The Soundscape of Burning Man

Abstract

The Burning Man Festival, an annual art festival in the Nevada Black Rock Desert of the Western US, has been going strongly for over 20 years, and has grown immensely since its humble beginnings in 1986. In the last few years, the event has reached a population of well over 50,000 people, featuring hundreds of performances, and thousands of works of art in all media and on all scales imaginable. A party in the desert for some, a way of life for others, the festival and the temporary city that supports it is a remarkable human enterprise, thriving on communal effort and participation, a gifting economy, radical self-reliance, and radical self-expression. The unique soundscape of Black Rock City, Burning Man’s ephemeral home, with its multitude of sonic art works, musical performances and immersive environments, offers some of the most unusual and interesting sonic experiences for the week that it exists. This study looks at the evolution of this unique soundscape through the course of the event, from its beginning as an uninhabited desert, to the gradual construction of the city by the inhabitants, to the height of its celebratory completion as the tenth largest city in the state of Nevada, its ultimate destruction with the burning of the central art structures, and the leave-no-trace cleanup process that follows. Throughout the event, we witness a ritualistic ebb and flow of sound as the citizens of the city celebrate radical self-expression in remarkable ways: hot days of construction and exploration, the city-wide celebration of sunset, the festive all-night dancing, the exhausted and restful morning, the exuberant burning of the man, and the contemplative and quiet burning of the temple. Our study analyzes the soundscape across the vast space of the event, looking at its daily and week-long evolution, through field recordings, discussions with participants, and personal observations. The paper is derived from observations over the previous eight years of the event, as well as a sound journal based on Burning Man 2011.