(Un)heard Neighbors? An Urban Ethnomusicology of Proximity

In todays European cities, people of different religions often live or pray close to each other without their religious communities interacting. Many of these are religious minorities whose sacred practices like prayers, chants and songs remain largely unheard in urban spaces. This project asks a fundamental question: Does any relationship exist between religious music and sound practices when nothing else connects them other than their occurrence in the same neighborhood? The research examines this question through one neighborhood in Viennas Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus district, where eight sacred spaces representing different ethnic and religious minorities exist within a few hundred meters of each other: various Orthodox, Islamic, Protestant, Catholic, and Buddhist traditions, as well as the memorial site of a destroyed synagogue. These religious sites exist side by side, yet their sacred sounds - prayers, chants, and liturgical music - remain largely contained behind walls and unheard to the outside. Rather than focusing on individual minorities - as is common in music research - this research project uses the neighborhood as a starting point. The project first conducts field research to document these sacred sounds and explore potential connections between the sites. The research also examines how social factors like gender and class shape these religious music and sound practices and, potentially, experiences of marginalization. This neighborhood-based approach allows researchers to discover dynamics that studies focused on single communities might miss. In a second phase, the researchers work with key actors from each community as research collaborators to initiate a joint project based on their sacred sounds. This participatory approach creates conditions for exchanges based on musical and sonic practices between spaces with no pre-existing interaction, examining what happens when the unheard becomes audible to one another. The project embraces the possibility of finding no connections on the level of the neighborhood, challenging the common assumption that cultural diversity in urban spaces naturally creates interaction. Through discovering unexpected patterns of connection or conscious forms of separation, the research will provide crucial insights for understanding cultural-religious patterns in contemporary European cities and develop new approaches for studying urban religious diversity through sound. These insights could inform approaches to urban planning, community relations, and interreligious dialogue within the postmigrant realities of contemporary cities.

No additional funding sources recorded.