Zora Feren developed a first-of-its-kind, interactive board game called Cityscape, which simulates the sonic makeup of our world, letting players create and modify urban soundscapes in real time
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Car alarms, sirens and motorcycles cruising by at 80 decibels might be the crickets of the 21st century — background white noise we’ve mostly come to ignore — but those city sounds still degrade our quality of life.
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But by how much?
An SFU graduate student has been helping develop an interactive board game that shows in real time how various decisions to build office towers, parks or walkways affect us, and she’s been honored by a national research council for her work involving cities and sound.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council named Zora Feren one of its five national award winners in the 2022 Storytellers Challenge for her work helping create the first-of-its-kind game.
“I think the sensory experience of the city is very intense,” said Feren, who comes from rural Wisconsin. “Moving to a bigger city is shocking to all the senses, I think.
“And I think sound, especially, because we can shut our eyes and we cannot touch things if we don’t want to, but we really can’t close our ears, it comes into our brain whether we want it or not.”
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Feren works on the project as a research assistant to Milena Drouevaan associate professor and Glenfraser endowed professor in sound studies at SFU.
the Storytellers Challenge is open to post-secondary students, the challenge being to demonstrate to Canadians how social sciences and humanities research affects their lives.
The game is called CityScape and in a short YouTube video Feren made about the project, she says that as climate change becomes unavoidable, we need to make conscious urban design choices that can ensure better livability for all, humans and non-humans.
The work builds on research begun more than 60 years ago at SFU by R.Murray Schafera musician who was artist-in-residence at SFU from 1965 to 1975 and who died at age 88 last summer.
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Schafer explored the acoustic ecology of Vancouver’s urbanization, believing soundscapes could be used as diagnostic tools in measuring health and balance in a community, and set up the World Soundscape project to study the relationship between people and the sounds around them.
Shafer called urban environments “sonic sewers,” but until Cityscapes there wasn’t a way to demonstrate whether what we hear aligns with what makes us happy, Feren said.
“We didn’t until now have a platform to foster this kind of civic literacy.”
Feren’s game connects acoustic ecology with city planning, and is played on a six-sided board with a built-in speaker at its centre. Players get cards depicting various roles — developer, activist, even a pigeon — and the aim is to create an environment with sounds that are livable, the audio from the speaker shifting depending on players’ choices.
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“Imagine constructing a small building or placing a park in a local community and hearing the influence on the local soundscape immediately,” Feren said. “Each building brings construction noise, each tree brings birds.”
The winners were announced at this year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Canada’s largest academic gathering, which runs through Friday, May 20. As part of her award, Feren also received $4,000.
“The sounds that we allow, that we tolerate and that policy tolerates or allows, it shows where our priorities are because it’s so impactful for so many people,” she said.
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