The Acoustics of Belonging: Who Gets to Make the First Sound?
On 27 August 2026, World Music School founder Pedro Aibéo presented The Acoustics of Belonging at the UNESCO Creative Cities Forum in Varaždin, Croatia. The talk moved between music, democracy, architecture and public space, but one of its central ideas came directly from the origins of World Music School: music as a language.
“Because language would be absurd if only professionals were allowed to speak.”
We speak badly before we speak well. We develop accents. We borrow, misunderstand and invent expressions our teachers may dislike. Communication happens anyway.
When the teacher becomes the student
Someone teaches a rhythm. Somebody else introduces another one. Five minutes later, the teacher becomes a student.
Authority moves.
And at that moment culture stops being something one group displays to another and begins happening between people.
This is also where the talk challenged one of the weaker forms of multiculturalism. You perform your culture. I perform mine. We applaud politely. Everyone goes home exactly as they arrived.
The talk described this as “diversity as a museum display”: safe, respectful, often well funded, and sometimes terribly boring.
Real encounter is messier. A rhythm passes from one person to another. Someone plays it badly. Someone else corrects it. Something unexpected is added. Perhaps the mistake itself gets borrowed. Eventually neither person quite owns what happened.
From the passive listener to the passive citizen
Music also offered a way of talking about democracy.
Formal concert culture creates a very particular arrangement. The musicians perform. The audience listens. Do not sing. Do not dance. Do not begin playing your own instrument from row twelve. Then, at the authorised moment, applaud.
Great music can emerge from that arrangement. But it also produces a particular social figure: the passive listener.
And perhaps contemporary politics has created its relative: the passive citizen.
Against this, the talk proposed another musical idea: polyphony.
Polyphony does not require everybody to sing the same note. Different voices can remain different while listening closely enough that difference does not collapse into noise.
And perhaps this is what belonging sounds like.
Not agreement. Not obedience. Not being politely welcomed into somebody else’s finished arrangement.
Instead, some part of the score remains blank. Some part of the future remains unwritten. Some part of the place remains ours to help author.
What makes a City of Music?
That leads to a different way of judging a City of Music. Not only by how much music a municipality programmes, but by how much musical life people themselves can initiate.
The child.
The amateur.
The immigrant carrying an unfamiliar rhythm.
The elderly neighbour remembering a song nobody has heard for thirty years.
The teenagers creating something everyone over fifty sincerely hopes is temporary.
Perhaps nobody stops to listen. That is fine.
The point is that somebody was allowed to begin.
And at that moment, the question stops being only about music. It becomes a question of citizenship.
Permission or possibility?
The talk therefore proposed a small reversal.
Instead of the musician asking
Where is my permission?
Perhaps the city should ask
What exactly is the reason to stop this?
It sounds like a small change. Politically, it is enormous.
In one system, public cultural life is presumed legitimate unless there is a good reason to restrict it. In the other, public life must first ask permission to exist.
For World Music School, this question goes to the heart of what music education can be.
Not simply the transfer of musical knowledge from an expert to a student. Not culture presented as a sequence of finished traditions.
But spaces where people can meet through music, borrow from one another, make mistakes, teach, learn and occasionally exchange roles.
The next note belongs to somebody else
The final challenge of The Acoustics of Belonging was not whether a City of Music can produce beautiful music. Of course it can.
The harder question is whether it can trust the person nobody invited.
The bad violinist.
The migrant carrying an unfamiliar rhythm.
The teenager producing something none of us yet knows how to name.
The next note might be terrible. It might offend us. It might sound nothing like the music we would have chosen.
That is precisely the point.
The real test is whether, when somebody we did not invite finally makes that sound, there is still enough of the city left unfinished for them to belong to it.
A democratic city has no final note.
The next note belongs to somebody else.
Watch the full talk
The Acoustics of Belonging — Pedro Aibéo, UNESCO Creative Cities Forum, Varaždin, Croatia, 27 August 2026.
