Sonic Drift: Listening Beyond the Visible City

Part I – Drifting Through Sound: Reimagining Urban Experience

Cities are often understood through what can be seen. Architecture, infrastructure, skylines, public spaces, and visual landmarks dominate how urban environments are represented and experienced. Yet every city possesses another layer of identity that is far less visible but equally influential: its soundscape.

front cover of the documentation of Sonic Drift

From the persistent hum of traffic and the rhythm of construction machinery to distant conversations, birdsong, mechanical echoes, and fleeting sonic events, urban life unfolds through a complex network of sounds that shape how people perceive, remember, and inhabit place. It is within this often-overlooked dimension of urban experience that Sonic Drift: Urban Soundscapes and Co-created Performances situates itself.

The project emerged from an interest in understanding how listening might transform relationships between people and their environments. Rather than approaching sound merely as artistic material, Sonic Drift treats listening as a mode of inquiry—a way of exploring the city that reveals social, emotional, and cultural dimensions often hidden beneath everyday routines.

Central to the project is the concept of the dérive, a method of exploratory wandering developed by the Situationist International during the mid-twentieth century. The publication describes the dérive as a process that “invites participants to drift through the city guided by affective responses, chance encounters, and environmental cues rather than fixed routes, destinations, or functional objectives.”

This methodology represented a radical departure from conventional ways of moving through urban space. Rather than navigating according to efficiency or purpose, participants surrender themselves to the atmosphere of the city, allowing sounds, encounters, textures, and emotions to shape their trajectory.

Situationist International 1957

The theoretical roots of this approach can be traced to the Situationist International, an avant-garde collective active between 1957 and 1972. Reacting against the increasing commodification of everyday life, the Situationists sought ways to challenge passive consumption and re-engage individuals with their immediate environments. Through practices such as psychogeography and the dérive, they explored how urban spaces influence behaviour, emotion, and social interaction.

More than half a century later, Sonic Drift reinterprets these ideas through contemporary sound art. Instead of mapping streets and buildings, the project maps rhythms, resonances, interruptions, and atmospheres. It asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when listening becomes the primary means through which we experience the city?

Participants engage in collective listening during a Sonic Drift dérive, exploring the city as an acoustic environment where sound becomes a medium for participation, reflection, and shared experience.

The answer lies not only in the sounds themselves but in the act of listening collectively. By foregrounding sonic experience, participants are encouraged to encounter familiar places anew. Streets become acoustic corridors. Abandoned structures become resonant chambers. Industrial zones become sites of memory and reflection. The city itself becomes both material and collaborator.

As the publication notes, “Sound, unbound by linguistic or material constraints, functions as a democratic medium through which diverse participants can engage with their environments.” In this sense, listening becomes more than observation. It becomes participation.

This first instalment of Sonic Drift: Listening Beyond the Visible City has explored the project's conceptual foundations and its reimagining of urban space through collective listening. In Part Two, we follow the dérives themselves—tracing the routes, encounters, and sonic discoveries that transformed familiar Maltese landscapes into sites of reflection, memory, and artistic experimentation.

Stay tuned as the journey continues beyond the visible city and deeper into its hidden acoustic worlds.