Urban development is usually framed in pragmatic terms. A planning problem. An engineering challenge. A logistics puzzle. A financial equation. But what if we thought about city shaping like composing music?
Cities, like symphonies, are made up of layers: the steady bass line of infrastructure, the soaring melody of architecture, the unpredictable jazz of human movement.
Music teaches us about flow – how a city can evolve without losing its heart.
It teaches us about contrast – how light and shade, fast and slow, can make a place feel alive.
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It teaches us about silence – how spaces left open, unfilled, unstructured, can be just as powerful those that are built in.
And then there’s improvisation. Cities are never finished. The best cities are responsive, adaptive, open to change. They listen.
The great cities of the world have their own soundtracks, their own rhythms and pulse. New York is syncopation, a city built on improvisation. It’s Miles Davis at midnight, a lone saxophone in the subway. Paris is accordion in Montmartre; the melancholy of Edith Piaf. Rio has the sway of the samba, the joyful percussion of carnival. Berlin is a techno beat, an underground club at sunrise; a city where creativity is built from ruins. Seoul is pure K-Pop and Gangnam Style.
Harmony between sound and space
I am fascinated by the connection between music, sound, architecture and the urban experience. The Pythagoreans were obsessed with harmony, mathematics and order too.
They discovered the ratios that create musical intervals – the octave, the perfect fifth, and so on. This mathematical structuring of sound laid the foundation for Western music theory.
Of course, music existed long before this theory, and different cultures have developed their own ways of structuring sound. But the Pythagorean idea that geometry could shape sound was to influence the construction of amphitheatres and coliseums so the voice of one person could reach thousands.
The same is true of the grand edifices of the Middle Ages. Gothic cathedrals were designed to be imposing visually and spiritually – but also to shape sound.
High vaulted ceilings, cavernous spaces, stone walls: these create natural reverberation, amplifying a single voice or a note from our largest instrument, the pipe organ.
The architecture overwhelms our physical sensibilities, and the instruments within our aural ones. The effect is to ensure people connect with something higher or bigger than themselves.
Cities, too, can be overwhelming in their sound. The name New York immediately conjures noise – honking cabs, clanking garbage trucks, the subterranean rumble of the subway. This cacophony isn’t music, but it is identity.
The score of a city
In my city, Canberra, the musical story spans millennia, starting with Indigenous Australians who used songlines or ancient dreaming tracks to map the land and forge a living connection between sound and place.
Some of our earliest architecture was built for music. Albert Hall, which opened in 1928, was the heart of performance in the nascent capital, hosting some of Dame Joan Sutherland’s earliest concerts. The city’s first band, the Royal Military College Band, was formed at Duntroon in 1916. The Last Post is played each dawn at the Australian War Memorial.
The Canberra School of Music, founded by Ernest Llewellyn in 1965, transformed Australian attitudes to music. Today, Llewellyn Hall stands as one of the finest acoustic venues in the country.
Bands like The Church and Falling Joys cut their musical teeth in Canberra, and we’ve hosted countless internationally acclaimed acts – from Elton John’s rain-soaked 2007 concert in Commonwealth Park to the wild night in 1992 when Nirvana brought the house down at the ANU Uni Bar and fans smashed their way through windows.
Despite this performance pedigree, artists and venues have struggled to survive in recent years. Some venues have faced a tenfold increase in insurance premiums since COVID-19. Streaming revenues are meagre, and many musicians simply can’t afford to live in Canberra, let alone perform.
Reforms to support Canberra’s $3.8 billion night-time economy, including less stringent noise restrictions, are a positive step.
The Greens propose going further, calling for designated entertainment precincts that place the onus on new developments to incorporate robust noise insulation – not on music venues to turn down the volume.
The upgrade to the Canberra Theatre complex, with a new 2000-seat lyric theatre alongside much-needed refurbishments, is more than an investment in infrastructure. It’s a commitment to a musical culture that runs so deep we often forget it’s there.
Composing the future
Thinking about the future of music in our cities makes me wonder: what if urban renewal tuned a city’s soundscape so that sound doesn’t “just happen”, but is designed?
In seeking an answer to this question, I stumbled on the Music Cities Manual. Published in 2019 by Sound Diplomacy, a UK-based strategic consultancy, the manual identifies 13 key indicators demonstrating the value of music to urban life.
They range from developing music policy and mapping local assets, to supporting venues and entrepreneurs, respecting heritage, and prioritising affordability and inclusion.
Together, these principles make a powerful point: music is infrastructure. It underpins tourism, contributes to the night-time economy, strengthens health and wellbeing, and helps cities achieve their sustainability goals.
Music is for everyone. And all cities are music cities. But not all cities create, maintain and care about their music policy. The cities that do care treat it like infrastructure. They develop music policy that is integrated with housing, land use, sustainability, smart technology. Everything.
Music influences everything because it is everywhere. Cities are not just built – they are composed. Every street, every square, every bridge and building is part of a larger score.
For city shapers, our opportunity is to think like composers, not just planners or builders, to create places that resonate. Because the best cities – like the best music – don’t just fill space. They make our lives better.
