Music in the Streets: Designing Places You Can Feel

Poured by: Kayla Copeland, PLA

Music has a sneaky way of taking us somewhere before we even realize what happened. One second you are driving to the grocery store, thinking about your list and whether you really need another houseplant, and the next you are emotionally back in a completely different chapter of life.

My current favorite, Opalite by Taylor Swift, makes me happy and want to dance. Wagon Wheel takes me right back to college nights at Lake McMurtry, sitting around a bonfire with our best friends, someone playing guitar, a lite beverage in hand, and all of us laughing the night away from our four-stacked-high hammocks we engineered into the trees. We truly lived the best life in college.

And American Honey brings back some of the sweetest, most nostalgic memories with my best friend Abbie.

The songs themselves are meaningful, but so are the places, people, and seasons of life attached to them. Music becomes a kind of time machine, except with better hair and fewer confusing rules about paradoxes.

As a landscape architect, that connection between sound, emotion, memory, and place comes up more often than you might expect.

Rhythm in the Landscape

Music has rhythm, repetition, a little surprise, a big chorus, and the occasional quiet bridge that somehow becomes everyone’s favorite part. Landscapes have all of that too.

A trail can lead someone through a sequence of experiences: an active entry, a shaded stretch, an open view, a gathering space, a quiet bench, and then a destination that makes you want to pause. Repeated trees, lighting, paving, planting bands, and site furnishings create a rhythm that helps people understand where they are and where they are headed.

Then there are the moments that shift the experience: a framed view, public art, a playground full of laughter, an unexpected garden, or a lawn filled with people at an event. Those are the choruses. They are memorable, full of energy, and often the reason people want to come back.

Sound Has a Story

Lately, there have been several conversations with clients about soundscaping—the idea that what people hear in a space matters just as much as what they see.

A lot of design conversation naturally focuses on shade, planting, circulation, materials, accessibility, views, and gathering spaces. But sound is just as powerful in setting the mood. A beautiful plaza next to a loud roadway may still feel stressful. A simple trail shaded by trees, with birds overhead and grasses moving in the wind, can feel like a reset button for the whole day.

The goal is not always silence. Sometimes the best sound in a space is children playing, friends catching up over coffee, a community concert, water moving through a fountain, or the slightly chaotic-but-happy soundtrack of people actually enjoying a public place.

Good soundscaping is about creating an intentional balance: enhancing the sounds that make a place feel alive while reducing the sounds that make it hard to stay.

Soundscaping in Practice

Soundscaping is not just a theoretical design conversation, cities are already using sound as an intentional part of their downtown experience.

Recently, one of our city client’s discussed incorporating Wi-Fi-connected speakers into light poles throughout a heavily programmed public area. This would give the city a unique tool for activating the space during events, sharing music throughout their special space, and broadcasting its own locally produced radio content, including local music, news, and community updates.

It is a strong example of how infrastructure can do more than provide light. When thoughtfully integrated into existing poles, speakers can remain visually subtle while helping a city create a stronger sense of energy, identity, and connection in its public realm.

There are several communities already using this approach successfully. In Opelika, Alabama, downtown light poles were outfitted with a wireless audio system that allows the city to provide background music and make announcements during events. Because the system can be managed by zones, it gives staff flexibility to tailor sound coverage to specific blocks, events, or gathering areas rather than treating the entire downtown as one continuous sound zone.

Wayland, Michigan offers another compelling example. Its downtown audio system was integrated into existing light poles, allowing the city to add background music for shoppers, support walking and biking events, and reinforce live music at its main intersection, all without adding visually intrusive standalone speaker infrastructure. It is a practical example of designing for both the everyday downtown experience and the special events that bring a community together.

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Soundscaping Close to Home

There is no need to look far for examples of how music and intentional sound can shape an experience. Communities and destinations across Oklahoma including Kingfisher, Sapulpa, McAlester, Claremore, and the all famous Hard Rock Casino. They all have used music and integrated audio to help create energy, strengthen identity, and encourage people to stay a little longer.

Whether it is background music along a downtown street, audio that supports events and gathering spaces, or music that helps establish a destination’s personality, these systems can make a space feel more active, welcoming, and memorable. They offer another way for communities to tell their story, not only through banners, planting, public art, and architecture, but through the atmosphere people feel when they arrive.

The impact showed up firsthand, for me, while working on the McAlester Comprehensive Plan in 2018. The downtown music absolutely invited lingering, strolling into boutiques, and—based on highly scientific research ::wink wink::—buying more boutique clothing & shoes than originally planned. That is the power of a well-designed experience: it invites people to slow down, explore, support local businesses, and enjoy being part of the life happening around them.

Music will not solve every downtown challenge, of course. But when it is thoughtfully integrated with good streetscapes, comfortable seating, shade, lighting, walkability, storefront activity, and programming, it can become one more layer that makes a place feel alive.

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Designing With Sound

Landscape architecture gives many ways to shape how a place sounds and feels.

• Enhance natural sound. Native planting, trees, grasses, habitat areas, and water features can create opportunities for birdsong, pollinators, wind through leaves, and the quiet rustle of seasonal change.

  
  

• Use water with purpose. A fountain, rill, or small cascading water feature can add a calming layer of sound while helping soften traffic or nearby mechanical noise.

  
  

• Buffer unwanted noise. Berms, walls, dense evergreen planting, and layered landscape zones can create separation from busy streets and adjacent uses. Usually, the strongest solution is a thoughtful combination of these elements.

  
  

• Celebrate community sound. Event lawns, plazas, playgrounds, outdoor dining, and flexible gathering areas should make room for conversation, laughter, music, and the buzz of people being together.

  
  

• Create places to exhale. Not every space needs to be activated. Quiet gardens, overlooks, shaded seating, and trail pockets can offer a softer experience for people who need rest, reflection, or just five minutes away from their inbox.

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Designing for All Senses

The best outdoor spaces are never only about the visual. They are experienced with the whole body: sunlight on shoulders, the smell of rain on soil, the texture of stone under a hand, the first cool evening of fall, and the sounds that make a place feel either settled or ready to leave.

Hearing has a special kind of power. It can make a person feel energized, peaceful, nostalgic, safe, connected, or completely transported. A song can bring someone back to a bonfire at Lake McMurtry. A certain melody can remind someone of a best friend. The sound of water, birds, or leaves moving in the wind can make an ordinary walk feel like something more.

When parks, trails, campuses, and public spaces are designed, the work is not just arranging plants, paving, benches, and lights on a plan. It is designing the setting for future memories: late-night conversations, family photos, neighborhood concerts, quiet walks, childhood play, first dates, celebrations, and the songs someone will hear years later that take them right back there. And this is my one-million percent reason I do what I do!

Like music, meaningful landscapes stay with people because of how they make them feel. And if the design gets it right, they become part of the soundtrack of our lives. We are able to help soundscape your space and craft the feeling you desire. Let us know if we can help!

Thanks for taking this latter break with me – what will you be listening to today?