Species of Sonic Spaces

Abstract

Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) offers the author’s most explicit and extensive meditation on space understood as both everyday reality and source for speculation. The book is organised according to a ‘visualist’ logic and does not address sound as a way of understanding our environment. This article takes Species of Spaces as an invitation to consider ‘species of sonic space’, a variety of related chunks of the sonic environment we share. It asks how we might explore the sonic environment by way of Perec’s text and through consideration of other spaces which Perec does not discuss. It reflects on existing attempts to think of sonic spaces and on the differences between describing sonic, visual and other felt spaces. Aspects of Perec’s text lend themselves to comparison with other writers’ attempts to bring sound and space together: his analysis of domestic spaces can be usefully placed alongside Gaston Bachelard’s work on ‘the poetics of space’; his descriptions of urban rhythms can be compared to those of Henri Lefebvre; his attention to interiority can be considered in light of Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘microspherology’; and his division of space into species find a potentially productive aural analogue in Brandon LaBelle’s account of ‘acoustic territories’. These and other thinkers are considered here as ways of setting up an ‘auralisation’ of Species of Spaces. The role of sound in Perec’s A Man Asleep (1967), An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010) and Life a User’s Manual (1978) is also discussed. These works, it is argued, extend, develop, anticipate or reverberate with Species of Spaces in ways that are useful for auralising that text.