Ears Have Walls - Media Geography at Mainz

Transcription

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Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Winter 2011
Ears Have Walls:
Thoughts on the Listening Body in Urban Space
Rowland Atkinson
University of York
Abstract
In this article I discuss how people, as listening bodies in urban spaces, both passively
(via hearing) and actively (via listening) engage with sound and unwanted noise.
The uneven generation and perception of sound presents us with an important set
of spatial, social, and physiological impacts. Our bodies are guided, damaged, invited,
and otherwise shielded by invisible yet powerful forces. These forces have a broad
patterning, what might be termed the sonic order of the city. Within the walls of homes,
offices, and streets, our experience is shaped both by natural sound and, more often,
by orchestrated commercial practices such as in-store radio, muzak, and the flows of
rush hour traffic. This aural stage management takes places through the planning and
relative containment of socially, commercially, and industrially sourced sound. This
article discusses the broad relationship between these urban soundscapes and their
influence on the trajectories of the human body to ask how sound and noise shape our
experience and movement through the city.
Introduction
When you listen with your eyes closed, when you attend to the feel of a
specific acoustic space, be it concert hall, cathedral, restaurant, kitchen, or forest, you
engage in attentive listening…Solely through sound, an entire environment, complete
with memories and emotions, comes alive. Indeed, we feel included in the life of the
soundscape: the auditory equivalent of a landscape (Blesser 2007: 15).
Cities are generally noisy places. This is a taken-for-granted ingredient in our daily
lives which tends to mean that, though we generally hear the cacophony and order of
sound around us, we rarely listen to the sounds of the places we inhabit. In fact a deeper
listening to and consideration of the soundscapes and the ecology of sound in urban
space may offer considerable dividends (Atkinson 2007). As Brian Eno has observed,
Aether Vol. vii, 12–26, January 2011
© Copyright 2011, The Center for Geographic Studies • California State University, Northridge
Atkinson • Ears Have Walls
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continued attentiveness to the sounds of the streetscape formed the basis of his “ambient”
music, which was constituted from this unfolding material. And yet a socially-relevant,
politically engaged, and critical geography may also stem from an analysis of the role,
functions, and impacts of ambient sound and noise in everyday urban life. From noise
“nuisance” to urban music subcultures, from traffic noise to building regulations, the
breadth of an agenda raised by concerns with sound in spatial contexts is considerable.
The aim of this article is to reflect on this spatiality of sound, the uneven sources of
sound production and the phenomenology of sound in space (that is to say, how sound
is experienced, in place, by human actors). A further aim is to highlight the benefits of
generating a robust social-spatial imagination that encompasses sound as part of the
broader sensual range of urbanised human experience.
In earlier work I have discussed the social and spatial order of sound and noise in
urban space, what I described as the ecology of urban sound (Atkinson 2007). I used
this phrase to suggest that sound is unevenly distributed, modulating in volume, yet in
many ways ordered within the social and economic life of cities. This unseen ecology
has similarly uneven effects, both intended and unintended, attracting and repelling
people depending on whether they define such sounds as socially inviting or repelling.
Sound may be contained by walls, rooms or streets, more or less emphatic in volume,
varying in timbre, and in ways that affect the relative sociality of the city, to say nothing
of our capacity even to hear over time if we are over-exposed. On a range of dimensions
being able to “hear ourselves think” has much to commend it and the relative quiet
and calm of spaces, such as urban parks or homes, that promote social contact and
interaction permits both the lungs and ears of the city to work more effectively over
time, by offering respite from these polluting aspects of city life (Figure 1). Thus ears
have walls, or, alternatively, the human body is a listening presence that both actively
Figure 1.
Traffic sound levels
vary by time, city, and
sometimes by national
context: The relative
civility and quiet of
a Kyoto rush hour
(photo by author).
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and unconsciously experiences sound within discrete and “walled” territories—whether
this be the bedroom, the home, the office, the gym, or the street.
The concerns of this article are developed over three sections. First, I discuss the
nature and effects of the contemporary urban soundscape in general terms, thus setting
the stage for a more detailed discussion. Second, I consider how the unevenness of
exposure to the soundscape has produced a growing interest in technologies, regulations
and the production of spaces capable of acting as refuges to sound and noise. The final
section uses the example of how socially averse and impaired listening bodies (people
with tinnitus,1 from which I myself suffer) respond to noise by shifting their trajectories
through the city. In this sense I go beyond Blesser’s (2007) “aural architecture,” in
which spaces “speak,” to a more emphatic and perhaps politicised reading of urban
noise in which spaces, people, and objects often appear to shout and scream. Here I
aim to highlight how urban sound has a significant affective and behaviour-modifying
influence and that such forces affect the broader ebb and flow of hearing bodies within
the physical structures and spaces of the city.
The contemporary urban soundscape: A sketch
The idea of a soundscape is by no means new (Smith 1994; Schafer 1994) and goes
back at least implicitly, to early considerations of noise nuisance2 that arose with the
increasing mechanisation of social and economic life in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Just as factories, roads, and cars reshaped our cities physically and
influenced subsequent waves of suburbanisation and leisure, so too did these shifts
dramatically alter the sonic ambience of these places. Yet even as these places became
animated a growing cellularisation and partitioning of physical space sprang up to aid
the avoidance of unwanted sound. Thus, at the broader scale of the city, the retreat
to the suburbs might be interpreted as the search for quiet while, at the level of the
neighbourhood, urban planning aided the separation of noise pollution from residential
districts. Descending through scale, the home created internal subdivisions, bedrooms
from other “living” rooms, and for the body itself earplugs and headphones to assist the
management sound that is external to the body itself.
With the advent and popularisation of sound amplification from around the 1930s
it became possible for public spaces to be redefined from being those places which could
hold and carry the voices of the individual addressing a crowd to anywhere connected to
a speaker and, by extension, the required cabling and wiring. These two socio-technical
shifts allowed people to create much more sound than they ever had before and while
it is true that the noise and bustle of city life itself generated significant volumes it is
to these latter two developments that we can ascribe the advent of the modern urban
soundscape (Blesser 2007).
One reason we might be interested in these changes is because they connote
underlying social and economic divisions in the city. Trolley cars, automobiles, omnibuses,
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and trains generated sound but also flowed from generally quieter residential areas and
between transitory spaces of intermediate use. Noise pollution was an early concern in
the emerging socio-spatial and economic structure of the modern metropolis yet has
rarely been appended to traditional concerns about social pollution that have tended
to run through accounts of segregation and house price changes. Yet what might be
thought of as the traditional soundscape has been dramatically splintered and made
more complex by further socio-technical changes that have internalised some forms of
sound (sound insulation, personal headphones, and so on) while externalising others
(domestic hi-fis and mobile phones). Processes of corporate colonisation in public space,
technological miniaturisation and scientific advances have furthered a more myriad
sound ecology that now implicates more human and non-human actors in emitting,
controlling, funnelling, shaping, and amplifying a soundscape that is experienced by
individuals and social groups.
As we have moved further into a leisure society these technological shifts have
added significant levels of mobility that have also impacted social life. We may live in
a home near a railway line, work in an open-plan office, drive around with a “monster”
stereo, listen on sound-reducing headphones, or live in a flat with a crying baby upstairs
each night. In each of these spaces and scenarios we are more or less in control of the
extent of our exposure to sounds which we more or less like, or seek to avoid. This
implies a further feature of these complex movements of sound in urban spaces: that
these have a range of social and spatial impacts and that social inequalities can also be
translated into inequalities of shelter from the sound aether around us. Among other
things, having more economic resources offers the advantage of outbidding others
in the scarcer resource of homes in quiet suburban areas or with better construction
techniques that keep unwanted noises out.
In the atomisation and increasing amplification of aspects of the contemporary
urban sound environment we now need to acknowledge significant corporate functions
and intentions which are relayed using sound as their basis. We are increasingly exposed
to audio-visual and radio advertising that deploys techniques of sound compression
to grab our attention (the impression being of a significantly louder advert break,
for example, that we often try to turn down). Radio advertising and billboards with
speakers attached are now placed in locations that might be deemed ordinarily public,
such as airport waiting rooms (the “gift” to waiting children) as well as more captive
audience spaces within buses and planes (such as the use of piped muzak and airline
advertising in the run-up to take-off and after landing on flights). In all of this we
need to recognise that our aural autonomy, the ability to switch off or avoid certain
forms of urban sound, is increasingly compromised by the techniques of marketing and
branding by firms.
The final essential ingredient of the modern soundscape relates to the increasing
mobility associated with urban life. Of course this is connected with the growing use of
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earlier inventions, notably the car (itself quieter but in greater abundance), but it is also
important to acknowledge our greater freedom of movement and use of complementary
technologies while on the move. Indeed our very freedom of mobility is itself expressed
through the noise of airplanes and cars among others. A variety of new devices are now
important to a reading of the contemporary “hum” of the city including laptops, iPods
(Bull 2008), and walkmans, portable gaming and dvd devices, and most importantly,
the mobile phone (Farnsworth and Austrin 2005). All of these may or may not have
headphones but, in the case of the phone, the impact on social life in public space has
been profound: the development of rudimentary etiquette, aggressive behaviour by
users and unwilling listeners, as well as the more general spillover of work/office life
into commuting and domestic spaces. As Farnsworth and Austrin (2005, 14) note:
These portable devices are sound technologies. Sound instantly crosses
conventional social, visual and physical boundaries and, in doing so, opens
up the potential for new, often unanticipated networks of connection. Sound,
in a word, travels. When sound devices travel, they further reconfigure the
way private and public space is managed by how they and their user moves
through them, and by how this affects hearing or overhearing. Sound, in
effect, mobilizes both space and social arrangements.
The final point to consider here is the way in which the general loss of freedoms in
relation to public spaces (Sorkin 1992; Atkinson 2003) can also be attached to the
attempt to discipline and interdict certain forms of noise and music in urban areas. In
other words, the growing corporate and consumption influences in public space has
seen certain activities banned or controlled, both in order to free citizens from the
problems of certain activities (such as busking,3 see Figure 2, or in informal attempts
at social control, such as that seen in Figure 3) as an intrusion over individual rights
to be free from interference. There is a more general sense in which both the state and
corporations are becoming “noisier” and more active in these spaces, demanding the
quiet attention of subjects and consumers, while controlling what are defined meanwhile
as the problematic disturbances of groups in the name of controlling disorder. For
example, piped muzak is sometimes used in public spaces to help script the kinds of
behaviour seen as acceptable to urban governance or to commercial interests (Atkinson
2003). Similarly, the use of Bluetooth has been taken-up by some advertisers so that
silent billboards relay “live” adverts to passing mobile phone users. In a slightly different
example the mosquito, a high frequency device, has been used to deter young people
from loitering around shops or in public spaces (older people are generally unable to
hear on this frequency), with controversy simmering over whether this represents an
infringement of rights.
There is perhaps a risk in suggesting that these shifts have made life simply noisier,
yet there is evidence to suggest that the contemporary soundscape is making life more
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Figure 2.
Control of busking,
Southbank, London
(photo by author).
difficult for many people. Much of this is focused on the disruption of sleep patterns by
noise (even when heard unconsciously the effect is a lower quality of sleep) and of quality
of life measures that include impressions of problematic noise in the neighbourhood.
Similarly a review of all relevant national government neighbourhood surveys in the
UK by the author shows that around ten percent of the population consistently feel that
noise is a problem in their area. These problems have yielded a politics of sound in space
that I discuss later on, but for now it is suffice to notice that social anxiety and stress
around groups and activities which are productive of noise is now more extensive and
intensive.
Sound container 1: The coffee shop
20/1/08 – I can barely hear my colleague talking here, regularly asking for
clarification and repetition. A quick dissection of the cacophony reveals the
almost constant grinding of coffee, the sound of the steamer to make frothy
milk, rock music at moderate volume, many people trying to talk over others,
and a background noise of moving seats without rubber feet on a hard floor
that makes the overall sound even more exaggerated.
Quiet carriages: The premium space of the aural refuge
A significant challenge for a sonically engaged geography lies in empirical examination
and theoretical engagement with the growing premium placed on aural refuges. The
growing selectivity and stress associated with urban noise places a greater social and
exchange value on technologies and places capable of offering respite. The first response
might be thought of as place-based strategies of aural refuge, the shelter of the hearing
body from the barrage of noise in the city. A number of elaborate strategies can be noted
including private clubs (for the “right” kind of music or a place of quiet), libraries and
other places of study, yoga and meditation centres, salt-tanks, gardens, houses, double-
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Figure 3.
Informal sound
control, corner shop
in London: NO
NOISE PLEASE,
RESIDENTIAL
AREA, THANKS
(photo by author).
glazed windows, and the variety of ordinances around the use of car horns and public
spaces more generally. Kastrup airport at Copenhagen, for example, houses a total
silence room complete with appreciative comments in its visitor’s book. Place-based
strategies may also operate around normative expectations of appropriate uses of space.
It is, for example, inappropriate to talk on a mobile phone in a library or play music in
a public square on a portable hi-fi. Of course such rules are broken and sanctions may
be put in place, expulsion from the library, a fine or warning in a public place perhaps.
As suggested earlier it is possible to provide a reading of the broader reception to
noise in urban systems in terms of residential choices and the qualities of the physical
and built environment itself. We have constructed cities with areas that are quieter than
others and, along with various other locational attributes; these places tend to attract
a greater dollar value. In some research the precise influence of noise on real estate
and rental values has been calculated (Baranzini and Ramirez 2005) while protests
around late evening flights around Heathrow and numerous other airports continue to
highlight the tacit value of peace and quiet from the stress of sound.
The retreat into places, and the value ascribed both to quietness and to
soundscapes that are consonant with our own social tastes, has been matched by
various technological responses. These have worked both to amplify, and to make more
manageable, the kinds of sound and noise around us. In the case of amplification it is
important to note how rising real incomes, declining costs of production, and increasing
technological competency have allowed even those on modest incomes to colonise
sonic space, through monster car stereos, domestic hi-fis, sporadic ringtones, and the
leakage of sound from headphones. In attempting to find aural refuges we can also see
that sound-cancelling headphones, negative sinewave emitting ceiling tiles, ear plugs,
noise barriers on freeway sidings, the “deafening” placed between floors in flats, and
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Figure 4.
Quiet carriage,
Network South
East Railways, UK
(courtesy of Ed
Holden).
other building regulations all play a significant role in further partitioning the urban
environment.
Advances in the understanding of the physiological effects of noise have generated
strategies of avoidance, planning, and management to enable sound pollution and noise
disturbance to be better controlled. This is recognised in explicit policy documents in
cities like New York and London (Greater London Authority 2004). Protecting our
psycho-social and physical well-being in relation to sound problems is a significant
aspect of the value attached to these strategies. A clear example of the breaching of
sound across social and more porous physical thresholds can be found in domestic noise
nuisance cases, such as the repeated playing of home stereos at loud volume. Events of
this nature take away the aural autonomy of individuals and have been implicated in
numerous complaints, assaults and, in some cases, homicide. The use of quiet carriages
on trains (Figure 4) shows that there is a growing social appetite for the provision
of space that reduces noise, itself seen as a marker of work, disturbance, and stress.
The general chatter of modern urban life has, then, not appeared to have generated
significantly stringent or effective enough social protocols that might diminish these
problems without the need for such interventions.
Figure 5 illustrates the kind of partitioning strategies used along freeways to dilute
noise overspill to neighbouring communities. In accounting for the presence and effects
of sound and noise in the city we need to be aware of the possibilities of its containment
and permeability across the aether of the urban soundscape. Sound affects us depending
on whether we feel it is out of place, threatening to our well-being, suggestive of
unpleasant experience and so on—there is a phenomenology to this experience of the
urban that has not often been recognised. The urban soundscape is also, in part, an
emotional and fleeting ecology of the city—it has the power to affect us and in shifting
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Figure 5.
The “Sound Tube,”
Tullamarine Freeway,
Melbourne (open
source from Wikipedia).
ways as sound and noise ebbs, flows and modulates. As Bull (2000; 2008) has shown
there is also a magical quality to encounters with urban space while wearing headphones,
yet the overspill of these personalised soundtracks may also provoke resentment, anger,
and violence from others. Effectively partitioning and managing urban noise creates
complex problems and the greater social and monetary value on solutions.
Sound container 2: On the Heathrow express
3/3/08 – After 30 hours of travel to the UK I am on my last leg of the journey,
from Heathrow to Paddington. I make the wrong choice of carriage, not one
of the quiet carriages. This isn’t just about getting away from squabbling
teenagers or mobile phone users, but escaping the semi-corporate babble of
the Express’ bbc news and information service. At a surprisingly loud volume
I am told of the latest headlines, a kind of ambient news service, and of the
need to read the safety cards in the event of an emergency. The swirling
signature tune for the service is constantly repeated and, even with the
rapidity of the journey, my time is spent in a rather grumpy reflection on the
ubiquity of this kind of corporate noise. On my return journey a loud iPod
user sits next to me—in my quiet carriage journey back to the international
terminal.
The quiet wars and social noise
Exposure to loud music among younger cohorts has created fears of an emerging deaf
generation. Both through clubs and listening to iPods and walkmen, the concern has
been that tinnitus and deafness will become more prevalent in the broader population.
Actively listening and seeking out loud music that is consonant with our tastes is
perhaps a feature of the life of many young people, yet the social and economic costs of
these cultural necessities may be profound. As someone who played large amounts of
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loud music during my graduate studies I now find myself with low-level tinnitus, which
means that the possibility of total silence is now denied to me. This personal trouble
led me to consider how, given my own emerging avoidance strategies, this might be
played out more widely. If urban noise and loud music in pubs and clubs is significant,
how do tinnitus sufferers and those with hearing aids navigate these spaces and other
noisy places? Again this raises the role and impact of music and sound in urban space—
how does it subtly and more directly influence patterns of sociability, encounter, and
interaction?
The hum of the urban soundscape is a marked feature of contemporary life. It is
potentially very difficult to find a place that is perfectly quiet (an instructive exercise
for the curious). In countries like the UK there has been an almost total urbanisation
of the national soundscape; roads, planes, and traffic are heard almost regardless of
location—urban or regional—and this perhaps does something to our reflections about
what really escaping from it all truly means. In fact several low-level resonant “hums”
have been noted globally (cf. Hutcheon 2006). Quietness is then defined as a relative
position within which those sounds we define as noise, sounds that are out of place
(Gurney 1999), are at a minimum. Of course, one of the ironies of noise exposure is that
the condition of tinnitus is akin to this very kind of persistent hum that is foregrounded
in ways that make it unpleasant or unbearable.
This raises further possible sound experiments. As I have already argued, we are so
immersed in the taken-for-granted soundscapes of cities that we rarely actually hear the
sonic furniture and aural architecture (Atkinson 2007) of the spaces around us—even
loud noises, like sirens or shouting are heard but not listened to. In the early 1990s the
growth of an ambient music scene, itself a highly urban group of artists, foregrounded
environmental sounds in compositions that were intended to be reflective and relaxing
Figure 6.
Cover of Recurring
Dreams of the Urban
Myth by Chris Meloche
(courtesy of fax +4969/450464 records,
Germany).
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(Figure 6). In fact ambient music itself had stemmed from Eric Satie’s idea of a form of
“furniture” music—music that could be seen as a background, rather than being actively
listened to. The hum of the urban soundscape similarly plays a modal role in our daily
lives, as something that either can be heard but which is more often a sonic baseline for
all other sounds in daily life.
As urban sound becomes noise in both intensity and character, a range of sociospatial effects can be charted. For although the listening body has the capacity of
personal volition and mobility it is also the case that certain sounds are unavoidable
or more difficult to skirt, such as the party in the flat upstairs, the sound of emergency
vehicle sirens, train whistles, and aircraft noise. More generally the kind of examples we
run across are subtler and potentially avoidable, such as a pneumatic drill in the street
or a loud conversationalist in a bar. Under these circumstances we may be propelled,
guided, embraced or apparently rejected by sound in subtle ways. Sound affects people
in ways that then filters and sorts them across urban spaces in complex ways and in
relation to their tastes, physiological weaknesses, demographic grouping, and so on.
Music in urban space, to take one form of sound, can signify membership (shop
soundtracks appealing to particular groups), territory and exclusion of non-members
(the “ghetto” blaster), or passive aggression (car stereos). Music guides, cajoles, and
deters us depending on tastes, on perceived demographic appeal, and in relation to
relative impairments. Even music at moderate volumes, for example, will steer tinnitus
sufferers, or those with hearing-aids, away from sites that employ soundtracks above a
certain threshold, just as they appear as embracing, knowing references to membership
of a particular social group for others. Many shops have pre-programmed soundtracks
that reflect changing client bases at different times of the day. Others broadcast, through
carefully placed speakers, music into streets to invite particular groups of consumers
(Figure 7 shows how such soundtracks can be problematic and contested).
Music can have an interdictory force; we may be deterred, alarmed or annoyed by
certain kinds of music in certain places, and at certain volumes. This power has been
used at numerous sites to ward away young people who are seen as being disorderly or
potentially destructive. Typically the strategy involves the use of low-level classical music
that is sufficiently discrete and yet highly off-putting to the tastes and dispositions of
young skateboarders or other “problematic” groups. This kind of sonic opiate is used in
ways that provides an apparently soft repulsion of selected groups that are then filtered
away from these spaces. Yet, in the case of tinnitus sufferers, the range of sites within
which loud music and other noise resonates means that they are similarly moved on or
displaced to locations presenting less annoyance to the condition (Atkinson 2006).
Time-space geographies are implicated in the density and relative affect of urban
soundscapes; sound affects social circulation and satisfaction in city life. To this end
the political ramifications of noise may be significant. Airport runways, leafblowers,
nightclubs, and street racers have all been implicated in legal attempts by the state and
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Figure 7.
Marking sonic
territories: Butchers
shop, Kensington
Market, Toronto: “Do
not cut the wires, you
are being watched”
(photo by author).
citizen control of activities that are seen to provide intolerable noise levels to particular
groups. The tendency for sonic breaching and overspill remains significant and it seems
that any attempt to simply stop-up such activities will continue to fail where commercial
imperatives or where adequate social alternatives are not provided. Nevertheless a
social politics around sound has sprung up with little warning. We live in an era of
war between noise and calm, where some groups articulate the need or legitimacy of
certain types of noise (such as airports and clubs) while others lobby for quiet and
calm (neighbourhood forums and institutes of the deaf ). In any case the underlying
transmission of hearing bodies around urban systems displays intricate pathways preempting the need for avoidance or selective engagement with certain types of sound in
terms of where we live and work, with whom we socialise, where we walk, how we get
to work, and so on.
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Sound container 3: The fridge in the street
18/12/07 – One week to Christmas, so the fridge container is in the street
again as our local grocer stocks up with turkeys and treats in the general rush.
This might be good for supply logistics but in a deathly quiet suburb the
noise is insufferable, a bit like an idling lorry engine parked outside our house
for seven days—and nights. Of course one of the reasons we chose to live
here was because it is a “nice” place, and because it seemed to offer a calmer
space than living in the central city. In fact suburbia here is revealed as a place
of daily do-it-yourself enthusiasts hammering and grinding away in garden
sheds, of early morning mowing, garden parties, shouting teenagers, and
infrequent nocturnal road racers on nearby roads. In a noisier place I wouldn’t
notice these distractions but here they are more clearly foregrounded.
Conclusion: The ambient turn
If we cast our minds eye across the rooftops, towerblocks, and interstitial spaces of
the city we can imagine the chatter of wireless transmissions, the unheard aether of
soundwaves, cables, and wires all devoted to the daily social life of the city. This chatter
affects the hearing bodies of city residents who are guided both by physical walls and
the sounds contained and resonating between them, whether they be the walls of streets,
of bedrooms, bars, cinemas, clubs, offices or factories. The implications of sound for
geography are significant. In this article I have framed these implications in relation to
the ambience of sound in urban space, suggesting that that which surrounds and often
immerses us is rarely listened to. Paying more attention to this soundscape is important
given the changing social, technological, and economic sources of sound and noise in
cities today.
In engaging with the distribution and sources of these atmospheres we become
both more attentive listening objects. This ambient turn, the greater reflection on our
immersion in sound, its sources and effects, also yields important dividends in relation
to the political and social constitution of urban life. In the case of this article, the search
for sanctuary from noise and contestations over how public and semi-public spaces
have emerged as these spaces are subject to greater amplification. An understanding
of the body, as both listening object and as social animal, has rarely been conjoined in
theoretical and empirical excurses into the city.
Sound in urban space is both an ordered and ordering force. It has a non-random
spatial distribution that is linked to social ecologies and the relative clustering and
dispersion of diverse transport, leisure, economic, production and other functions
that emit, to varying degrees, sound. The urban histories of planning, housing, and
suburbanisation all contain concerns with this distribution, and the need for certain
noises to be avoided or minimised. Thus the spatial structure of our cities reflects not
only the traditional dynamics of politics, ethnicity, and governance, but also the tacit
understanding of these underlying sonic effects and inducements.
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To say that sound itself has an influence on social life is also important. As
indicated in this article, there remains a socially relevant and generally under-researched
linkage between modes of social exclusion that result from physical impairments and
the social control functions of music and noise being deployed in public spaces. The
example of people with tinnitus suggests particularised responses and trajectories of
listening bodies affected by noisy places. Clearly we should be attentive to the potential
research agenda surrounding the deployment of sound in ways that provides not so
much a subliminal, as subtle influence on work (the “gift” to the worker of muzak), on
patterns and rates of consumption (think of the combination of hard seating and music
in fast food stores), and on public spaces (the use of classical music to deter loitering by
young people).
Urban space can be thought of as a kind of hive, with a cellular social and physical
ecology, that creates complex outcomes in terms of cyclical and spatially organised sonic
geographies that flow, modulate, and change as the chronology of days and seasons pass.
So we find a noisier rush hour period, spaces of calm in parks, and the almost perpetual
dominance of the sonic baseline of traffic of all kinds. Gendered, generational, and subcultural readings can also be brought to bear. This experience feeds into and returns to
influence the lives of social actors and the broader groups they reside within—fighting
for quieter neighbourhoods, for less noisy drunkenness, for silent clubs and gigs, and for
more tranquil streetscapes. To achieve any such outcomes certain views of the good city
are promoted while often diminishing the enjoyment, quiet or otherwise, of others. The
common thread here is that we are all listening bodies, to a greater or lesser extent, and
that the vitality, range and impacts of encounters with the urban are deeply connected
with this phenomenology of sonic and urban experiences.
Endnotes
1
Tinnitus is defined in the Chambers English dictionary as “any noise (ringing, buzzing or whistling,
etc) in the ears not caused by external sounds, frequently associated with deafness due to ageing
or continuous exposure to loud noise, but also caused by ear infections or disease, high blood
pressure or drugs.”
2
Noise is defined both here and more widely as unwanted sound, etymologically stemming from the
early French word nausea, or sea-sickness.
3
Buskers are street musicians who set-up temporarily to earn money informally.
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Ears Have Walls - Media Geography at Mainz

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