Intentional | Audio Identity Blog

Photo by chuckp

If you’ve visited New Orleans, you know it doesn’t take too much wandering around to soak in the city’s sonic identity. It’s not something you can encapsulate in the form of a five-second audio logo, or even in one particular song or style of music for that matter.

I was fortunate enough to live there for a few years in the early 90’s. My head overflows with audio postcards when I drift back. Funky brass bands. Dixieland jazz. Funky blues. Cajun, zydeco, boogie-woogie piano, you get the picture.

You’ll hear all this walking the city in one day, but you’ll also likely take in the audio apparition of tankers and barges heading down the Mississippi just over the levee. Or the constant grind of streetcars, which can be felt in living rooms that are blocks away. Then there’s the rooster-hour hose-down of the Quarter’s streets, followed by a chorus of shopkeepers’ brooms as the city’s washed anew for just one more day. It’s a sonic collage that you’ll experience nowhere else on earth.

If you’re a fan of American music, you have this city to thank for sparking so much of the music we love today — New Orleans is the Giving Tree to which Rock often returns. And yet there’s more than music…that urban soundscape…that creates and reinforces our perceptions of a place most unique.

– Noel Franus