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La Place des Beaux-Sons 

Recognizing the soundscape as a shared common good to preserve, cultivate, and care for.

Lookout points are generally created on elevated sites to admire the landscape, and scenic viewpoints are carefully signposted. Why not create listening points instead? Places where residents, passers-by and visitors would be encouraged to appreciate the soundscape, listen to its distinctive acoustic identity, and discover its local sonic curiosities?

A handful of pioneers have already established such listening points (in France, notably Élie Tête & Cécile Regnault, and more recently Gilles Malatray). We ourselves initiated the official inauguration of Paris’s first listening point, unofficially nicknamed Place des Beaux-Sons (“Square of Beautiful Sounds”).

Official inauguration and world premiere

On 21 June 2026, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, beyond simply celebrating the Fête de la Musique, Décor Sonore invited the public to celebrate the creation and official inauguration of a new public square in Aubervilliers, in the Villette–Quatre-Chemins district: the Place des Beaux-Sons.

At once modest and generous, ambitious and committed, it establishes a space for art and culture open to everyone without discrimination, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, with no subscription, no fee, no admission ticket—and not even any advertising. It is a public space dedicated to the peaceful and pleasurable experience of listening to the city: a place for the production and appreciation of beautiful sounds.

The inauguration took the form of a journey through a neighbourhood undergoing urban renewal: a landscape concert devised by Décor Sonore and the Fanfare des Beaux-Sons.

The event was festive, popular and artistic, but also solemnly official. By cutting the tricolour ribbon and unveiling the commemorative plaque, the Mayor of Aubervilliers, Sofienne Karroumi, together with his team, publicly affirmed the city’s commitment to giving greater importance to sonic ecology.

Sound as a common good and a public health issue

In a world dominated by images, the question of the soundscape remains largely overlooked. Yet this dimension of the environment concerns everyone and has a tangible impact on quality of life and public well-being.

Through the Place des Beaux-Sons project, using an artistic and sensitive approach, we seek to engage both residents and elected representatives in a conversation about the challenges of sonic ecology.

The sound environment in Aubervilliers

This densely and diversely populated area contains numerous locations simultaneously exposed to multiple forms of pollution—air, water, soil, and others. Significantly, maps of air pollution almost perfectly overlap with maps of environmental noise.

However, understanding the sonic environment cannot be reduced to measuring decibels. During the summer of 2025 (from late May to mid-July), Décor Sonore carried out a programme of research and meetings with local residents to gather their perceptions of the neighbourhood’s acoustic environment.

Most testimonies concerning the district’s sonic identity described it as acoustically burdensome, referring especially to Avenue de la République, one of the Quatre-Chemins’ main thoroughfares: traffic, car horns, “human noise,” or simply “noise,” the cries of illicit cigarette vendors, and so on. A saturated, aggressive sound environment is the image most commonly associated with the Villette–Quatre-Chemins district of Aubervilliers.

Beautiful sounds?

Rather than the notion of music, which often divides people along generational, cultural, aesthetic or social lines, we prefer the notion of the beautiful sound—a far more inclusive concept, removed from commercial concerns.

The spelling Beaux-Sons, with capitals and a hyphen, playfully echoes the French term Beaux-Arts (“Fine Arts”), whose academies and museums traditionally exclude both dance and music—as though these disciplines were somehow not among the arts, or perhaps merely the “ugly arts.”

The Fanfare des Beaux-Sons, bringing together musicians from the CRR 93 with the invaluable support of Philippe Pannier and fellow musicians, is less a conventional brass band than an experimental ensemble for interventions in the landscape: a mobile unit of acoustic gardeners. Here again, the name is a friendly wink to the traditional Beaux-Arts student bands (fanfares des Beaux-Arts, or bôzarts), famous for their exuberance rather than the beauty of their sound—though, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Our invitation to local residents is to listen differently to their surroundings: to discover unexpected aesthetic and informative dimensions within them, and to become active participants by playing with these sounds, interpreting them, and creating relationships between them. In doing so, what once seemed like a chaotic mass of noise can be perceived instead as a kind of perpetual composition.

Admittedly, Aubervilliers’ Place des Beaux-Sons is a modest little square measuring only a few dozen metres across. Yet, in one sense, it is far larger than the Place de la Concorde. Here, one can simultaneously hear birds fifty metres away, footsteps and human voices a hundred metres away, laughter and children playing five hundred metres away, sirens and aircraft from kilometres away, as well as someone whispering just a few centimetres from one’s ear; whereas in the Place de la Concorde, the audible field extends no farther than a few metres.