The sound of water trickling – or more like dripping – from the utility pipes into the large plastic underground tank of our compound always triggered a feeling of relief. Even for me, who lived in the up-market area of Westlands, Nairobi’s erratic water supply system and its confusing schedules provided a weekly dose of concern and anxiety. Will water come this week? Will the tank make it through the coming days? When will the water actually return?

Lucky enough, I had an official piped connection by Nairobi Water and an additional over-ground tank. Many others in Nairobi rather rely on private water vendors, unofficial connections, and various other water supply modes. With a piped system that only covers two thirds of the city’s water demand, Nairobi’s water infrastructure consists of overlapping and sometimes contesting water access options, and a multiplicity of water practices, rhythms, and sounds. Overall, Nairobi’s infrastructural conditions – from roads and transport systems to everyday mobile data use – are everything but equally distributed. Each neighborhood, sometimes each block, has their own infrastructural realities with their own respective soundscapes and rhythms. For the most part, Nairobians across the city rely on myriad other humans, technologies, and practices to access the often-erratic supplies of water, electricity, transport, food, data, and many other necessities. How infrastructures work and how they are distributed reflects on the everyday activities of urban residents, and vice versa, which in turn further contributes to an infrastructural cacophony of sounds and rhythms. Blending out the overwhelming noise of cars and matatus, the hammering sounds of massive constructions, and the blasting of music from uncountable speakers, the subtle to not-so-subtle sounds of infrastructures provide accounts of the distinct multiplicities and inequalities of Nairobi.

At water points and water kiosks across Nairobi, one can listen to many infrastructural accounts and sounds. Especially in under-served areas, residents purchase and fetch water at public points or taps. Largely in the mornings, and mostly women and children, they queue there, they chat or play while waiting, they gossip and argue etc. You can listen to all of this until their hollow, reverberating plastic mitungi are filled with rushing and gurgling 20 liters of water. At home, the gobbling of re-filling other water containers and the dripping, flowing, and swooshing of basic water uses tell you about individual water security and privileges, or the lack thereof. In well-connected and well-off houses, the water often flows silently behind walls until it pitter-patters into solid sinks and showers. In homes without pipes, water is scooped and splashes into plastic buckets and on outdoor surfaces. In these various hydraulic audio expressions one can hear the infrastructural water realities of the city, of which some can be listened to on the streets also. For example, the loud engines of water delivery trucks may dominate street spaces in some residential areas, when water hasn’t come through the pipes as expected and where people are actually able to afford delivered water. And where the city features ghorofabuildings, the humming and screeching sounds of water pumps – that mostly transport water to rooftop tanks for later in-house distribution – tell you not only where residents might have direct taps in their apartments. It also reveals the water network’s incapability to provide appropriate pressure. All in all, from the chatter at water points to the mechanical sounds of trucks and pumps, when you listen closely to these sounds, you understand better the modes and rhythmicity of water distribution, access, and use.

Rooted in a colonial political economy and neo-liberal ideas of cost efficiency, Nairobi’s struggle to provide infrastructure in a regular and equal manner can be audio-experienced when it comes to electricity also. While most homes have some form of power connection, the city experiences roughly 90,000 small to large power interruptions per year. As much as those interruptions are black-outs, they are also sound-outs. Your TV stops, the speakers at bars and clubs go silent, water pumps stop humming, etc. Sometimes these events are preceded by a sudden rumbling, sparkling, hissing sound of a busting transformer nearby, or a tree branch that fell on a power line. Once you hear such a sound, you know chances are high that your place goes silent in the next seconds. For some places, the electric soundscape then becomes dominated by the rumbling of diesel generators that provide back-up supply for those who can afford it. As Brian Larkin has written for Nigeria, also in Nairobi ‘the constant drone of generators is a backdrop to everyday life – often bitterly resented, but reluctantly tolerated as an unalterable part of urban life.’ This audio backdrop is complemented by the beeping of so-called UPS battery systems in offices and many other digital-electronic sounds of uncountable devices, meters, and more in public and private spaces across the city. In comparison to water – for which its availability and presence is audibly distinct and diverse – it is the absence of electricity that produces distinct soundscapes of silences and back-up devices.

Listening closely to infrastructural soundscapes allows us to more deeply experience and understand the city as a space of heterogeneity, polyrhythmicity, and cacophony. Infrastructures and their spatial differentiations are not only a visible part of urban life in Nairobi and elsewhere but also audible – in their presences and absences, in their working conditions and breakdowns. The various sounds and their respective rhythms can help us to uncover persistent shortcomings and inequalities as well as the entanglements between different infrastructures. The humming of water pumps indicates the interconnected availabilities of water and electricity. The silence of black-outs may relate to the absence of Wifi. The rumbling of water trucks on streets tells us about place-specific water shortages. And, in the end, the sounds of infrastructures are connected to other sensorial and ambient experiences, like the vibrations and fumes of generators, and emotional reactions, like my own feelings of relief when I heard water trickling into my tank. There are many more open avenues for artistic, academic, and multi-sensorial investigations into urban infrastructures. Let us use all of our senses to follow those, by watching, smelling, tasting, feeling, and listening.

Moritz Kasper is a doctoral researcher at the International Planning Studies (IPS) research group (Department of Spatial Planning, Technical University Dortmund). He largely works on heterogeneous, socio-technical realities of the urban everyday, for example the practices and artefacts of domestic storage (water and electricity) in Nairobi. He is also a member of the “Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic” research project and an associated member at the collaborative research center “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265). In the past, he has worked for Goethe-Institut Kenya, HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, Samuel Hall, and others in research, design, cultural events, public relations, and editing in Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Tanzania.

As an urban designer and journalist focusing on the lives of cities, visiting and staying in Nairobi for 2 months was just like diving into the ocean of curiosity. Nairobi — massive, chaotic, and ever-changing — was immensely unknown to me, and even intimidating sometimes, even for a professional urban researcher like myself.

I got to know SOUND OF NAIROBI prior to my arrival, by google “soundscape” and “Nairobi”. Having worked with some soundscapers and have organized a workshop through my studio for Cities applying the methodology of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (a method for analyzing the “rhythms” of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces) in the past, the soundscape is one of my closest and favorite way to decipher cities.

Listening to the sounds of Nairobi on their website, prior to the visit without even seeing the city, created some sort of a fictional landscape of Nairobi in my head.

Walking in Nairobi, while paying attention to the sound environment, made me feel an intimate connection with the city.

As a foreigner, my sound experience would have been a lot different from those who are from there. I notice different things, that convey different meanings. Ex. The automatic Japanese announcement from the Japanese car navigation systems whenever I take Uber. The strange absence of car honking. Sound of birds, which I found fascinating to hear in the midst of a big city. People’s conversations with various accents, none of which I understand.

SOUND OF NAIROBI was, both symbolically and literally, my guide to Nairobi. I visited their experimental music events in Westlands almost every Friday, and they openly introduced me to so many creative-minded talents in the city. During our conversations, the idea of connecting our two cities — Tokyo and Nairobi — emerged, through their sound, music, and rhythms. Just like China Miéville’s novel The City & the City, where the two cities occupy the same space and a rumored third city exists in the spaces between, we would be able to create a soundscape of a fictional third city in between our two cultures.

The idea of the “Sonic fiction Workshop” immerged from there, and is still evolving. In 1998, the music critic, DJ, and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed the concept of sonic fiction in his book “More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction”. Sonic fiction opens up the field of speaking about sound in general, reflecting individual sonic experiences and highlighting their stories in an imaginative manner.

Together with the SOUND OF NAIROBI team, we have organized a small kickoff event on this idea, where we explained our ideas to the participants and did an experimental field recording using our workshop kit, as well as exhibiting some video installations by a Japanese “urban composer” Kenta Tanaka. We’ll keep working more closely to utilize the concept of sonic fiction in upcoming months, in order to exchange the sounds and rhythms of our cities beyond the boundaries, to re-compose existing urban paradigms.

Since kicking off our new/ongoing project Sound Pressure Levels, which is aiming to document the sonic atmosphere in Nairobi leading up to the Kenyan election in August 2022, we have had many thoughts and discussions about the ethics of field recording in times of political tension.

Field recordings are documents of a time and a place. They bear witness of situations, conversations and an atmosphere. They carry an inherent truth and authority. This gives them an immense power not only for the listener but also as a testimony and as evidence.

The artist/activist collective Forensic Architecture in collaboration with the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan have made this very clear in the work Earshot (2016).
In May 2014, Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank of Palestine shot and killed two unarmed teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher. Lawrence Abu Hamdan carried out a detailed acoustic analysis of the recorded gunshots audible in public videos of the event, for which he used special techniques designed to visualize sound frequencies and established that the Israeli soldiers had indeed fired live rounds, and moreover had tried to disguise the fatal shots to sound like rubber bullets. These visualizations later became a crucial piece of evidence picked up by CNN and other international news agencies, forcing Israel to renounce its original denial. This is an example of how sound can actually lead to uncovering injustice and wrongdoing by a political system.

But we know all too well that this can also go in a very different and dangerous direction. The history of the former GDR (East Germany) is a very present case for a spy apparatus set up by an insecure political system using audio and visual recordings to spread fear and terror amongst its people. It made neighbours, friends and family turn against each other and spy on each other. What was heard became evidence to harass civilians, and leaving an atmosphere of fear behind. Microphones were set up in flats to gather audible evidence for treason. The fiction film „The Life of Others“ shows that in all its cruelty with many scenes of the spy wearing headphones as to show the power of listening into other peoples stories and lives.

So with this in our minds we entered many discussions about what we are actually doing in setting up a project like that. We came to a clear decision: This is not a project to eavesdrop on others or record wrongdoing. We are collecting the sounds of the streets of Nairobi to find out if one can detect any changes in the sonic atmosphere; to capture the effect of the sound srom election campaigns, public media, human gatherings; to record the static in the air and the state of our minds during this period, through sound.

After much discussion, we feel that these 3 simple guidelines should serve us during this exercise and in future recording projects:
1. Be safe. Do not put yourself in danger for the sake of a recording. Live to record another sound!
2. Be fair. Do not inconvenience or endanger anyone while you record.
3. Be respectful. Do not record personal conversations or situations of an overly personal nature. Recordings that are judged by the moderators to violate this guideline will not be admitted into the archive.

We’ll be sharing further reading about the ethics and practice of recording in this blog, stay tuned.