I recorded something last week. I don’t know what. First order of business: do you?
For context, G.F. and I moved last month to an apartment on the cusp of Kensington and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Our neighborhood is Hasidic/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Polish/Albanian/Mexican/Caribbean, among others. We have, in the course of our sensory adjustment to the new neighborhood, gotten acclimated to the muezzin issuing five calls to prayer every day over a loudspeaker, to lots of children running around the building, and to the daily delivery of goat carcasses by the truckful to the butcher down the block. But some things are still unclear, even if we have guesses. e.g., Why do so many men congregate outside the closed-looking dentist’s office across the street? What’s in the jungle that comprises our (inaccessible) backyard? What and why does a chorus of women sometimes chant, as above, around dinner time?
Our new neighborhood, 1903
I’ve been researching sonic conflict in urban space for a few years now, and Brooklyn is a great place to do it. As much time as Brooklynites spend around people of different habits, cultural variation is so dense and dynamic here that even longtime residents tend to find themselves perplexed by sounds they can’t quite place. For some, what can’t be identified is heard as evidence of a special diversity. For others, or for the same people under different circumstances, weird sounds are rude, inappropriate, extraneous, heretical, and/or invasive. (I’ve heard people mention each of these.) We seem to have something of an itch to locate sound, not only in terms of where it’s coming from but in terms of what it means. We want a reference, often desperately. Why?
So, the second order of business: why do you think unidentified sound is so disturbing?
And the third: what mysterious sounds (recordings or descriptions, from wherever) would you like to share?
If I squint my ears it almost sounds like they are repeating "Salaam Alaikum."
On the second order of business, how do you define disturbing? Would it mean unpleasant or simply distracting? Because most unidentified sound is distracting, but much of it is not unpleasant…
Hey Wendy: Disturbance is in the ear of the beholder, but the term could certainly include both distraction and aesthetic repulsion. Actually, for a lot of the people I've spoken to, especially those dealing with noise/sound issues in their own lives, unpleasantness and distraction can be hard to disentangle. For example, I used to share a backyard with a family that owned a rooster. While one usually associates roosters with the pastoral setting of the farm, in an urban context I had fantasies of shooting the thing, or at least throwing rocks at it if I ever spotted it. (I didn't).
I'll have to ponder that one a bit…Off the top of my head I would say it has a l,ot to do with control or lack thereof. E.g., pick up an electric guitar and bash on it- it's fun. Now put the guitar into someone else's hands while THEY bash on it and YOU listen. They've having fun, but you probably aren't anymore. Assuming the sound is roughly the same, what has changed? Control.
Hey Nikkos,
Thanks for yr posts. I definitely agree that control is part of the answer. But there's also an element of shared purpose – if you're in a band with someone making horrible noise on an electric guitar, or if you're part of the crowd that paid to see it, you might feel differently from the neighbor next door. We can extend this thought to culture as well. If you grow up in a city that has lots of loud parades in the summer, you might find those events exciting as an adult. But if you grow up in a quiet suburb, and you were happy in that environment, you might find the volume and activity unsettling.
But to complicate things even further, what about the connection between *understanding* and sounds we can't control at all? What I mean is, when we can't control a sound, sometimes we take comfort in being able to domesticate it with knowledge. For example, I used to be really bothered by the click-click-BANG-CRACK of my radiator, until I learned the physics of it (maybe someone can post about this someday). There is something about being able to explain a phenomenon that makes it a bit more tolerable to the ears and eyes. I think that the connection between knowledge and sensory reception is an enticing one to consider.
I was just about to say something quite similar, Ben. Control has part of the issue with being disturbed by a sound, I think particularly when it is unidentified.
When people understand the noise, say a rooster, but cannot turn the sound off, it the sound "has a face" and can be perceived as almost heckling the listener. "If I could only throw a stone and stop the rooster from cawing…"
When a sound is unidentified, the sound could, in some cases, come off as disturbing in a threatening way. The sound has no face, and it's origin might not be discernible, therefore throwing the listeners senses into a shadow of self doubt. In some cases this could be scary, it could be angering, it all depends on the situation, but I think the control issue goes even further, because the listener not only wants to possibly control/eliminate the sound, but first master the details of its origin.
I suppose my post is nothing you didn't already say in a slightly different way, but now I'm on to thinking about why control is so highly valued.
I often hear sounds that some would immediately describe as annoying, but I either hear it as genuinely beautiful, or I make a cognitive choice to listen to an interesting sound differently – hearing layers, highest pitches, lowest pitches, phrases, arrhythmic features…it's a great feeling of "letting go" that often fights with my daily duties of maintaining order and defining function.