07-07-2025
I can't be the only one who walks without headphones
Every morning I take the same silly little mental health walk with my dog Bonnie, who cancels out any discernible benefit with her barking. Recently we've been trying to change it up by looping around the science park instead of going to the riverside. Sometimes we wander towards the centre of Dundee. Other times we check out the seafront. No matter the route, I'm in the minority of urban walkers who don't wear headphones.
I have no interest in leaving the house wearing headphones. I want to tune into my surroundings, not cancel them out. This is my precious hour of no screen time, of being totally disconnected from technology. For one hour — just one — I am the city's active listener.
It is hard to romanticise the experience. Round where I live the sounds are the thunder of buses, the keening of gulls and the bleeping of the Charleston roundabout traffic lights. I have tried to find harmony in layers of lorries, searching for hidden notes buried in the gloom. The one word I keep coming back to is 'noisy'.
For posterity I try again with the headphones. See, that's no good. Drowning out the city means I miss all the things I go out for, as if my brain needs auditory clues to hold on to treasure. Earbuds ejected, my eyes catch on chamomile at the roadside, flowerheads tilted to the sky like satellites. Straight ahead I find a feather the same colour as an oil slick. Underfoot the pavement is speckled with chewing gum like confetti.
This is the trade-off for living alongside other people. You can choose to be part of it — to open your ears and eyes to the world, really go all in — or you can choose to be out. And I choose to be in, even if wandering by the dual carriageway means I come home wildly overstimulated. Even if Bonnie's barking rises to a crescendo with all the commotion.
Can the sounds of the city be art? I think so. A few weeks ago I bumped into an old friend at a festival in Edinburgh and he told me he designs audio for one of the world's biggest video game makers. His job is to record the sounds of a city and apply them to software. He refuses to use AI, instead working out how to capture the real noises within.
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Each city is different, he told me. He's working on Miami right now. I'm taken by the idea of it having its own soundscape quite unlike other Florida cities, say Tampa or Orlando. In my head my friend sneaks around after hours with a tape recorder, trapping the hiss of a school bus's brakes or the chirrups from Raccoon Island. It makes me think how my favourite cities might be distilled in this way.
Edinburgh is footsteps on cobbles, wind whistling past Georgian pediments, spring chatter on the Meadows. Glasgow the low rumble of the subway, the clang of the last orders' bell, the background hum of machinery. Copenhagen the whicker of bicycle wheels in motion. Paris the jingling of coins in a pocket.
I'm sure a clever person can do the same for the country, discerning location by cuckoo call or farming technique. But to me all rural places sound the same. I wouldn't know where to start with all that quiet. A city is much more knowable, a chicane with voices and engines in its bends.
There's even peace if you know where to look. Last autumn in Tokyo I went to the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing, a chaotic medley of zebra crossings capable of handling 3,000 pedestrians at a time. Or 2,999 when I walked on its huge barcodes. All around me the city swelled and rushed like waves breaking on the shore. Ahead, neon adverts for Asahi beer threatened to tip me into sensory overload.
After the crossing I walked for a couple of blocks, took a left and then a right through the residential neighbourhoods. I found a play park and sat down opposite a row of dark-leafed maples. The blocks of flats and the trees absorbed practically everything. All I could hear was birdsong, if only I knew how to identify it. The paucity of noise felt just as Tokyo as the traffic.
Back home I go out without headphones and notice again that everyone else has theirs. Sure, it limits your exposure to Bonnie's barking. For this I can't blame them. But sometimes, very early in the morning, it feels as if the city has forgotten to tidy up its nighttime sounds. Generators hum. Mechanised street cleaners churn. A plane stutters through the sky. Off I go scooping them up, breadcrumbs laid out especially for me. @palebackwriter
Brian d'Souza, aka the DJ Auntie Flo, has spent the past five years using plant bio data to trigger notes on a custom synthesizer and create songs. A digital track of Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing) comes with a T-shirt with mycelium artwork on the back. £25,
