Sound Excursion: Plano Pilato, Brasilia

Abstract

In 1994 the Goethe Institut Brasilia had invited me to conduct a soundscape workshop. This sound excursion was one of many activities during the final sound symposium that wrapped up four weeks of intense soundscape explorations of the city of Brasilia. The focus of this workshop had been the creation of soundscape compositions by a dozen or so participants in collaboration with Michael Fahres and Piet Hein van de Poel from NPS, the state radio of the Netherlands.

We decided to do a sound excursion by car rather than a soundwalk, because Brasilia was designed for the car, not for pedestrians. A one-hour long soundwalk would have given us very little acoustic variety, as it is hard to get away from traffic noise. Brasilia is a young city—not yet 40 years old—and was designed according to a master or pilot plan. The crossing of two paths along the basic north-south and east-west directions, initially just a cross drawn in the quiet earth, has grown into two huge traffic arteries with six lanes in all four directions. This contrast is I believe, the basic contrast today in the soundscape of Brasilia and surroundings: on the one hand, there is lots of traffic noise within Plano Piloto, on the other hand one does not have to drive very far to enter a very quiet, natural soundscape.