Seeing has long been regarded¹ as the most important of human senses in our culture. Images show a story. Images encourage us to buy. Images are scattered in cityscapes. Images are flickering in the palm of our hands faster than the muscles of our thumbs do vertical movements. Images are on the rise. Images are omnipresent.

Some say that the volume of images is a problem. They are polluting our world with their loudness. It’s a straightforward way of being. In talking about why listening to radio theatre as a child spurred his imagination, Paul McCartney² said it was due to the fact that stories were told without images and “it wasn’t laid out for you.” Sound tells part of the story, but “…the problem with images is they don’t leave space for your imagination.”

Sound moves people. Sound evokes emotions, carries memory, and has the ability to bring people together. Even in the deaf community or in people with hearing loss, musical timbre, texture and rhythm can evoke emotional response³. Other species, living and nonliving, make sounds—we hear the wind, trees’ movements, the ocean, the birds singing. Humans make sounds—through our thoughts, with our bodies. Music is made in harmony, a lot of the time by groups of people. Sounds are a by-product of human activities. Sounds are an even bigger by-product of machines made by humans—the coffee grinder, that fan on the roof, the traffic on streets. Some sounds are pleasurable. Some sounds are not pleasurable; they can be considered noise. Sound pollution in urban habitats is an even bigger problem than image pollution—it causes real health issues⁴.

Sounds are omnipresent. If not in the foreground, almost always in the background. We can’t escape. Silence doesn’t exist. So what do we make of it? How do we use the seemingly magical abilities of sound to bring us together?

Connection through sound and song

Between January and March 2024, a core group of 20 music makers, event managers, sound designers, researchers, creatives, professionals and students gathered to share, imagine and co-create futures of sound and song in Malmö. Prompted by the question, “How might gathering and bonding around a ‘social bonfire’ look, feel and sound like in 2050?”, they spent four days together sharing their observations and experiences from across disciplines and sectors. They teased out trends, signals and uncertainties and imagined a wide range of possible, desirable and alternative futures—including signals and a critique of the future scenarios from a broader community group.

During four days of intense workshops, the group explored who, what and how might create sound and song; how we might experience music; what impact sound and song might have on belonging and connection; and how gathering around sound and song might bring about social change in the future.

The discussion was encouraging—we will get together, there will be sound and there will be song—and prompted a deeper exploration of aspects of human creativity, of our relationships to hearing, soundscapes, music and each other, and of our history and agency in bonding through song. Some provocations included the following:

Will it matter who makes the music—even if it’s a machine—as long as we like the song? Or will we value that connection to another human or other being behind that sound over the product itself?

Will we experience the same sounds and songs together? Or will we be alone in hearing the exact sounds of our lives, from our soundtracks to our soundscapes, customised to our tastes and wishes by machines that know us better than we do?

Will we value local musical cultures and give them the credit and value they deserve? Or will we continue to commodify and appropriate them?

Will we gather in-place and in-time around music? Or will joined experiences mean each at their own time and wherever?

Will silence and hearing nature become a luxury, afforded by only a few? Or will we all get to have the soundscapes we need?

Will we long for immersive tech-driven spectacles? Or intimate, authentic experiences?

Will the artists retain power over an end product of their creation? Or will music be an open-ended and fluid collective process of endless mixing and remixing?

Will industry drive the music scene? Or will artists have the final say? Or will the audience’s tastes and wishes dictate in the end?

Will sound and song connect us? Or will they take us apart? Will it bring about peace or conflict?

In this book, you will find three possible futures co-created by the core contributors using Media Evolution’s approach to collective imagining called Collaborative Foresight. Their future scenarios are brought to life by stories of characters living in these worlds, written by the author Paul Graham Raven and illustrated by My Comét.

We invite you into these futures to walk in the characters’ shoes, see these worlds through their eyes and hear them through their ears. You might discover answers to the questions above, or to questions you have, or those you’ve never thought to ask about belonging, music, place, senses and connection. You might see the present in a new light, or perhaps hear something in your surroundings that you’ve never paid attention to before. And you might discover things in your present that you wish to foster and care for now, and find pathways towards futures where the diversity, authenticity and transformative power of sound and song are used to shape our collective human experiences.

The commentaries in this book complement the stories by exploring the futures prompt and signals from three practitioners’ perspectives. Musician, artist and researcher Nicholas B. Torretta asks us to consider what music, songs, sounds, instruments and musical gatherings we need to nurture pluriversal futures. Gehl’s Head of Research and Development, Liselott Stenfeldt, and Associate Professor of Sound Studies Marie Koldkjær Højlund share an approach to creating inclusive, diverse and high-quality soundscapes in our cities.

Read on—listen deeply—to the many possibilities captured by this Collaborative Foresight cycle on Futures of Sound and Song. Be reminded of the vast potential of our plural futures when created by a chorus of voices, sounds and even noises. Or, as “Mama” Cass Elliot put it:

Nobody can tell ya

There’s only one song worth singing⁵