There seems to be a pattern of successful urban design enabled by music. See: the revolution of Taiwan’s recycling industry from a 5% recycling rate to over 50%, supported by garbage trucks playing a chiptune version of Für Elise; or see also: the enormous success of Japan’s national rail system, each station identified by its eki-melody.

How does the sound of a city shape how we behave as part of one?

Essential themes for any synthwave artist or group looking to truly capture that retro-80’s feeling. Roughly grouped, not ordered.

1. Nostalgia
2. Time
3. Memory & sentiment
4. Analog photographs
5. Melancholy
6. Love
7. Young love, usually assumed to be naïve
8. Heartbreak
9. The color blue
10. Being lost / Losing things / Losing each other
11. Summer
12. Summer romances that should have been something more
13. The idea of an endless summer
14. Summer being over
15. Sunsets (the color orange) (often used in a symbolic way to represent summer being over or the end of a romance)
16. Neon
17. Chasing someone/thing and/or running away from someone/thing
18. Driving
19. Looking through rose colored lenses at the memory of a lost love while driving into the sunset
20. The night (preferably so late at night that nobody else is awake)
21. Driving at night
22. California
23. Most forms of waves: ocean waves, radio waves, waving goodbye
24. The ocean (almost always the Pacific Ocean)
25. The Pacific Coast Highway (i.e., driving on the coast of California)
26. Video games
27. Arcades
28. FM Radio
29. Records / Record players / Vinyl
30. Kids / Being kids
31. Underage drinking
32. Growing older (not being kids any more)

The field of phonaesthetics concerns itself with the relationship between beauty and the spoken word; euphony and cacophony. And you may have heard the claim that, out of all combinations yet considered, “cellar door” takes the top spot as the most beautiful pair of words in the English language.

If I could expand that pair to a trio, I might nominate the title of a book that’s occupied a space on my shelf for a long time: the Blue Cliff Record, a classic book of Zen koans, verses, and commentary. Considering I’ve never made it past the first hundred pages or so, I think I own this book as much for the beauty of its title as anything else. It strikes a mysterious balance between meaning and nonsense (where exactly are these blue cliffs?), as all the best writings on Zen tend to do.

Willow.
Cellar door.
Blue cliff record.

is-ness

Consider also: the Socratic Hypothesis and the inherent meaning of words.

There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.

Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word

Earlier this year, the New York Times produced a characteristically stunning piece of interactive journalism that I’m just getting around to reading, titled “Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves?” In it, Michael Kimmelman outlines one of the more recent – and most visible – examples of the failure of contemporary architectural and urban planning practices to generate coherent places.

The essay ends with the following reflection.

Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ observation deck may also become an attraction — a triangular platform, 1,100 feet high, theatrically cantilevered from the top of 30, with bleachers that provide an even loftier view. It opens next year.

I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

New York is awesome, I thought.

Then it occurred to me.
From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.

Which reminded me of one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson.

When the sun had gotten to the angle from which Phidias had taken his perspective, the Parthenon almost seemed to glow.
Actually, the best time to see that is generally also at four o’clock.
Doubtless the taverns from which one could see that did better business than the taverns from which one could not, in fact, even though they were all in the same street.
Unless of course the latter were patronized by people who had lived in Athens long enough to have gotten tired of seeing it.
Such things can happen. As in the case of Guy de Maupassant, who ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower.
Well, the point being that this was the only place in Paris from which he did not have to look at it.

I can't seem to confirm or deny whether this particular story is apocryphal, but Maupassant does seem to have presaged Kimmelman’s malaise.

It wasn’t only the Eiffel Tower, however, that gave me an irresistible desire to live alone for a while, but everything that was done around, inside, above and adjacent to it. Really – how could all the newspapers speak to us of a new architecture in relation to this metallic carcass? Because architecture, the least understood and the most forgotten of the arts today is perhaps also the most aesthetic, the most mysterious and the most nourished with ideas.

Guy de Maupassant, The Wandering Life
(Originally cited on Occursus)