4.1 Summary of the Research Components

The neighbourhood selected as a case study proved to be a very receptive and fulfilling space of research. Commercial Drive is known for its strong sense of community, the presence of a very culturally diversified population and a certain hipness expressed notably through a vivid artistic life and a number of massively frequented cultural events. Located in the Grandview-Woodland district of Vancouver, BC, the Drive was historically known as the Little Italy, as many Italians, along with Chinese and East European immigrants established in the neighbourhood after the First and Second World Wars. In the seventies, Commercial Drive became the home of a growing “counter-culture” composed of “students, feminists, artists, pre-, semi- and full-professional” (Smith, 1993, p. 115). While the influence of these various groups remains clearly visible on the Drive, filled with Italian cafés, ethnic restaurants and various cultural venues and eclectic stores, its neighbourly character seems to have shifted in the last couples of years, as crime and drug dealing and the presence of panhandlers have increased (Smedman, 2003). I chose to focus my research on the most “commercial” portion of the Drive, in the quadrilateral constituted by Venables, Broadway, Woodland and Victoria. However, most participants, even when they themselves lived on avenues, commented almost exclusively about the Commercial Drive street itself, with few exceptions such as Victoria and McSpadden Parks. The fieldwork, including multiple series of interviews, recordings and various measurements, was completed during the months of January, February and March 2004; 21 persons were involved in the study in either one or many interviews.

Twelve inhabitants and various other ‘users’ of the Drive filled sonic mind maps and questionnaires during the two first weeks of the study. The range of participants extended from a homeless person frequenting the Drive to a worker at the Commercial Drive Business Society, and included also students, parents, and a storeowner. This first step (which consisted basically in walking down the street, questioning random people on the sidewalk or at cafes and parks) proved to be extremely rich in primary information about the sounds and locations of the Drive which would later prove to be valuable in a general assessment of its acoustic community. Furthermore, the entire days spent on the street also provided the researcher with a better understanding of the daily life and cycles first invisible (or should we say inaudible) to a foreign listener. Along with a short questionnaire presented verbally to participants (see Appendix D), two types of forms were used to draw mind maps. A blank rectangle was first presented as an empty space on which participants could draw or write. Another form, which already included the main streets and park locations, was also available for those who might be unsettled by a blank page or an absence of geographical landmarks (this happened once).

Sonic mind maps were often used as “icebreakers”, resulting in interactive discussions about the soundscape of the Drive and the various locations and sound sources identified by participants. The drawings themselves (see samples in Appendix C) were used not only to begin the selection process leading to the choice of three locations to be presented in the reactivated listening session, but were also analysed in terms of the choice of sound sources, their placement and numbers, the mapping of the sound environment and the various iconic representations found (people, nature sounds, architectural features, importance of the street and sidewalks…) throughout the samples collected.

Sonic mind maps and questionnaires notably revealed the importance of public spaces and social interactions (drawings of people talking, zones of interaction, or even a generic “TALKING” label inscribed throughout the Drive) in inhabitants’ perception of “their” sonic Drive. Furthermore, it quickly appeared that this “publicness” of the Drive is experienced primarily through sounds and ambiences, which allow one to move from the “anonymous cafés with their constant hustle-bustle ” to other places such as markets and various stores in which they expect to meet people they know on various levels, but also a particular acoustic setting which will shape their way to interact. Cafés, restaurants, markets, Grandview Park and Britannia Centre were all chosen several times as examples of positives soundscapes, while the intersections of First and Commercial as well as Broadway and Commercial were always described negatively. Soundmarks of the Drive such as the constant mix of languages, street musicians and music leaking out of coffee shops and restaurants are easily revealed by long-term inhabitants but do not always appear in accounts of newer inhabitants or foreign “users” of Commercial Drive.

Once this initial step was completed, the first series of interviews (or phono-reputational inquiries, as Amphoux calls them) were organised over the next weeks. Recommendations made by Amphoux in his methodological guide (1993a) concerning the types of participants and their role as either “users of the city” or “representation of the city” were followed as much as possible. However, it appears that the ‘unusual’ subject of the interview and the fact that people often feel they “lack the specialised knowledge to talk about sound” made this first series of interviews more difficult to achieve. In the end, five persons were interviewed, including an active musician playing in many venues of the Drive (Jean), one person involved with the Grandview Woodland Community Policing Centre (Lucie), two university students (Diane and Jane) and a long-term inhabitant of the Drive (Josh). The interview focused mostly on the selection of locations that seem to possess particular sonic features and the description of these spaces by participants. Other topics including sound memories, discussion about sounds that seemed “representative” of the Drive, personal judgements on the overall soundscape and its changes through time were also addressed.
This second step partly confirmed some of our earlier observations, notably in terms of the selection of spaces possessing particular features and the features used to describe and qualify the Drive’s soundscape. Various cafés and restaurants on the Drive were described by participants as examples of positive soundscapes. Italian cafés such as Calabria, Abruzzo, Roma and Continental Coffee are particularly appreciated and commented on, partly because of the historical importance they have, the multicultural experience they offer, their strong acoustic identity (reverberant qualities, dense soundscape filled with foreign languages— and particularly Italian male voices, various coffee machines, cups and dishes handling, Mediterranean music, etc.) and the fact that they somewhat “represent” the whole of Commercial Drive.

These locations, like most of the other ones mentioned and described by participants, are perceived as important spaces of socialising that define the “neighbourhood” character of the Drive and its localness. Other cafés and restaurants including Havana, Waazubee Café and JJBean were also mentioned several times. For long-term inhabitants who frequent these cafés, there exists a sort of habituation, a built-in knowledge of these places, their particular sound signals and the people one can expect to encounter in each location. Diane commented: “Havana, it’s mostly just general hustle and bustle of the people, inside of the restaurant. Calabria, I’m thinking more the machines, the coffee machines. Turk’s, more mood music…” One thing that is common to all these locations is their extension on the sidewalk through terraces and/or large (opening) windows. Inside and outside spaces are often blurred, and participants interpret this as an extension of these inside social spaces onto the Drive itself. Music, voices and “the sound of people interacting” (as Josh called it) are all spreading out on the sidewalk; for Lucie, the soundscape of these locations is “not even leaking out, it’s meant to be out”.

Furthermore, for inhabitants the social life taking place on the street itself appears as important as localised (and commercial) spaces of interaction such as coffee shops and restaurants. Street musicians, for instance, are considered by Lucie as “one of the defining features of the soundscape”, “(they) civilise the place”; they are soundmarks of the Drive. They can be heard (when the weather permits it) at various locations, including Grandview Park, near the Government Liquor Store, on the Napier greenway facing Britannia Community Centre and into the Commercial Drive SkyTrain station. Some of them are known by participants, who can even sometimes specify where and when each musician plays. Lucie adds, “we use to have one single guy who was always at the Liquor Store playing the guitar, he was good, he’s not here anymore but he was here for ten years”.

Other exterior places of social interaction include the various fruit and vegetable markets and the few parks located around Commercial Drive (Grandview, Victoria and McSpadden Parks notably). Participants most commonly mention two markets, Santa Barbara and Norman’s Fruit & Salad, as possessing distinctive soundscapes. Various languages, loud and lively interactions and discussions about “what’s a good deal or not” are intermingled with the sounds of plastic bags, food handling, carts, and the constant background of car traffic. Grandview Park, on the other hand, features according to participants a constant mix of children voices, playing and yelling, their parents, and various buskers including drum players and many guitar players, and at times, according to Jane, “people trying to hawk stuff” along Commercial Drive. While it is not considered as a quiet location, Grandview Park is appreciated because it provides a temporary relief to the loud traffic noise on the Drive, and the presence of joyful interactions and nature sounds (birds, and wind blowing through trees) makes it a somewhat “refreshing” space.
Locations that were depicted negatively by participants tend (but are not limited) to be the noisiest intersections on Commercial Drive, in accordance with our previous findings. However, the recorded interviews allowed a more in-depth understanding of this negative perception, subtler than the simplistic it’s-noisy-therefore-I-don’t-like-it type of assessment. In the case of First Avenue and Commercial Drive, for instance, the intersection is described by Lucie as the place “where we interact with the others (others referring to commuters who drive through to reach suburbs) (...) that’s the invasion of the other and they’re always going through”. Furthermore, the fact that First Avenue is one of the only intersections on the pedestrian-oriented Drive where “you are forced to stop and listen to traffic” reinforces a negative assessment by shifting one’s attention from either visual (storefronts, other people walking by) or sonic clues (discussions at cafés or with someone else); “When you’re forced to stop, it’s unpleasant and it makes you think ‘I wish they’d go away’, whereas the same guy just turns left and start going (on commercial drive), and you’re walking alone, it doesn’t bother you, it’s just a car.”

In the case of the Broadway and Commercial Drive intersection, negative assessments of the soundscape are intermingled with resentment about the radical changes (both visual and acoustic) that took place in this section in the last twenty years and the various social problems associated with these transformations. The construction of two SkyTrain stations, in 1986 (Broadway Station on the Expo Line) and 2002 (Commercial Drive Station on the Millennium Line) has brought a much larger flow of commuters, and filled the space with new structures and new sounds. Although the sound of the SkyTrain itself (often described as a futurist and somewhat soft or fleeting sound) can only be heard in the immediate surroundings of the stations, the accompanying changes in the landscape and the soundscape, now filled with transportation noises including cars, buses, heavy trucks, a train and two SkyTrain lines, are for all participants signs of a deterioration of this neighbourhood. The Broadway intersection has also become a more anonymous environment, and has been adopted since then by drug dealers and panhandlers (Smedman, 2003).

The “noisiness” of this intersection has therefore as much to do with the temporal changes experienced by inhabitants than with its actual unbalanced and loud soundscape; Lucie comments:
I hate the sound of it partially because I hate the look of it (...) It used to be all trees, only cars, then they built the overhead SkyTrain, and that was a blight. And then they took out even more trees and put the other SkyTrain, so I hate it so much that the noise of it bothers me a lot!

Diane also comments:


“I certainly remember when there was no SkyTrain and stuff like that, and a slower pace, things weren’t quite so hustle and bustle (...) I used to associate it to the railroad track, but I don’t anymore (...) I also think it’s no longer the dominant sound, everything else overpowers it, you don’t even notice really when a train goes by”


In these two first locations, transportation noise overpowers human sounds and prevents interaction, even though there is a large number of pedestrians in most daytime periods. In the case of the two other locations, negative comments are based, on the other hand, on the actual absence of human interaction, which again makes traffic noise the dominant sound. We can observe in the Commercial Drive sections extending from Venables to William and from 4th to 7th Avenue a sudden drop in the number of pedestrians, while car traffic remains fairly consistent along the Drive. A pedestrian vs. cars count has revealed that while car traffic on the Drive remains at an average of 256 cars per 15 minutes, the number of pedestrians is significantly lower in these two sections (130 and 172 respectively, compared to 258 in front of Grandview Park and 325 between Graveley and First Avenue) (see Table 1). Lucie, talking about the 4th to 7th Avenue section, says: “People are not comfortable there, there’s no noise, there’s no people coming in and out, it’s just dead. And I think that kind of dead air, dead soundscape makes people less comfortable, it’s quieter for sure but nobody likes it”. Again, there is an expectation of a busy soundscape on the Drive, and traffic constitutes a part of that acoustic image for many inhabitants. Jean says: “The outside I expect it to be noisy, like now, there is always traffic, foot traffic, there’s always people shopping, it’s always busy. (...) I think it is the interaction of everything, the traffic and the people, because if you took one away, it wouldn’t be quite the same thing.”