ABSTRACT
Chapter Six explores the temporal aesthetics of urban places drawing on an analogy with musical aesthetics, earlier noted in the works of Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze, and offers unique conceptual and analytical tools to assist processes of place temporal and rhythm analysis. It begins by exploring the interface between music, music aesthetics and the aesthetics of the urban environment, and the evidence of its potential in informing temporal understandings of the city and its places. It examines how music has been a favourite theme in avant-garde art forms and the extent to which it has entered critical urban studies research and vice-versa. Overall it discusses how musical aesthetics is increasingly recognised as a fruitful disciplinary field for research on temporal and sensorial aspects of the urban environment. Furthermore, it explores similarities between the experience of music and urban place-temporality, and looks at aspects of performance analysis, such as the notions of choreography, resonance and listening, and their significance for both music and for urban place studies. Lastly, it examines, three musical processes, that of rhythm, performance and tonality and eurhythmia in music, and brings these forward as useful conceptual and analytical tools for the study of temporality and rhythm in the urban place environment. The chapter ends by introducing the notion of place-score as a unique form of representation and tool for urban place rhythmanalysis, in particular as a tool for polyrhythmic and eurhythmic analysis, and as a means through which the temporal aesthetics of urban places may be best diagrammatically uncovered.
