I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.

On 29 September 1994, Cheb Hasni, the most renowned Rai singer living in Algeria, was gunned down outside his family's house in Gambetta, a quarter of the city of Waharan (Oran). He was one of many public figures (and some 50,000 others) who have been killed since the main opposition political party, the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) was prevented from assuming power by the annulment of elections that they would have won in 1991. Like the most notable of Algeria's victims of violence, which include journalists, lawyers, doctors, television presenters and top policemen, Hasni represented a version of Algerian identity that some people clearly could not tolerate. Responsibility for his assassination has not been claimed, but the manner of his death was identical to others carried out by the armed faction of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). His death has possibly marked the demise of a genre of North African popular music known as Rai as it was produced in Algeria. Rai has been a particularly problematic idiom for Islamists and secularists alike. Both groups nurture distinct views of the place of Algeria, and Algerians in the world, and the role of Islam and liberal secularism in Algeria. Rai music constructs its own distinct trajectories linking local and global, ‘East’ and ‘West’, and, in this way, constitutes a distinct problem for Algerians, and indeed other North Africans today.

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This special section of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies engages with the idea of activating a ‘sonic turn’ in urban cultural studies scholarship, in part through the evocation of the paradigm of critical and participatory citizenship, as well as through critical approaches to understanding how sound and music are implicated in the texture of a city. This work is therefore informed by theorizations of topdown and of bottom-up approaches to engagements with, and representation of, the city, through sonic and musical means. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, including urban ethnomusicology, urban sociology, cultural geography, acoustic ecology and soundscapes studies, this introductory article examines what is meant by ‘the sonic turn’ as it relates to sound and music studies and how and why this should matter to the study of cities and of the urban experiences of citizens in the broadest sense. This introduction also summarizes aspects of the five papers in this collection, signalling the different approaches taken by each of the authors as evidence of the richness such sonic and musical investigations into the city and the urban experience can bring to urban cultural studies. With a focus on urban ethnography and on applied dimensions of research, particularly in the contemporary city, this article seeks to underscore the importance of listening to and hearing the city, especially for those citizens that do not necessarily have an ‘official’ voice or the technical means to interpret and engage with their sonic environments. Finally, this article suggests how sonic cultural interventions and engagements may assist, if not in social regeneration, at least in promoting a greater understanding of the complex sonic dimensions of city life as mediated and experienced by urban dwellers and as imagined by others.

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