We (Lauren Knight and Aline Zara) invite you to join us in celebrating the launch of our zine, BEEP on June 7th!

BEEP is a multimedia zine that creatively explores the urban soundscapes of Toronto through field recordings, photography, and collage across four editions: Pool, Park, Bar, and Bus. Through this creative experimentation, we audibly map sonic relations between human and more-than-human members of the city: technologies, species, materialities, and natural forces as an acoustic community. By encouraging an attentive relationship to the acoustics of urban ecologies and assemblages, we offer an invitation to generating sustainable sonic futures.

BEEP, like other co-creative projects, creates a sonic gathering point through which choreographies of assembled stories, memories, legacies, and histories shape community against the alienation of the city, negotiating new urban narratives of gender, race, class, ability, and mobility (Luka 2018). By recording the urban environment around us, BEEP pays attention to and participates with sonic citizens both human and non-human: technologies, species, materialities, and natural forces that are “entangled in the social, cultural and political life of contemporary cities” (Franklin 2017). In this way, BEEP takes up the work of Mbembe in considering the creation of a new earthly community whose assemblage makes room for both human and non-human actors based on our “in-common”, as a multiplicity of realities and perspectives which deconstruct existing socio-techno-ecological ideologies (Mbembe 2022). Extending concerns of soundscape studies that suggest urban noise pollution impacts the ‘livability’ of cities (Droumeva et al. 2020), the disruptive listening (Westerkamp, 2019) offered by BEEP’s soundscapes are invitations to generating sustainable sonic futures.

Come join us at Typist Studios & Coffee from 6:30-8:30pm on June 7th for an exciting in-person event celebrating the launch of our multimedia audio zine. Expect live readings (and listening), physical and digital copies of the zine on display, a chance to enter a raffle to win one of the physical editions, and drinks and food (made by Typist, arrive early for a drink ticket). Please register on Eventbrite so that we can keep track of expected numbers. We look forward to seeing you there!

Following the launch you can find our zines and more at beepzine.com!

BEEP is funded by the School of Cities Small Grants Program at the University of Toronto and is co-created by Aline Zara and Lauren Knight.

Droumeva, M. et al. (2020) Livable Soundscapes. Simon Fraser University: Sonic Research Studio.

Franklin, A. (2017) ‘The more-than-human city’, The Sociological Review, 65(2), pp. 202–217.

Luka, M.E. (2018) ‘Assembling Collaboration in the Debris Field: From Psychogeography to Choreographies of Assembly’, Canadian Theatre Review, 176(1), pp. 41–47.

Mbembe, A. (2022) The Earthly Community. V2 Publishing.

Westerkamp, H. (2019) ‘The Disruptive Nature of Listening: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow’, in M. Droumeva and R. Jordan (eds) Sound, Media, Ecology. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 45–63.