Sound of Urban Environment: Today & Future

Interactive AR installation exploring urban futures through speculative soundscapes

Collaborated with Wei-Jun Lin
Supervised by Laura Mchugh
Paper | Video

We rarely pause, listen, and think of the soundscapes in our city, but they carries information about activity, culture, atmosphere, and time. These are continuously shaped by technological, social, and environmental changes, and thus are a refection of the transformation of our urban environment. So, can sound serve as a medium for reflecting on and imagining urban futures? By making sound the primary medium for speculation, we hoped to create space for reflection in that invites interpretation rather than prescribing meaning. This project used design fiction methodologies and spatial audio in AR to create an immersive experience inviting audiences to listen to and question how cities might evolve.

Design Concept

We proposed a speculative system that uses a type of hypothetical color-changing bioluminescence mushroom to creating a lighting system. In the system, there will be a "mama mushroom" that controls how the network of "baby mushrooms" lit up, mimicking how real fungi communicate through mycelial connections.

The design challenges typical smart home aesthetics of sleek minimalism, instead embracing organic forms, handcrafted materials, and the "semi-chaotic blend" characteristic of solarpunk futures—where advanced biotechnology coexists with earthy, living surroundings.

Design Process

We used the KTH open-air square in Stockholm as our focus, where we explore how to pair up soundscapes that are/will be present in the years 2025 and 2040.

We use design fiction as our starting point of our design. The process began with mapping current phenomena (e.g. global warming, EU-Russia tensions, AI advancement) onto a design fiction matrix to ground speculation on real trends while identifying potential future events like declining biodiversity, electric vehicle adoption, stricter immigration policies, and international conflicts.

We also created "what if" scenarios to imagine how these forces might reshape urban sound: What if global warming continues? What if self-driving cars become reliable? What if society becomes more conservative? These questions guided the soundscape composition.

The present soundscapes used real recordings from four corners of the square at different times and days, layered with additional sounds to emphasize aspects we wanted to contrast with the future. Future soundscapes with our speculated changes, such as less birdsong due to species decline, electric vehicles replacing oil cars, war alerts, and more.

The soundscapes were structured in three layers (human, mechanical, natural) based on how urban sounds are categorized, with each corner emphasizing different layers based on its location and characteristics.

Implementation

When the AR application detects the image anchor, four virtual "windows" will appear. Each window displayed a photo of one of the corners of the square, acting as a portal to that corner's soundscape. As visitors moved through the physical space, sound sources shifted spatially and volumetrically based on their position, creating an embodied experience where physical movement shaped what they heard.

Rotating the device between upright and upside-down gradually transitions the soundscape between present (2025) and future (2040), with a clock interface indicating the year. This interaction mimics how clocks hands runs, focusing on fluency and pliability, for a responsive and intuitive control for navigating time through physical gesture.

Responses

We asked participant to sketch how they see the future of urban space after experiencing this installation. The responses were pretty divergent. Some participants sketched dystopian futures with war, extreme weather, technological surveillance, separation from loved ones, and expressed they feel stress and pessimistic for the future. Others imagined hopeful, greener futures with more natural sounds and wrote about feeling hopeful.

Even though our own speculation is a bit more leaning on the pessimistic side, this shows how the installation sparks different imaginations of the future that are outside of the creator (us) perspective, showing that sound can be a speculative medium that leaves room for personal interpretation and critical imagination.