After gathering various information through the interviews about old and new sounds of the city, I asked which are the sounds that identify the city. Here is the list of the characteristic sonorities:
- the market
- the new overground metropolis
- the bus station
- the chants of Orthodox priests amplified with the megaphone.
It is interesting to note that certain sounds that I find peculiar and identifying were not mentioned by the interviewees. I realised that my aesthetic interpretation of the sounds of the city, deeply influenced by Western culture, was completely different from the reality of the area and its economic and social environment.
For example:
small public buses, in which there is a guy who shouts out the destination and urges people to board the bus; the acoustic environments and the acoustics of the narrow streets of the old surviving districts (low houses with mud walls); the soundscape at sunrise, where the chanting of Orthodox priests mixes with muezzins and the awakening of the birds; musicians playing in night clubs accompanying, with traditional instruments (Krar, Mazenko), improvising singers and dance performances; loud and often distorted music coming out from small shops along downtown streets.
In the streets of Addis Ababa I recorded about 10 hours of sounds at various times and locations. With these recordings I made:
- A soundscape composition with which I propose a summary of Addis Ababa’s day.
- I adopted the narrative of chronological succession of the day. It begins with the sounds at sunrise and ends with the sounds of the night.
- A soundwalk in the most central street of the capital where there is a a high density of commercial activities and a flow of people waiting for buses and doing shopping.