Lagos Soundscapes - Field work photo

Photograph of a recording site for Lagos Soundscapes by Emeka Ogboh

Lagos Soundscapes is a sound based project that captures the sounds produced in Nigeria's busiest city. It especially features the sounds of automotive vehicles, horns, bus conductors and street commerce.

"The advent of verbal mapping may have resulted from the lack of associative visual materials (i.e. display of bus stops and routes) at the bus stations. Bus conductors improvise by calling out each bus stop and route. This method of oral communication is a singular cadence—the bus stations and routes the conductors call out are unique to the city—captured within the Lagos soundscape repertoire. Without these monikers, Lagos would invariably sound like any other Nigerian or West African metropolis, but when you hear these verbal maps in a recording, it is almost certain the sounds originate in Lagos.

Verbal mapping is an art form of successive freestyle-rap deliveries honed by many hours of non-stop ranting. The Danfo bus conductor’s language is hybrid and his lyrics are spontaneous, converting real-time occurrences into short and remixed poetic verses. When deployed at bus stations, individuated chants are orchestrated within a collective context where a single annunciation reverberates among many to compose a temporary audio map that diagrams the distribution of Danfos within the bus station and orientates passengers to seek out their preferred route and ride. The bus conductor will hustle you, drawing your attention as you navigate the sea of yellow Danfo buses searching out the right bus to board. The bus conductor must be listened to intently as he rattles out these routes in machine-gun-styled verbal assault, or else you will be lost in this space. You must make sense of what may appear to be his nonsense; names of bus stop and routes are abbreviated, verbally flipped, re-flipped and flipped again. The bus conductors modulate these vocal deliveries to stand out within the cacophony of the bus station and draw the attention of potential passengers. The conductor must be heard amidst the non-stop Lagos bus station din, his voice surpassing the clamor of engines, loudspeakers, hawkers, horns, chatter and verbal maps of other conductors. While vocal patterns are specific to a conductor, they do copy each other sometimes, and are thus loosely associated by the harsh guttural pitches they share." - Emeka Ogboh