hall Square bill or Rolls Blessen's uh uh clogger.

So, yeah, some of the things in this soundscape actually was combining all of these things from the other one, so it was a combination of trams and bikes and pigeons and cars that you would also hear separately in some of the other sounds, and of course, also using the the bells uh sometimes in the soundscape as well.

Yeah, and many sometimes it's just like overall atmosphere of the city, you know, a lot of sounds going on in the in the hall square. So a key problem was that how do we manage all of this sound in such a small space? I don't know if you can see it, but it was really a tiny space for all of these sounds, and some of these sounds are also really noisy or have really like loud uh sounds, such as the whistles or the horns from the harbor and factories and and so on.

So I really tried to focus on the very specific sounds that you would know from each zone, and then try to uh lower some of the sounds that you probably wouldn't symbolize with with that, because we also had this fundamental soundscape who was supposed to blend in with this and get uh more people and uh all of these other noises in in as well.

So one of the things that I did was creating this uh storyboard where I each zone goes through a time period. It was a loop of nine minutes that was running in the in the in the room, and then all of the stones had different like peak levels of sounds, so the whistles and the trains uh going departing and so on.

So I tried to like move move them all out so they wasn't interfering that much with each other. So I'm kind of like mixing some of the periods here because we go through a evolution of 100 years, but it was really necessary so we wouldn't have uh all of the same sounds going all at once, so people would hear different sounds coming uh from different areas of the room.

And then we had the neighbor installation, it was an interactive installation in the last part of the noise room as well, who uh Christian has mainly been been working on and tell us a little bit about.

So, uh yeah, as you know, I was uh during my internship I got to work on this exhibition, and this is one of the things I was working on. So it's a neighbor noise installation to sort of highlight um the different types of noises you would hear when you lived in this uh society back then, and they are based on actual real complaints from people that you would find in sort of uh local reports or maybe newspapers, and that's one of the things about this exhibition that I particularly like because if you go to it, you'll see that sort of scattered throughout it, there's going little snippets of literature or uh newspapers, so you get that cultural reference in there, which I really like.

So it's 12 different sounds that sort of uh play in sequence and highlight here. As you can see, there are 16 blocks. Don't ask me why. Uh but we sort of landed on 12 sounds along with uh with Jakob, Ingemann Pabi, who was the curator. Yeah, so some of them are um you know very special for that time.

It's very common actually for uh to have like the carpenter might have his workspace in the uh ground floor, and you would also keep animals in the ground floor. It's very common to have cows and horses in the ground floor, which is you know, but obviously some of them um like the neighbor partying and the dogs you might still find today.

Um so I have a uh few examples. So uh yeah, just to highlight some of them, um these are like dogs running around and stuff like that. And also we have an old-fashioned sewing machine, so like a uh you use a pedal for it, like a trading old sewing machine. Sort of try to get a sort of annoying, make them a little bit more annoying by getting sort of a uh uh pedal sound or a stomping sound in there.

I don't know if you can hear that in the actual exhibition because of the speakers, but um also birds were very common. Um so you would have tarrots and parakeets and also canaries, canaries were very common at that time. Um yeah, I think they were also sort of a uh wealth status symbol to have um uh yeah, birds, and also uh here's one where it's piano, someone trying to learn the piano.

Um sort of fun fact about that is it's me trying to play uh Jan Bay Negalum by Jose Lumbu. Uh I thought that was kind of funny to throw that in there because Jose Lumbi, as uh Alexander mentioned, is a very key figure uh of that time and uh uh very prompt. Composer. I don't know if anyone actually has caught that during the exhibition, but yeah, I thought it was pretty funny, and sort of also the challenge of trying to play something but make it sound like you're learning something, kind of like acting drunk or something like that.

Yeah, and one of the things uh actually as sort of a um I uh yeah, an issue with this was I got a little bit carried away with trying to design these sounds, uh process them too much. I was sat in um dream internship with headphones on, just like in an office, and I thought it was really cool if I design this acoustic occlusion of sound coming through a uh a wall.

So it's like very low, uh a lot of low pass and a sort of reverb to make these rooms sound small and like they're coming from somewhere else. But it works really great in headphones, but once we got it onto the speakers, it was like, oh wait, this doesn't work at all because there's so much bleed, and you know, it bleeds into other other sounds because as as Alexander mentioned, this one is sort of in its own booth, but still in the main room.

So it was actually we listened to it and we couldn't really tell where they were coming from. So it worked, but it worked too well.

Yeah, yeah, but that's that's what's funny because we made it like so it will really you know emphasize the the sounds that were coming through the walls, and then we were saying, like, yeah, of course, now we can hear it all over in the in the room as well. So it was kind of like uh you know taking over, or you can hear it clearly throughout the whole uh room as well.

And that was also the point you can say because it was about uh complaints about the neighbors, but yeah, it kind of dwelled maybe a little bit into much to to the other section. So we yeah, you would have to mix it a little bit.

Uh so I had to dial it down a little bit, but also that was one of the um sort of main learning experiences for me doing this as my internship because I had never done exhibition uh sound before, so it's like okay, you can't just you have to sort of you know work with the room a lot. Um so uh yeah.

Yeah, so uh eventually it became uh a room full of noise, uh, but also in a good way. So we used I I used around 200 different sounds on the zones alone, and then we had over a hundred different sounds on the fundamental soundscape, and also with the the neighbor installations, so over 300 sounds uh just uh going on in this room, of course, not in on the same time, but through this uh nine-minute loop.

So it wasn't really something that we could tame that much, but just try to embrace uh this and just make it something else that you haven't heard before in uh in a museum, uh, but still could you know go out to these different zones and hear it uh uh as a primarily. So yeah, that was quite nice. Yeah, and the the second uh room was the the voices room, and then we had in the start of that uh a road uh surface installation.

It was uh made so that people could uh choose and pair different types of pavements with different kinds of transportation, and then people could hear how much the pavement and transportation meant to the sound. Uh so I made this entirely by recreating different surfaces together with uh different uh trend transplantations.

So we had these um videos going where we uh the yoke team did these uh animations, and then we would put uh different pavements underneath. Now it's just grayed out, and then you could switch between different uh pavements. And uh yeah, we can just have a quick demo of that. So uh the asphalt with asphalt underneath uh would sound something like this, and then it could switch it to uh to cobblestone, or uh the last one was uh dirt.

So had this underlying uh car that was like an automobile, what which was uh vintage recordings of some of the the first cars that was that had really this funny uh car or uh engine sound to it, and then we just put different layers underneath to to emulate how it would sound in in on different surfaces.

Um yeah, and then we also had for walking so people could hear how uh different shoes uh was sounded like on different payments uh as well, and then the last one was a carriage uh where uh yeah you could hear the difference as well. And I have a few examples. So this was the asphalt, and then you would have the the bricks or not the bricks, the the cobblestone and uh with with dirt.

So yeah, here you can see uh how it works so you can switch between different services and transportations. And one of the limitations was that it was made with ear cups, so it was a mono sound. So we actually needed to really enhance or uh turn up the volume of these pavements so people could actually hear a difference because it was a bit hard on these uh mono ear ear cups.

And then we had uh the reverb installation, who uh uh Christian has been mainly working on, which was to like emphasize the difference in reverb in terms of um different streets and so on. Uh yeah.

Yeah, so um as long as as well as emphasizing uh the different reverbs, I think it's also to sort of tell a little sort of sequence of how the streets would evolve during this time. So it starts off with the first one being sort of a very small, quiet street, and then you get into these sort of over here, they would build like very tall buildings, uh, and the sounds would echo all the way up through like that.

And um, so it's a it's a combination of reverb but also the environment changing uh because some of them are very subtle in uh the changes in reverb, but then I decided to sort of work a little bit more on um the environment changing so you can hear the difference. Um, and we decided to uh the way we would demonstrate this would be to have the same sound.

Uh this is a street call uh from a street seller, and but to put different processing on it. Um so it's as uh Alexander mentioned, you're listening on these ear cups, so it's slightly exaggerated, also because it's mono and there's other sounds going through uh the room, so it's yeah, it's exaggerated to enhance the subtle nuances a little bit.

And I have a few examples. So if we just uh solo the voices here, this is the street call.

Hey, I'll be all hey pats.

So this is the first one, which is like a small street, uh very not busy street. I put a little bit of ambience under it just to get that feeling. And in combination, we sort of get this. So if we skip to the next one, it's this one. Actually, the picture is I believe this one. Uh so it's very exaggerated, but just to uh sort of get the idea.

And also we I tried to play a little bit around with the uh localization of the street solar. So sometimes he's close to you and sometimes he's a little bit further away. Um one of the things that Jakob wanted to sort of get the idea of that maybe you're inside one of these apartments and you hear him down there or sort of.

So yeah, it's a it's a sort of psychoacoustic thing, but it's kind of difficult to do with the ear crab. And then there's a little bit of ambience under it. And in combination, so look at this.

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Case Study: The Sound Of Copenhagen

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