Unpacking economic rhythms

Today, as Berlin again seeks to become a world city, there is a more complex mix of sounds and the rhythms that comes from 'beyond the horizon' to spread through its spaces. The rhythms that are of interest here are not so easily associated with recognisable things. After all, as Re (1999) points out "[h]earing has to be content to live in a world of sounds - floating, ungraspable, and weightless nothings that they are; unlike vision, it cannot pretend to deal only with real solid things". Sounds, in other words, rather than things are what the experience of hearing involves. As an experience "hearing is decidedly less materialistic than seeing" (ibid 1999 p.45).

By unpacking the buildings around Potsdamer Platz, the gesture is to make material the white noise of capitalism; the social relations that compose the rhythms imposed on this new centrality (see Pryke and Allen 2000). Because we cannot see the revenue flows, profit projections, exchange rate risks, interest rates, and so on, that run through the organisations moulding this place, it is difficult to imagine their rhythms let alone to name them. Yet they need to be at least recognised for increasingly they are the "separate strings, pipes, reeds or throats that collaborate to produce…" the city's dominant rhythms. A light should be shed to make visible these sources of sound if only because they influence - through the temporalities they carry - a sense of space, a pace of place.

The buildings act as conduits or 'conductors', establishing rhythms and 'spreading them to the performers' (Lefebvre 1992, 92), filling this place with a time rhythmed by ongoing calculations of financial profitability transmitted through international business and money networks. In such cases there is always the risk that imposition of such outside rhythms leads to a 'dissociation of time and places" (Lefebvre 1992, 93) the gradual recomposition of rhythms within a city. Trying to listen geographically, as it were, to the rhythms these buildings symbolise, the social relations they contain, allows the networks making such places to be understood not as static, but as movers of rhythms.

To be in amongst the buildings of Potsdamer Platz is not only to be dazzled by the structures created by some of today's leading architects, by the range of surfaces, the symbols of Berlin becoming worldly, it's also about opening other senses to the experiences of economic change.

Though sounds are often thought "…too brief and ephemeral to attract much attention, let alone occupy the tangible duration favoured by methods of research" (Kuhn 1999, 5) nonetheless they do form part of the 'data' to be recorded in telling the experience of grounding networks in Berlin and how these experiences have, in a sense, been transported. Listening geographically to these networks is part of acknowledging that "…hearing and listening may also, in their way, be means of facilitating inquiry, and methods of orientating oneself in the world" (Re 1999, 53).

The sounds of Potsdamer Platz complement the visuality of the built form in marking out the scape of this site. These buildings and the quasi-public space they help make do not work only to enclose 'space' but help to exhibit sounds. The sounds around the shoppers and the strollers help to animate and evoke space; for, following Schafer, the perception of such spaces is just as much about sound - helping to denote and articulate space - as it is about the visual (1985, 95-96). The sounds of Potsdamer Platz all function to 'rework the architecture'; the visual rhythms of buildings can also be listened to. For going to somewhere like Potsdamer Platz is an "auditory event" (Borden 2000, 30) as much as it is a visual event. Sounds are very much a part of this exhibition.

Moreover, it might be argued, the sounds that fill these spaces reach into the sentient and begin to shape an altered way of being in cities as visual and aural rhythms collide, meddle and feed off one another. Walking through Potsdamer Platz it is interesting to try and pick out who and what has a "sonic presence" (Borden 2000, 29); the ear can identify a mix of social and electronic sounds but missing is the clatter of a less controlled citiness.