This article examines the essential role of reverberation in everyday spatial experience and argues that the perception and production of reverberation -along with the related concept of resonance -is an example of an innate mimetic capacity residing in both living beings and seemingly inert matter.Reverberation, and acoustic experience more generally, are explored in relation to urban space, with attention paid to the transformation of sense experience in modernity.Drawing on a range of authors, with reference to the work of Walter Benjamin in particular, this article proceeds from a primarily theoretical level to that of concrete human experience, with the example of buskers (street musicians) who perform in the highly reverberant spaces of Montreal's underground metro system.Drawing on the author's ethnographic research among metro musicians, this article demonstrates that reverberation is a vital element in busker practices and experience, and argues that, in their practices and in their effects on space and passersby, metro buskers make evident -make perceptible -the mimetically reverberant relations between body and space, and between self and other.

Dans cet article, j’examine l’expérience acoustique des espaces souterrains du métro de Montréal et j’expose les pratiques et perceptions des musiciens qui performent dans cet environnement. Je considère comment les caractéristiques acoustiques particulières qui distinguent les espaces souterrains des espaces en surface influencent les relations coproductives qu’ont les gens avec ces espaces. Les musiciens ambulants qui performent dans le réseau du métro doivent composer avec les contraintes et les possibilités posées par les caractéristiques matérielles de ces lieux – surtout en matière d’acoustique – ainsi qu’avec la réglementation en vigueur et les normes sociales dominantes. Les musiciens de métro font preuve de tactiques fort variables et improvisées dans le cadre de leurs pratiques musicales et spatiales. Bien qu’elles puissent muter alors qu’elles sont liées à des caractéristiques personnelles et spatiales singulières, ces pratiques sont somme toute assez durables et cohésives pour être qualifiées d’acte d’agencement, une réalité qui démontre la nature coproductive du corps et de l’espace. Enfin, je suggère un parallèle entre les pratiques de nature technologique des musiciens de rue et la production audiovisuelle réalisée dans le cadre de ma recherche, deux éléments qui soulignent la relationnalité du corps et de l’espace ainsi que le rôle participatif d’agents matériels dans l’expérience sensorielle.

Buskers—street performers—evince the creative tactics of self-conscious agents who are both produced by and productive of the social and material conditions within which they carry out their practices. In this article, I discuss my ethnographic research among buskers in Montreal’s underground transit system—the metro—and examine their highly variable and improvisational practices (musical and spatial). I detail how buskers work with and against the constraints and possibilities posed by the material characteristics of those spaces (especially in terms of acoustics) as well as formal regulations and prevailing social norms. This suggests understanding busking as a relational process of “cobbling together” that is never entirely fixed or bounded, but dispersed and always in-the-making. Further, I demonstrate how the research process in this context is itself a creative, improvisational approach, guided as much by the conditions at hand as by an overarching research design. By drawing parallels between the busker-performer and my role as researcher and creative producer, particularly in my use of audio-visual production, I argue that ethnographic research is, itself, a form of assemblaging, of bricolage—an embodied, relational process that involves multiple participants (human and material) of varying influences, bound together by the tactical activities of the researcher.