Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Computational Methods for Listening to Gentrification

In this article, I outline a method of combining ethnography and computational soundscape analysis in order to listen to processes of gentrification in Washington, DC. I utilize Kaleidoscope Pro, a software suite built to visualize and cluster bioacoustic recordings (typically birds and bats) to cluster points of tension in the soundscape of Shaw, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in DC. Clustering and visualizing these sounds (which include car horns, sirens, public transportation, and music) makes audible the sonic markers of gentrification in Shaw. Furthermore, listening to gentrification is a call to engage with the sonic right to the city, histories of legislating sound, and sonorities of memory and nostalgia. This work contributes to the burgeoning black digital humanities canon by thinking through how computational methods can help us to hear black life. Although the digital humanities have turned to embrace the sonic in recent years, there is still much to be done in considering how to embrace the aural in DH work. This project invites us to listen closely to a changing neighborhood, and emphasizes sound as a valid mode of knowledge production, questioning how a sonic rendering of gentrifying space through the digital might move us toward more equitable soundscapes.