Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

The ethical potential of sound in public space: Migrant pan flute music
and its potential to create moments of conviviality in a ‘failed’ public
square
Karolina Doughty a, *, Maja Lagerqvist b
a
Cultural Geography Chair Group, Wageningen University and Research, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
b
Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be understood in terms of ethical
Received 30 January 2015 potential, where new sensibilities for thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined
Received in revised form and practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by migrants impact on inclusive
5 June 2016
forms of place (re-)making, affective enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging
Accepted 6 June 2016
Available online 14 June 2016
and ‘the other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American pan flute musicians,
performing music at Sergels torg, a central square in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a
combination of qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory methods such as
Keywords:
Sound
photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace the affective aspects of encounters with busking
Public space and the impact of music on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience of urban
Migrant busking moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that encounters with sound can produce new
Affect spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive
Ethical potential encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable social, physical and temporal context,
Atmosphere and because busking serves to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it can
Diversity be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need to take into account the full
Place-making
complexity of the dynamics between sound and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window
to the ethical potential of the urban encounter.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Music … allows sharing with the other(s) in difference before
and beyond any word or cultural specificity (Irigaray, 2004:
101).
‘in a well-designed and well-managed public space, the armor of
daily life can be partially removed, allowing us to see others as
whole people. Seeing people different from oneself responding
to the same setting in similar ways creates a temporary bond.’
(Carr et al., 1993: 344)
Sergels torg, the square by the central station in Stockholm, is one
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: karolina.doughty@wur.nl (K. Doughty), maja.lagerqvist@
humangeo.su.se (M. Lagerqvist).
of those stark and seemingly inhumane urban spaces that perfectly
exemplify the failed vision of modernist planning. However, like all
other examples of its kind, as a lived social space it is also much
more. For us, the authors, it is a place we have grown up with; a
gateway to the city associated with coming-of-age and first inde-
pendent mobility; where we have met up with many friends over
the years; taken part in the odd demonstration; or just absent-
mindedly wandered across the monochrome flagstones on our
way into the city. It is not a well-loved place, but a significant one
nonetheless, not just in individual biographies like ours, but also for
the multifaceted role it plays socially, culturally and politically, in
the city and beyond. One of the things that Sergels torg is well-
known for locally, is the pan flute musicians that have regularly
busked there for more than thirty years. In this paper, we attend to
the significance of their street music for the emotional and affective
qualities of Sergels torg as a public place, in order to explore what
we might term the ethical potential of sound in public space.
The recent surge in academic work within the interdisciplinary

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.06.002
1755-4586/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
field of sound studies has established that attending to sound helps
us rethink how people relate to each other, and the places they
inhabit (Bull and Back, 2016). A sonic perspective on everyday re-
lations in the city not only speaks to geography because sounds are
inherently spatial in that they afford awareness of our environment,
but also because they are event-like (O’Callaghan, 2007); sounds
are a means by which new social experiences and engagements
with common spaces may occur, however fleeting. The potential of
busking to create moments of conviviality between people in an
urban environment has received some attention from scholars
interested in the impact of music on experiencing the city (Arkette,
2004; Atkinson, 2011; Bywater, 2007; Kyto € and Hyto€ nen-Ng, 2016;
Simpson, 2011; Tanenbaum, 1995). The role of migrant street mu-
sicians in the constitution of, and encounter with, ethnic and cul-
tural diversity in cities has only briefly been considered. However,
since the early 1990s a growing interest in the mobility of cultural
forms has led migration researchers to turn to forms of creative
cultural production such as music, film and dance. The literature on
music and migration has explored this relationship not only in
terms of processes and results of migration as in ethnomusicology
studies, but this work has also focused on analysing song lyrics to
shed light on experiences of transnational cultural production (e.g.
Kaya, 2002). Slightly earlier work by Tanenbaum (1995), however,
points towards the role of sound in the experience of urban di-
versity. Her study on music performance in the subway posits that
music improves urban life by offering security and personal ex-
change that crosses lines of ethnicity and class. Others have briefly
touched on the role of busking in the cyclical journeys of migrants,
where busking in more affluent European cities is a way to earn
money to support family members at home (e.g. Grill, 2011), and
the liminal position of buskers, occupying an ambivalent space
between performance and begging (Butler Brown, 2007; Bywater,
2007; Kyto € and Hyto €nen-Ng, 2016). We have ourselves previously
reflected on the position of migrant buskers in the in-between
world of the local and the global (Doughty and Lagerqvist, 2014).
Studies dealing with the role of music in broader productions of
place-identity can be found in work on music and tourism/travel
(Connell and Gibson, 2003, 2008; Gibson and Connell, 2005), world
music (Connell and Gibson, 2004), and place marketing (Gibson
and Davidson, 2004). There is a growing interest in music’s role
in urban experiences on the basis of the increasing mobility of
music technologies such as mp3 players (see for example Bull,
2007; Beer, 2007, 2010). However, this wide-ranging literature
has not fully explored the influence of music, and busking in
particular, on diversification of city spaces and urban encounters
around the world.
In this paper we are interested in how busking impacts on di-
versity and inclusive forms of place (re-)making, aspects of en-
counters with, and enactments of, public social space that can be
explored both in their affective and emotional capacity. We explore
the encounter with busking by South American pan flute musicians
at Sergels torg, in Stockholm, Sweden, emphasising the range of
emotions the music performances give rise to and the affective
engagements with the social space of the square they trigger. We
consider whether these musical encounters have the potential to
contribute to the makings of new spaces where the city can be re-
imagined, debate can occur, where new identities may be forged
and marginalised voices can be heard, thus investigating moments
of ethical potential in music’s capacity to reconfigure space
(Connor, 2004a). This entails examining dimensions of the city that
are more-than-visual and more-than-verbal, and perhaps not al-
ways easily observable or accessible in interviews, in particular as
the encounter with music in public space is often in passing, and
makes itself known in a fleeting and often barely perceptible
manner. However, we argue that these ephemeral aspects of the
59
interactions between people, sound and place can have a strong
impact on how places are practiced, and can be traced in dominant
narratives about place-specific experiential qualities such as at-
mosphere, safety, sociability and belonging. The migrant buskers
and their music constitute a focus for the experience of difference,
but this music also becomes the central dimension through which
we seek to understand the tensions between difference and fa-
miliarity in urban place-making, thus a number of contrasting ex-
pressions of place emerge. Approaching place-making through
sound means its aesthetic, socio-cultural, ethical, emotional and
affective dimensions emerge in new light. We find that encounters
with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it
can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive
encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable
social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves
to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphori-
cally), it can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason.
The fieldwork combined a range of qualitative techniques,
including observation, interviews and ‘sensory methods’ (Pink,
2009) such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’. A
total of 30 individual participants were interviewed, comprising of
13 men and 17 women. Most of the participants were resident in
Stockholm, but eight were visitors to Stockholm (for work or lei-
sure) from other parts of Sweden. 14 participants were between the
ages of 17 and 30, and 16 were between 31 and 73, 25 were born in
Sweden and five outside Europe. Although the research makes no
claims of being representative of other public spaces, perfor-
mances, or experiences, nor of the attitudes of the Swedish popu-
lation at large, the participant characteristics broadly reflect the
makeup of the Swedish population, with approximately 16% born
outside of the country (Fores, 2016). The interviewees were
approached among bystanders and passers-by and were inter-
viewed on-site. We spent five days, mostly during daytime, at
Sergels torg in order to conduct interviews but also to immerse
ourselves in the atmosphere and situational characteristics of the
musical performance. Through video and sound recordings at the
square we were able to grasp movements and emotional expres-
sions, such as dancing, walking pace and facial expressions, among
the people in the vicinity of the performers. We also tried to capture
the place by writing field notes of our own experiences of the
square and everything we sensed while we were on site. In this
article we draw on all this data to trace the affective aspects of
encounters with busking, as well as emotional perceptions of the
impact of music on place. Taken together, the participant narratives
and sensory data enabled us to discern broader patterns in how
sensory encounters figured in the affective production of place, and
emotional perceptions of belonging, and conceptualisations of
authenticity. From this, a politics and ethics around the sensory
foundations of place emerged, where we locate the ethical poten-
tial of music performed in public social spaces. As such, the paper
contributes to a wider discussion of the role of arts and cultural
performance in public space in the production of liveable, inclusive
and diverse cosmopolitan cities (Simpson, 2011; Sharp et al., 2005;
Tanenbaum, 1995; Gibson and Stevenson, 2004), as well as the
growing debate on the value of attending to sound in geographical
research (Gallagher and Prior, 2014; Anderson et al., 2005; Fraser,
2009; Wood and Smith, 2004; Connell and Gibson, 2003).
2. The ethical potential of public space
Cities have always been diverse places in socio-economic, cul-
tural and ethnic terms, but some (e.g. Bridge and Watson, 2000:
225) have argued that ‘contemporary cities are increasingly
affected by complex patterns of local/global interconnection and
disconnection’, which provides opportunities for encountering
60 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
diversity in everyday life. We may say that this has led to an
increasing level of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise and
Velayutham, 2009) in urban spaces, which refers to the way in
which ‘cultural diversity is experienced and negotiated on the
ground in everyday situations’ (Wise and Velayutham, 2009, p. 2),
rather than referring to how diversity is dealt with in policy and
legislation at nation state level. Arguably, encounters with ethnic,
cultural and social difference are now commonplace in most urban
public spaces. However, we agree with Amin (2008: 7) that social
interaction in public space is not a sufficient condition for civic and
political citizenship, so we contend that encounters with ethnic and
cultural diversity, in this case facilitated through music, may not
stand in for the plural sources of civic and political culture in
contemporary life. Vibrancy and diversity in a particular public
space may not represent inclusive urban democracy overall. Yet, we
remain positive to its ethical potential. The workings of public space
may be politically modest, but as Amin (2008: 8) also suggests, ‘still
full of collective promise’. Amin locates this promise in the entan-
glement between people and the material and visual culture of
public space, rather than purely in the quality of social interaction
between strangers. In the analysis that follows, we aim to follow on
from Amin’s post-human reading of public space, which argues for
attention to its ‘situated multiplicity’; a total dynamic of human and
non-human, ‘the thrown-togetherness of bodies, mass and matter,
and of many uses and needs in a shared physical space’ (Amin,
2008: 8). Amin locates the ethical potential of public space in the
affective and situational nature of these spaces. He e following
others, such as Jane Jacobs (1961) and Richard Sennett (2006) e
traces this kind of ethical potential, or what he terms a reflex of
‘trust in a situation’, to public spaces that are ‘open, crowded,
diverse, incomplete, impoverished, and disorderly or lightly regu-
lated’ (Amin, 2008: 8). Sennet (2010: 269) draws our attention to
how ‘during the course of an ordinary walk in New York’ the
encounter with diversity has become so commonplace that ‘it
doesn’t much register’ because ‘it lacks disruptive drama’. Others
have referred to this condition as ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2006)
or ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf, 2014), to capture the
positive state of coexistence, where encounters with difference are
rarely conflictual e although the potential always remains
(Valentine, 2008) e but rather taken for granted. Amin (2008) ar-
gues that this ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) of diverse
people, things and activities, not confined to an overall plan or
totality, is generative of a social ethos with potentially strong civic
connotations (Amin, 2008: 10). In this way, urban complexity or
diversity can become domesticated and valued through the social
experience of spaces like this.
3. Sound and atmosphere
Following Amin’s (2008) post-humanist and materialist reading
of public space, we argue that ethical practices in public space are
best understood through an affective lens, rather than understood
as entirely rational or conscious responses to encounters with di-
versity. Rather than framing music as a ‘technology of the self’
(DeNora, 2000), building our understanding of music’s influence
around the individual, we are more concerned with how these
effects are shared and become a part of a social and material
‘environment’. Our reading of the interactions between sound,
space and affect is post-humanist because for us, sound offers a way
to re-think the classic binaries of subject and object, inside and
outside (Bull and Back, 2016). Along with others working from a
more-than-representational perspective, we consider ‘the social’ to
be constituted across mind, body and space (Boyd and Duffy, 2012),
and we take particular interest in the capacity of sound to ‘weave an
individual into a wider social fabric’ (Labelle, 2010: xxi).
Contemporary materialist and realist philosophies of sound
(Connor, 2004a, 2004b; Cox, 2011; Labelle, 2010; O’Callaghan,
2007) help us theorise the role of sound in the constitution of
places. In this endeavour we are also contributing to a growing line
of scholarship that has sought to emphasise the ‘beings and doings’
of sound; its more-than-representational, affective, embodied and
experiential qualities, and connections to spatial practices
(Anderson, 2004; Anderson et al., 2005; Atkinson, 2011; Boyd and
Duffy, 2012; Duffy, 2005; Duffy and Waitt, 2011; Fraser, 2009;
Kanngieser, 2012; Matheson, 2008; Simpson, 2011; Wood et al.,
2007; Wood, 2012).
Through a focus on sound, we can approach the contemporary
globalised and political landscapes of public space with an
emphasis on situational, embodied, and affective relations. We
relate this to the recent emphasis on ‘situational places’ in work on
diversity in cities (e.g. Dirksmeier et al., 2014; Watson, 2009), which
entails shifting our attention away from specific inter-personal
relationships in public space to the collective mood, as an under-
lying ‘force-field’ of influence, which houses ‘ethical impulses’
generated within particular situational comings-together. Labelle
(2010: xvii, italics in original) talks of the moment of sound as a
geography of intimacy in its capacity to stitch bodies together in a
temporal instant; ‘sound might be heard to say, this is our moment’.
As he also points out, what follows the temporality of sound is the
enactment of an exchange between body and space, meaning that
‘This is our moment is also immediately, This is our place’ (2010: xvii.,
italics in original). Sound can thus be understood as a spatio-
temporal event that opens up a field of interaction, and which
often exceeds the parameters and possibilities for representation
(Labelle, 2010: xvii.). So, instead of asking what sounds might mean
or represent, we may instead focus on what kind of situations they
produce; what they do, how they operate and what changes they
effectuate (Cox, 2011), and, how and when sound can act as a
medium for personal and social transformation (Labelle, 2010)
through its power to reconfigure space (Connor, 2004a) and how
we occupy it.
Sound, in the way it is omnipresent, non-directional and mobile,
has an existence distinct from both its source and the subject that
apprehends it, and engenders, in Henri Bergson’s terms, ‘contin-
uous multiplicities’ (Cox, 2011: 148) in its capacity to move through
bodies at different speeds and with different intensities. Sound has
a capacity to disintegrate distance and reconfigure space in ways
that the other senses do not do as readily (Connor, 2004a). Whereas
the rationalised ‘Cartesian grid’ of the imagination tends to pose the
self as a single point of view, sound gives way to a more fluid,
mobile and voluminous conception of space, through which ‘the
observer-observed duality and distinctions between separated
points and planes dissolve’ (Connor, 2004a: 56). It is worth noting
that the Enlightenment convention of visuality as centred on the
individual eye of the observer (Howes and Classen, 2014) fails to
capture the ways in which acts of ‘seeing, envisioning and regis-
tering’ (Rose and Tolia-Kelly, 2016: 8) are not just representational,
but are embodied, practiced and performed, and moreover tied up
in ethics and power relations that determine what is brought into
view and what is hidden. The visual world, no more than the sonic
world, is given to us as structured from the outset but is a product of
culture, education and language (Chion, 2016: 60). Auditory expe-
rience, however, more readily produces an apprehension of space
as plural and permeated. For this reason, paying attention to the
auditory experience of public space opens up for new possibilities
for understanding the creation of more inclusive social spaces: ‘The
dynamic of auditory knowledge provides then a key opportunity
for moving through the contemporary by creating shared spaces
that belong to no single public and yet which impart a feeling for
intimacy’ (Labelle, 2010: xvii).
 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
Scholars attending to such collective affects have notably done
so through the concept of ‘affective atmosphere’ (Adey et al., 2013;
Anderson, 2009; Dyson, 2009; McCormack, 2008). This is an
approach that traverses distinctions between people, things and
spaces, and is tied to a renewed and expanded emphasis on ma-
teriality, which understands experience as emergent through
complex and interactive sociomaterial processes (Coole and Frost,
2010). Atmospheres are always place-specific, situational, and af-
fects how we feel and act in places and towards others, it is a part of
‘a field of moving materiality that registers differentially in the
perpetual affordances of sensing bodies’ (McCormack, 2008; 415).
As Anderson (2009: 78) points out, the concept of atmosphere may
actually provide the best approximation of the concept of affect,
where affect is understood as the transpersonal or pre-subjective
intensities that emerge when bodies affect one another
(Massumi, 2002). Affective atmospheres are on one hand intangible
and vague, yet on the other easily apprehended; when we enter a
space, we instantly know how it makes us feel. Because affective
atmospheres are ‘a class of experience that occur before and
alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-
human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’
(Anderson, 2009: 78), atmospheres unsettle the dividing lines be-
tween affect and emotion. Following Spinoza’s definition of affect,
the subjective/objective problematic is dissolved because both
processes are understood to work in tandem, in that affect is un-
derstood as the increased, diminished, aided or restrained power
the body has to act, and at the same time the ideas of these affections
(Curti et al., 2011).
Thus, atmospheres are impersonal in that they belong to col-
lective situations, but nonetheless can be felt as intensely personal
and involve subjective emotions (Anderson, 2009). Following such
a contention, we are interested both in the role of sound in pro-
ducing collective atmospheres, and in the emotions that are trig-
gered in individuals by their experiential immersion in such
atmospheres.
3.1. Sergels torg
We have observed the square since morning, watching it fill with
people as we approach afternoon. There is an air of conviviality
here, there are multiple groupings peacefully claiming their in-
tersections of space; a few teenage punks have set up camp proudly
in the middle of the plaza, three ‘gothic lolitas’ in their tutus and
brightly coloured hair and makeup frolic about, moving from one
end to the other; a group of Eritrean teenage girls are sitting on the
narrow stairs; smatterings of people of all ages on the broad steps.
As these groups start to gather a police van pulls into the square, it
was parked there most of yesterday too, calling attention to an edge
of unpredictability, underneath what feels like quite a jovial at-
mosphere. A local evangelical church has erected a stall handing
out leaflets in the centre of the plaza, next to them a man plays the
trumpet badly for half an hour or so. A couple of girls have sat down
on the flagstones in the open, and several people of all ages are
moving, pausing or lingering throughout the day. The sun is cutting
diagonally across the square, adding drama, and what seems like a
symbolic play on the contrasting images and feelings attached to
this place. Come early afternoon, the upbeat trills of pan flute music
frame the space, flowing through some bodies more obviously than
others, calling for jigging and tapping, flashes of memory and
flights of the imagination (Karolina, edited research diary, 3 April
2013).
Sergels torg (see Figs. 1 and 2), our empirical focus for the paper,
is a square in central Stockholm, Sweden, consisting of a
61
pedestrianised sunken plaza flanked by a busy shopping street and
surrounded by trafficked through-fares. When it was constructed
its main purpose was to separate pedestrian traffic from motor
traffic, thus the pedestrian square and its subterranean tunnels
were constructed several stories below street level (see Fig. 1). It is a
comparatively young city square, constructed according to
modernist planning principles, begun in the early 1960s and
finished in the early 1970s, but with numerous discussions and
plans for redevelopment (some actioned and some not) since then
(Franzen, 2002). Few central city squares are subterranean, or so
heavily defined by motion and through-flows, as this one. The
underground station provides a reason for people to enter the
square, but other than that, there are few attractions here, for
example there is nowhere to sit, apart from the broad flight of
stairs, and it lacks some of the aesthetic flair of many older city
squares, such as a water feature or some greenery. Instead, there is a
mix of openness and shadow, and black and white flagstones add to
the juxtaposition of light and dark (see Figs. 1 and 2), invoking the
sharp angles and cool detachment of modernist town planning.
Plattan is the colloquial name for the open underground area of
the square, in Swedish this word is the definite singular of the word
platta, meaning something flat and thin, it can be translated as
plate/plaque/tablet/disc, and refers to the flat open space of the
square, accessible by anyone, and open to multiple uses. Thus, its
name signals its cultural associations as well as its multiple public
functions. Multiple expressions of place co-exist here; it is a place
where different claims of space are made by different groups, and
where ‘situated multiplicity’ (Amin, 2008), alongside the open ar-
chitecture of the plaza, works to produce a certain amount of
egalitarianism, and opportunities for a convivial orientation to-
wards the unfolding situation. Difference is manifested here both
through the expression of different identities but also through the
visible variety of people that occupy the space (Valentine, 2010).
Quickly after its construction it became a significant place for
activism and protest and is still the most common place for dem-
onstrations in Stockholm (Franze n, 2002). As such, this square has
been seen as something a symbol of possibility, and a site of public
encounter and formation of civic culture, as well as a significant
space for political participation.
However, as Franze n (2002: 1118) points out, there is nothing
romantic about Plattan and its name; ‘burdened by everything it
has to bear, [it is] a most public, even naked, place’. Our in-
terviewees commonly referred to this starkness in their accounts of
how they experienced the space:
It’s awful. I guess it’s designed like this so it can be used for different
things, but I miss some vegetation and some sort of life in the
concrete (Male Stockholm resident, 55).
There are materials that aren’t organic (Male Stockholm resident,
34).
I would say that it feels like function over form (Male Stockholm
resident, 25).
This stark openness, which can be read as particularly egali-
tarian on one hand e open to be filled and used by anyone e also
guarantees its ambivalent quality, as so many feel it is ugly, unin-
teresting and aesthetically poor. Its ambivalent quality is enhanced
by the common knowledge that soon after its construction it also
became the centre of Stockholm’s drug traffic (Franze n, 2002). This
place is now firmly placed in the national consciousness as the
Swedish metonym for illegal drugs and criminality. Again, this is
something that was alluded to in most of our interviews, for
example:
62 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67

Fig. 1. The steps and the entrance to the underground station. Photo by the authors, April 2013.

Fig. 2. Sergels torg viewed from the steps, with the subterranean tunnels in darkness. Photo by the authors, April, 2013.

it has a bad reputation (Female, visitor from Southern Sweden,
51)
you read about all sorts of strange things down there [in the plaza]
(Female Stockholm resident, 73).
There’s a lot going on here … a lot of terrible things too. That
cigarette being passed around, it’s not ordinary bloody nicotine, is
it? (Male visitor from Southern Sweden, 68).
The majority of our interviewees made sure to point out that
although we had encountered them in the square, this was some-
thing out of the ordinary:
we don’t usually hang around here! (Female Stockholm resident,
20).
I tend to almost avoid it (Female Stockholm resident, 37).
I go to the city regularly, but I don’t go to Plattan (Female Stock-
holm resident, 30).
 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
today I’m actually using it as a meeting place, but usually I just pass
through (Male Stockholm resident, 25).
So despite the designed-for egalitarianism of the plaza, in the
popular imagination it has been rendered a failed public space and
an undesirable place to dwell for too long. As Franze n (2002: 1124)
writes, this common perception of the square juxtaposes it to the
older parts of the city, the more humane, warm and beautiful;
‘Plattan, a most dilapidated and dirty place, epitomises all that went
wrong [with modernist town planning], aesthetically, spatially and
socially. It is a complete failure’. Its modernist architecture is a
reminder of the sprawling suburbs and their ‘million projects’ that
were built in the post-war period, and their attendant social
problems. In this sense, Sergels torg is rather ‘other’ to the city at
large, it brings the spirit of the suburbs into the City, not just
metaphorically but also because it serves as a meeting place for so
many teenagers and counterculture kids who come here from the
suburbs.
Thus, Sergels torg, is a complex case for a consideration of the
ethical potential of public space, because of its multiple and
competing symbolic projections (Amin, 2008). It is a diverse,
multicultural and egalitarian space, symbolically more so than the
rest of the city, yet the ‘otherness’ it embodies is also rendered
problematic, unpredictable and potentially dangerous in the social
imagination; ‘free and safe mingling’ is not how it is experienced by
all, or at all times. However, it does resonate with vitality and mixed
use, and music plays a significant role in the production of place
here, as we will see.
4. The reconfiguring role of music
Sergels torg is closely associated with music of different sorts.
Music has long fostered interactions between strangers in this
space, creating mundane instances of cultural emergence
(Dirksmeier et al., 2014). The most well-known example is perhaps
Maria Johansson; for three decades, between 1972 and 2002, she
was there practically daily playing her organ and singing Christian
songs and hymns, bringing her street mission to the people
(Franzen, 2002). A simultaneous and subsequent example is the
South-American pan flute musicians who have played at Sergels
torg since the mid-80s. These pan flute musicians have become so
ubiquitous at Sergels torg over the last thirty years that if walking
along the shopping street facing the plaza, one expects to do so to
the tones of pan flutes. At first, it was mostly a sole musician with a
pan flute, but with time, larger bands with more instruments and
amplifiers and increasingly elaborate costumes were set up. Many
bands started to sell professionally recorded CDs. Only a few of the
South American pan flute musicians that play here live in Sweden
permanently, the majority live in South America and travel to, and
around, Europe during the summer months (Laxgård, 2011).
We spent five days at Sergels torg, immersing ourselves in the
atmosphere of the square, and interviewing people we found
lingering there. It became clear that people we interviewed
strongly associated the music with the square; just as spring
returns every year, so do the pan flute bands. The music seemed to
signal continuity, and simultaneously embody both cultural
‘otherness’ and familiarity, providing one element of a number of
unavoidable everyday encounters with cultural difference in the
city (Valentine, 2010). The trills of pan flutes seemed to be an in-
tegral part of the atmosphere in and around the square:
Every time I’ve been here, they’ve been here (Male, visitor from
Southern Sweden, 65).
63
They’ve been here forever … so you get used to it, it’s a habit-thing.
You don’t really notice it either, it’s part of the environment (Fe-
male Stockholm resident, 23).
The regular presence of the music also seemed to have made an
impact on the place that outlived the actual performances and
contributed to a persisting sense of place. The music served as a
point of connection, where the pan flute musicians as cultural
‘others’ were often narrated by participants as exemplary of the
€ and Hyto
new inclusive ‘multicultural city’. As Kyto €nen-Ng (2016)
have also argued, migrant street musicians can be seen as an
important ingredient in the growth of a grass-root level
cosmopolitanism:
Maybe it would have felt strange 50 years ago, but now it feels
totally natural, like one of the ingredients of the city (Male
Stockholm resident, 55).
There’s lots of different people from different cultures here, so in
that way they fit in. You just have to look around here at all the
people.. so to a degree they fit in here (Male, visitor from northern
town, 65).
I guess it fits in well when there’s so many people and different
groups that come through here … [the musicians] wear their
cultural clothes, yes there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s perfect that it
stands out from the rest, you know (Female Stockholm resident,
70).
In this sense, the presence of the pan flute music functioned as a
symbolic projection of ‘multicultural Sweden’, a notion that has
increasingly been under attack in Sweden over the last few years, as
in other European countries, by the ever-more vocal anti-
immigration Right. In the social imagination, the pan flute music
was deemed to fit into, and even be particularly indicative of, the
social and acoustic landscape of Sergels torg: the area was
frequently experienced by participants as dynamic, aurally and
visually animated and a multifunctional place where a variety of
people from different parts of the world and different sections of
society cross paths. Arguably, the South American pan flute musi-
cians are not the focus of the new ‘catastrophist’ biopolitics of risk
(Amin, 2013) that have framed anti-immigration sentiments across
Europe over the last few years in response to what in the populist
rhetoric has been dubbed the ‘migrant crisis’. Instead, they embody
an older, and more comforting, conception of what ‘multicultur-
alism’ entails, in contrast to the growing numbers of Eastern Eu-
ropean buskers, who were sometimes mentioned by participants as
examples of when busking becomes intrusive, a nuisance, and oc-
cupies the wrong side of the ambiguous divide between perfor-
mance and begging (see also Kyto € and Hyto € nen-Ng, 2016, on
perceptions among street musicians in relation to begging and
musicianship). The figure of the indigenous South American is
largely romanticised, it is a figure that stands in for spirituality and
connectedness with nature, rather than a target for anxieties over
social fragmentation, jobs and welfare, and cultural erosion in the
manner of immigrant groups from Eastern Europe, Africa and the
Middle East (Amin, 2012). Such considerations notwithstanding,
the pan flute music could be seen to reconfigure the atmosphere of
the square through its experiential capacity to render both the
material and the social differently. In interviews, participants spoke
of their sense of the square as a ‘hard’ place, visually dominated by
grey concrete and sharp angles. However, the pan flute music
seemed to have the effect of ‘warming’ the space aesthetically and
emotionally. This ‘failed’ public place, seedy and dangerous, was
suddenly described in much more positive terms. For many, the
64 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
music worked to animate and soften the experiential qualities of
the square, and have a soothing effect on social behaviour:
I like it, it livens the place up a bit (Male visitor from southern
town, 68).
It’s interesting … exciting … it makes the place beautiful (Female
Stockholm resident, 18).
[the music] doesn’t affect me very much but it’s nicer with it than
without it. If it does something, I suppose it’s that it creates a nicer
atmosphere. Because around there it’s a pretty hard climate, people
elbow their way through (Male Stockholm resident, 34).
Often also giving rise to mobilities of the imagination, conjuring
images of nature and faraway, exotic, places:
They’re not so “concrete-y” … if you think about it … this is a hard
environment, but their clothes and music have a lot of associations
to nature (Male, Stockholm resident, 34).
One participant narrated her flights of the imagination and their
incongruity with the place she was in:
Well, somehow it feels a bit wrong, too hard in a way, these con-
crete flagstones, when you think about Maya Indians … (Female
visitor to Stockholm, 51).
Music can be said to function as ‘integral to the geographical
imagination’ (Smith, 1994, p. 238) and ‘articulating our knowledge
of other people, places, times and things, and ourselves in relation
to them’ (Stokes, 1994: 3). Memories, imaginaries, associations and
sensory perceptions become entangled in the encounter with the
music and create mundane instances of cultural transposability
(Dirksmeier et al., 2014).
As outlined above, this open plaza is a place of multiple in-
teractions between strangers, where encounters with difference
are to a large degree mundane and peaceful, although the potential
for conflict exists. The pan flute music sensorially invigorated and
animated the space, making it experienced as more hospitable, safe
and friendly. The music and performance was overwhelmingly
described by participants as positive; ‘beautiful’, ‘cool’, ‘intriguing’,
‘enhancing of street life’ and also as ‘fun’ and as something that
‘raises a smile’. Such influences were also observable in our video
recordings and our on-site observations of the crowd and passers-
by (see field notes below). One participant emphasised the positive
impact the music had on the area around Sergels torg in the
following comment:
They usually stand up here often and play, it’s nice, it’s really like
lovely, there’s usually people standing around and listening and it
becomes like … a cause for joy (Female Stockholm resident, 20).
The embodied and affective reaction to the music signals its
ethical potential to create a convivial orientation. We witnessed
many people stop and linger, a crowd gathered very quickly around
the musicians, but the tones extended all across the square:
When people came close and saw/heard the band, many had a
smile on their faces, some more tentative and some broader. Some
smiles could be interpreted as based on recognition, and you could
distinguish between recognition and appreciation and recognition
and something like amusement. Very few didn’t throw them a look
as they passed. Several people let the music affect their bodies, like
tapping the rhythm with their feet, a few bodies started swaying a
bit, two older ladies started moving in a subdued dance a few
metres away. Some teenagers did humorous dance moves. A hen
party played with the band and danced in front of them and also
with what seemed to be a friend of the band. Several groups of
people stopped, dwelled for a moment, or turned their heads to see
the band (Maja, field notes, 4 April 2013).
We recorded the soundscape of the square, both walking around
it and standing near the pan flute musicians. Like Boyd and Duffy
(2012) note, we hear the place differently when we listen back to
the recording; the sound environment takes centre stage. What we
hear in the recordings is many animated chatting voices, some
laughs breaking through, contoured by the happy trills of pan
flutes. If one listens carefully there is the noise of traffic at the lower
end. The sounds seem to tell us something about the nature of the
space, about its vibrancy. Sound works in this way to place us in the
world (Ong, 2002). A discussion on the spatial qualities of sonic
perception has explained the way that sound is a situated experi-
ence, placing us in the midst of a multi-sensory, embodied, spatio-
temporal engagement with urban space (Behrendt, 2012).
Michel Chion (1993) designates the ubiquitous ‘muzak’ of
everyday urban life as ‘musique-milieu’, as opposed to ‘musique
discourse’ (cited in Thibaud, 2011), which involves what Sloboda
(2010) calls ‘non-everyday-music’, a performance with a clear
beginning and end. The pan flute music, as most busking in public
space, perhaps falls somewhere between the two. This is not a
musical performance where the audience is expected to be
listening from start to finish, it is designed to be a part of an
evolving ambiance as one makes one’s way through the city. These
kinds of musics can be experienced without being noticed, heard
without being listened to (Thibaud, 2011). What makes busking and
the affective atmosphere - or ambiance - it communicates partic-
ularly interesting in terms of ethical potential is that there is a
direct relationship between the music, the place, and the situation
in which it is played. The music is situational, as much as the place
and its atmosphere is situational. In the commercial context, spe-
cific soundtracks are designed to fit specific situations and to
induce particular moods, which will make us buy more. Similarly, if
to a lesser degree, the busking repertoire is often put together to
induce upbeat moods which increases the willingness to donate
money or buy pre-recorded CDs. The sound of the situation is
intricately connected to the quality of the situation, and a pervasive
aspect of its ambiance (Thibaud, 2011). But, what we have found
here is that music has the potential to enhance aspects of the at-
mosphere of spaces, or altogether alter the feeling people have in
and for places. So, music’s ethical potential lies in its power to
inform the quality of a situation.
The concept of ambiance, developed primarily by French
scholars, more or less independently from the concept of atmo-
sphere, particularly emphasises the close affinity between sound
and the ‘mood’ of places (Thibaud, 2011). What we have to
acknowledge here, of course, is that sound is only one of the many
sensory modalities that contribute to the fabric of an ambiance and
provide its specific phenomenal characteristics (Thibaud, 2011:
unpaginated). The growing interest in the senses in social science
(Howes, 2006) has recently led to arguments for an emphasis on
the integration of all the senses in experiential embodiment. In our
empirical study of music at Sergels torg, we can see that the
encounter with music is multisensory, and above all experienced
through the whole body (Vannini and Williams, 2009). Sound
courses through bodies in different ways, for some it calls for
movement of the body, for others it takes the mind to other places,
or it calls forth sensations informed by the imagination, such as
spirituality and an association to nature. Thibaud (2011) accurately
points out that this is a question of sensation, not perception, it is
 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
not about the way we interpret, recognise or understand the world
we perceive, but rather the way we feel and relate to the world we
sense. When we enter a place, we instantly feel its atmosphere, our
bodies react to the place, we tend to adopt its rhythm and its to-
nality (Thibaud, 2011; see also Wunderlich, 2008 on rhythm).
The pan flute performances were often described by partici-
pants as entrancing, making people feel happy and wanting to
dance, or at least stop and linger close to the performance and as
creating spaces of confluence and possible conviviality. One
participant described her embodied and sensory response to the
music like this:
They’re happy and lively and jolly and bubbling with life all over …
You feel happy inside, you almost keep up with the rhythm un-
consciously (Female Stockholm resident, 70).
Illustrating that ‘the body and its sensations are always ahead of
our reflected consciousness’ (Boyd and Duffy, 2012: unpaginated).
This is where we hint the affective potency of the music. When
brought to reflective consciousness as participants were asked
about their experiences of the music, these effects were of course
filtered through the language of subjective emotions, in order to be
made intelligible.
Sound researchers have previously explored the impact of music
on ‘moods’ and experiences of public space, but have frequently
focused on personal music listening, such as Bull’s studies of the
Walkman (Bull, 2000) and the iPod (Bull, 2007). Bull shows how
mobile music listening has a capacity to affect the listener by
‘warming up’ their private space, although this is a move that at the
same time distances them from others and ‘chills’ the environment
for everyone else. Even though Beer (2007) offers a convincing
argument that such digital music listening is part of the urban
soundscape, live music has a much richer potential to positively
contribute to the atmosphere of public space as a shared sensibility.
Live music in public space truly realises sound’s capacity to
reconfigure distance and create a sensually vibrant and immersive
socio-spatial encounter.
However, we cannot over-state the ethical potential of migrant
music, as encounters with busking in public space are subject to
various power relations and social and cultural interpretations.
People’s perceptions and associations were not always positive;
many participants raised questions in reference to aesthetics and
authenticity. Two changes had recently altered the conditions for,
and character of, pan flute music in Sweden. The first was the
overall decrease in CD sales, which had significantly reduced rev-
enue from street performances. This was arguably due to a general
decline in popularity of so-called ‘world music’, and a broader
aesthetic shift since the late 90s. The second development was that
the musicians have started to wear North American Native Indian
costumes for their performances, presumably to capitalise on a
more widespread recognition in the West of Native American
symbolism. Also, clothes and performances had become increas-
ingly more spectacular with feathers, large sound systems and
dancing, perhaps as a way to militate against tough market con-
ditions and a decline in CD sales (Laxgård, 2011). As such, the
performances were often described by participants as a gimmick, a
business idea, a well-thought-out concept for selling the same
thing everywhere, as something out of Disneyworld or a Spaghetti
Western. There was a prevalent construction of the performers as
disingenuous; ‘pretend-Indians’, that deceived their audiences into
believing that they represented ‘authentic’ indigenous culture for
the sake of selling their wares, exemplified by this quote from one
participant:
65
Starting out they wore outfits that I would say are like the Incas or
something, it made me think South America. But the last few times
I’ve seen them, they’ve worn some sort of feather headdress, which I
would think is more for North American Indians … maybe it’s more
successful? They have to renew themselves maybe? You know,
when they had the old clothes, I thought that was their heritage, or
like subconsciously. But maybe it’s not, since … well, you can’t
know, maybe they’ve just adjusted themselves to the “market”
(Male Stockholm resident, 34).
As we have mentioned elsewhere (Doughty and Lagerqvist,
2014), audiences’ perception of ‘authenticity’ is central to the
construction of the genre of ‘world music’ and integral to how non-
Western music is valorised in the West (see Aubert, 2007; McLeod,
1999; Revill, 2005; Taylor, 1997; Thornton, 1995). Therefore, a
consideration of the ethical potential of music must take into ac-
count that street musicians have unequal capacities to affect others
through their music, and that these capacities are subject to ge-
ometries of power (Tolia-Kelly, 2006). In this way, uneven power
dynamics can work to undermine the ethical potential of music in
public space. As Amin (2008: 11) puts it, ‘the ethics of the situation
… are neither uniform nor positive in every setting of thrownto-
getherness’. Nonetheless, we found that music had a powerful ca-
pacity to affect how people felt and acted in this particular urban
space, and that on the whole, the music worked to ‘warm’ the space
and create a more convivial situation.
5. Conclusion
Tuning in to the sounds of the ‘background’ in public places
offers us a way to rethink the affective functioning of the social in
these spaces. In this paper we have investigated the meaning of
sound through the registers of affective atmosphere, drawing on
more-than-representational and posthumanist accounts of public
life. This perspective begins to correct what Sterne (2013) has called
the Western cultural ‘truisms’ of sound and hearing, such as the
tendency to describe sonic experience in terms of interiority. En-
counters with street music, although certainly individually mean-
ingful, are shaped by particular affective politics of place, which are
culturally embedded and materially contingent. Music functions
differently in different spaces, often dependent on the different
dynamics of the social in these spaces (Labelle, 2010). People move
and relate to others differently in an open plaza compared to on the
underground, for example. Proximity and intimacy is handled in
different ways in these spaces; in the plaza of Sergels torg, the
architectural openness invites to free movement and mingling,
relaxing the social dynamics of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of place, creating
an atmosphere of inclusive liveliness, in contrast to the un-
derground’s atmosphere of tolerant quietude, or social trepidation
(Auge, 2002). Thus, the architectural design of Sergels torg may be
particularly conducive to convivial encounters with music.
In this particular place, the street music was shown to facilitate
moments of egalitarian togetherness, moments that encouraged
co-mingling across multiple existing lines of difference. Perhaps it
is especially important to pay attention to such mundane moments
of ethical promise in a contemporary world that seems increasingly
divisive and where social inequalities are on the rise across the
board. Sounds have a capacity in this sense to leak through ‘identity
enclosures’ (Berendt, 1985) and facilitate an alternative space for
public association. Yet some musics are also clearly processed
through the registers of exoticism or Orientalism (Sharma, 2003),
we saw this in responses from our participants that posed the pan
flute musicians as more ‘spiritual’ and ‘in tune with nature’. The
ethical potential of music in public space is certainly not uniform,
66 K. Doughty, M. Lagerqvist / Emotion, Space and Society 20 (2016) 58e67
and should not be overstated, but even the oft-ridiculed pan flute
bands (dubbed a ‘pandemic’ in the TV series Southpark, for
example) hold great potential for creating alternative ways of being
in urban spaces that may otherwise be experienced as alienating.
The affective power of sound thus lays in its capacity to make us feel
and act differently.
Part of sound’s ethical ‘promise’ can be found in the way it can
reconfigure not only space, but the self in relation to space; ‘the self
defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imagined not
as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel
through which voices, noises and musics travel’ (Connor, 2004a:
57). We should be careful not to overly romanticise sonic experi-
ence and its potential to ‘bring us together’, however we found that
the musical performances affectively revived and enlivened Sergels
torg, and the emotional translations that participants offered of this
effect was that it created a friendlier climate, a softer human
dimension in a place that commonly was thought of as dull, hard
and unnatural; a ‘failed place’. Through ‘turning up the background’
(Bull and Back, 2016), Sergels torg emerged as less of a failed place
than a place where ‘everyday multiculturalism’ could flourish, or a
space for grass-roots cosmopolitanism; a singularly diverse social
and acoustic space at the heart of the city.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Swedish grant
€derbergs Stiftelse and the School of Applied
fund Johan och Jakob So
Social Science Research Development Fund at the University of
Brighton.
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