This week, Weird Vibrations will review two new books together: Gordon Hempton’s 2009 “One Square Inch of Silence” and Steve Goodman’s 2010 “Sonic Warfare.” The books offer contrasting viewpoints on acoustic ecology – the first is a naturalist’s travelogue, the second a philosophical critique of military-industrial soundscapes. Both call for increased attention to our planet’s sonic environment, but they take radically different stands on where to go from there.

Before publishing the review, I want to poll you on a couple of questions. First, is understanding sound as an ecosystem practical? In other words, can this formulation help us deal with noise in a just fashion? How does the ecological metaphor sit with you?

Second, does acoustic ecology’s focus on “natural” preservation make it essentially conservative? This is a charge that’s latent (if not explicit) in some recent Sound Studies work that foregrounds technology. What do you think?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. (I have ESP, but type them out for others’ sake, please.)

NOISE Control, under that name, actually only lasted until 1961, after which it was succeeded by a nearly-identical periodical titled SOUND, Its Uses and Control. The name-change points to a realization by the editorial staff that noise control was ultimately too narrow, not to mention negative in focus – most articles were about the search for silence in an increasingly noisy world. Shifting to a focus on sound opened the journal to contributions like “Listening Through the Moth Ear,” “Supplementary Sound for Opera,” “Absolute Pitch Part I,” and “Sound in the Motion Picture Industry,” which were comparatively colorful and less burdened with acoustical jargon than earlier articles had been. However, for reasons unknown to me, SOUND, Its Uses and Control only lasted two years.

As a journal of applied acoustics, NOISE Control advocated technological solutions almost exclusively. It presented research about construction materials and architectural strategies that could contribute to a refined aural privacy – in the home, office, or factory. While complications related to frequency or other details beyond decibel were sometimes acknowledged, the search was on from Issue One for a universal ear, a quantifiable average of listening preferences. The search for standards was assumed to be a temporary problem whose solution was not too far over the horizon. According to an article in the first issue, “all of us can agree at once that a standard on what are ‘permissible, objectionable, and injurious noise levels’ would be a fine thing. But do we know enough yet to do the job of writing such a standard?”

The journal was also closely linked to the project of industrial efficiency. Its content dealt above all else with manufacturing contexts, including ventilating systems and aircraft engine test facilities. Articles often cited data about how noise affected productivity in factories and offices, and offered solutions that would keep things running more smoothly. Even NOISE Control’s editorial board was made up largely of corporate officers at companies like General Motors, Liberty Mutual, and Douglas Aircraft Co.

The notion of preference was mostly outside of the journal’s sphere, at times impatiently dismissed. Wrote one contributor: “Most people, except those who prefer the bawdy noise of the cocktail hour or night club, like things quiet. We like it quiet because it is peaceful and restful, and by nature we like to have a quiet atmosphere in which to live and work.”

There were a few exceptions to this kind of rhetoric, and not every writer was ignorant of the subjective qualities of listening. According to another piece, “there is no reason why engineers should feel that dealing with a subjective quantity such as annoyance is less important than making the more objective measurements of work output or energy consumption.” But even articles like this one eventually resorted to quantitative claims: “We know that … annoyance increases with frequency.” It was clearly difficult for the community of researchers to be comfortable with a plurality of listener types.

A letter to the editor entitled “Are Church Chimes Noise?” captures the essence of this difficulty:

For the sake of not repeating historical patterns of inquiry, especially the wild goose chase of expecting technological solutions to fix every noise problem, NOISE Control should be required reading for noise abatement specialists everywhere, not to mention Sound Studies scholars.

Above: Thomas Ashcraft’s recording of the invasion of Baghdad, 2003. From Soundtransit.nl

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This is a follow-up to the previous post, which was a general typology of sound maps. Many readers wrote in with more maps that, in one way or another, extend the format. Ten of them are listed here.

1) The London Sound Survey

The London Sound Survey map is both assiduous and lovely. Many sound maps treat geography in two-dimensions – the LSS adds graphical elements that go further. It uses “recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London” to comprise “a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city.” The recordings can also be represented graphically, so that a musical note represents a musical recording, and so on. Some other sound maps do this, too, but LSS is unique in that the boldness of each icon represents that element’s volume. This is much easier to see than to explain.

2) Madrid Soundscape
Madrid Soundscapes is a Spanish-language, collaborative documentary map of Madrin and environs, with recordings marked by color-coded pins indicating categories such as “social interactions,” “events,” “mechanical sound,” and “silence.” The site includes a Derridean manifesto about the divide between the visual and the oral.

3) Free Sound Barcelona
Free Sound Barcelona is another Spanish-language site that features not only a map, but a blog and other specific projects, such as the documentation of personal “audioways.” The map uses a satellite view, with larger pins representing clusters of sounds which can be accessed by zooming in and clicking directly. Although this map is structurally very similar to many other city-based collaborative efforts, it has a rather unique voice.

4) Noisetube

Noisetube, in its own words, is “is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment.” The project monitors more than 35 cities in total, using a sophisticated system to analyze raw loudness. Recordings can also be tagged with “social annotations,” weather, time, location, and more. The number of measurements per city ranges from less than 10 to more than 10,000.

Noisetube seems to be the most advanced effort at noise pollution control through environmental engineering. While the project leaves itself open to a number of methodological and theoretical questions, its approach to sound mapping is worth a look:

5) Soundcities
Soundcities was created by the British artist Stanza. It is effectively global in scope, although clustered in Europe (and to a lesser degree east Asia and the Americas), with Google Earth-based maps of forty cities in total. Rio de Janairo has one recording, Chicago four, and London perhaps a hundred.

Soundcities is described as “An online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks.” The sounds are meant to evoke a sense of place, but also to become available for composition.

6) Locus Sonus
Locus Sonus is a world map with pins representing active microphones streaming ambient sound in real-time. Microphones are operated by volunteers in many cities, some of whom also provide photo galleries of their locations. The intention is to “provide a permanent (and somewhat emblematic) resource to tap into as raw materiel for our artistic experimentation.” The streams can be mixed or heard individually.

The site is essentially an ongoing art project, which also serves as fodder for further projects. It is essentially generative rather than documentary in nature.

7) Hypercities

Hyercities is “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.” Sound is just one among many elements in a “digital curation project” that collects data about a time and place – say, Tehran in 2009 – and then gives visitors access to that material through an interactive map. With the Tehran example in particular, Hypercities is advertised as a tool for political transparency.

8 ) SOINU MAPA

SOINU MAPA is a collaborative sound map documentary of Basque country.

9) Sound Transit

Sound Transit is a well-designed site with a robust database of phonographic recordings. The home page offers three options: “search for sounds,” “book a transit,” and “localisms.”

“Search for sounds” is a simple database, searchable by keyword or location. A search for Thailand, for example, led to a submenu of four cities, from which I chose Bangkok. Seven recordings by five different sound hunters came up. Searching by keyword worldwide, queries for unlikely terms such as “golf,” “hospital,” “spider,” and “tomato” all turned up positive, suggesting
the database is deep indeed. More likely words such as “birds” and “street” each returned more than 100 results.

“Book a transit” – my favorite sound mapping instrument anywhere to date – allows you to “plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world,” with an interface that imitates online travel booking. My itinerary looked like this:

The site also outputs sounds from each location in your itinerary into a single, playable string, with slow fades between each part. No other sound map I’ve seen evokes so emphatically the transformations of space, including sonic space, that take place in a mobile modernity. Although this suggests the possibility of even more commentary and critique ready at hand, it is an exceptionally thoughtful presentation.

10) Radio Aporee
Radio Aporee is a global map that can be viewed through Google Maps or as a bewildering network of lines and tags. The map does not reveal political divisions. The recordings, of which there are thousands, are user-contributed, and include not only environmental sound, but voicemail “tags” of a location that can be added by anyone with a cell phone. Visitors can access sounds directly, at random, or as mixes.

According to the site’s proprietor, Udo Noll, “there are some other “interfaces” to listen, e.g. the permanent stream of (randomly or intentionally grouped) recordings at http://radio.aporee.org/ , the experiments in public spaces, with hybrid/mixed realities (superpositions of “real” spaces and the geolocated sound archives, explored by GPS-walks etc. http://aporee.org/maps/mobile/), and last but not least the user’s, artist’s, contributor’s projects within radio aporee, e.g.”

These include

- The Global Bridge Symphony

- Allah Bul Kheer – Of street vendors and displaced people in damascus

- The Montreal Sound Map

- The The Stuttering Stroll

- Resonanzen

People kill other people distressingly often over noise.

Plenty of evidence implies that the planet is noisier than at any other time in human history. What now?

Before attempting to answer that practically – and we will, here, over time – we can begin by ruling out a few well-worn, fatally flawed approaches. Today’s approach is both the most common (by far) and one of the easiest to take down. It is the fantasy of silence.

The Times of London recently gave writer Helen Rumbelow one of those tedious assignments where the journalist is supposed to go out and search for an oasis of true quiet amidst the ubiquitous din of modern urbanity. Conventionally, the journalist either finds a single tranquil place or doesn’t; either way, the moral of the story is that we’ve forgotten the value of silence, and by extension neighborliness, peaceful contemplation, relaxation, and so forth.

In her piece, titled “Silent Night … Is There Peace Anywhere in Britain?,” Rumbelow takes the high road considering that her assignment was essentially a straw man. After moving through the usual tropes of noise control, she makes some great points.

To paraphrase the article, Britain is noisier. People have become exasperated. Noise-reduction experts agree that the problem stems in large part from overpopulation. But too much regulation on behavior (i.e., no peeing standing up in apartments after midnight) can be overkill. Besides, noise is also caused by more and louder technology – including things that can’t easily be limited, like motor vehicles. Such noise is not only annoying, it’s physically damaging to our bodies. Ultimately, since we can’t achieve total silence, perhaps we can overlay nicer sounds – like waterfalls. Finally, it is worth considering that people seem to tolerate mechanical noise better in developing countries. Is sensitivity to noise a disease of affluence?

Rumbelow offers, provocatively, that part of what makes certain sounds tolerable is not only, generically, that they’re subjectively pleasing, but that they signify things beyond human control. Some of the loudest sounds we hear – waves crashing, thunderstorms, forest animals – are usually pleasing in spite of their volume, and even their irregularity. Conversely, the animal sounds that do tend to bother urban-dwellers, like the aforementioned barking, are those that come from domesticated beasts, which people are ostensibly responsible for controlling.

On this, Rumbelow writes:

I have come to think that our relationship with noise is like our relationship with God, or with universal forces beyond our control. We crave natural sounds, such as that of the ocean, that are beyond our power. We long for the incorporeal, and our longing intensifies the more the noises of other people press in on us.

So, then, is sensitivity to noise actually a disease of the triumph of classical liberalism, in which people understand themselves as free actors with the right to control their environments? If we run with this thesis momentarily, we might conclude that nostalgia for silence is really a displaced lust for dominance – in particular, dominance over the actions of other people, which is one hell of a paradox for a philosophy of political freedom.

Whether or not this thesis is true, its mere possibility is one of many strikes against the open-ended idea of noise control animated by the fantasy of silence. This is because every time we choose a target for noise abatement, our choice is not only about volume, but about our own hearing. This doesn’t mean, at all, that the definition of noise is totally subjective and thus impossible to do anything about. It simply means that too few quests for greater quiet have considered the politics of listening in sufficient depth.

Next: The amazing noise map of the entire nation of England

Increased CO2 emissions caused by marine shipping have made the ocean less acoustically absorbent. As a result, animal sounds travel further, creating an underwater cacophony that may affect marine life.

The journal Nature Geoscience published a letter online yesterday suggesting these findings.

The researchers claim that oceanic pH levels have declined (i.e., become more acidic) due to a greater prevalence of CO2, especially in regions such as the North Atlantic that have lots of commercial ship traffic. As the water becomes increasingly acidic, a number of key sound-absorbing chemicals are broken down, and the marine atmosphere becomes far more resonant, particularly at low frequencies, near what human beings hear as bass.

For animals that communicate in this frequency range, the sonic environment may thus become cluttered and confusing. We can imagine an analogue of mass amplification on land: it is as if, gradually, the air began to carry people’s voices further and further, until conversations a block away were audible in our living room. We would feel stress, frustration, a compulsion to move to more remote places, and a need to reformulate our interactions in significant ways. Although the recent study does not include any behavioral research (though such research has been conducted elsewhere), the authors clearly imply that animals could act on similar impulses, with consequences for ecosystems.

For Sound Studies, these findings demonstrate the relevance of sonic material to any robust understanding of environments. The aural field is not absolutely divided from the chemical one. In fact, changes in either can affect the other directly. But because of a general prejudice about the distinction between senses (hearing and feeling, for example), the materiality of sound is not empirically obvious. As a result, sound is mainly interpreted as a source phenomenon, rather than as stuff that propagates and accumulates – that itself constitutes environments, and that thus should be a site of empathy. This connects to earlier discussions in the present space.

Finally, the situation underwater resonates with the actual situation above it, albeit owing to different causes. Technology – subwoofers, heavy traffic, air conditioners – is often the culprit when we complain about noise. More powerful devices mean that our everyday actions are broadcast further and further to a wide, if inadvertent, audience. Like seals and whales, we have to adapt our communications in response to the increased volume and density, inevitably faring better in some efforts than others.

The officer in the case, Ken Roth, was unable to make a reliable radar reading, but he claimed that he could tell simply by listening that Freitag’s vehicle was speeding.

According to the decision:

Ptl. Roth testified at trial that he was parked in his patrol car along the side of U.S. 42 at 9:16 p.m. on October 8, 2007, when he heard a vehicle he could not yet see. He testified that, based on the sound of the vehicle, he believed it was traveling in excess of the 35 m.p.h. posted speed limit. The officer testified that he “audibly heard the speeding, not the speed of the vehicle.” Ptl. Roth clarified: “As it approached I could hear the vehicle on the roadway which based on my training and experience it is consistent with a vehicle that was in excess of the posted speed limit.”

Fascinatingly, Roth distinguishes between the sound of speeding and the sound of moving at any specific speed. The sound of speeding is marked, presumably, by aggressive engine noise. We’ve all heard vehicles that sound like this. Often enough, it’s a jock move.

But, by hearing alone, what would distinguish a normal engine working hard enough to speed from an inefficient engine working just hard enough to drive the limit? Or an engine in a car with a broken muffler?

Nothing could distinguish them. Or, rather, doing so would require an ear trained to identify engine types, and to be able to hear precisely how these engines were operating. The officer’s claim, that he’d heard lots of speeding cars before, did not convince the judge that he was qualified to make such an assessment.

From her opinion:

It is simply incredible, in the absence of reliable scientific, technical, or other specialized information, to believe that one could hear an unidentified vehicle “speeding” without being able to determine the actual speed of the vehicle. The officer offered no testimony regarding how he might have been trained to audibly distinguish various speeds, let alone to distinguish the speeds of various makes and models of vehicles.

What’s intriguing about this ruling is that, thinking beyond conventional empirical evidence (namely, the radar gun), the judge alludes to the possibility of a hypothetical listener skilled enough to be able to do exactly what Officer Roth only imagined he could – to listen as well as the radar sees. This would, admittedly, be a type of listening disciplined by visualism inasmuch as it would be burdened with the task of identification, which is a visual metaphor. But it would still be an impressive technique.

A quick walk through any store targeted to people twenty or younger – in other words, almost any store – reveals the importance of emphatic sensory appeal to product value, especially for toys and games. The best-selling holiday items are often outfitted with literal bells and whistles, or the 21st century equivalent.

This has perpetrated something of an arms race among toy manufacturers. It’s not unheard of, according to some reports, for holiday toys aimed at children younger than three to reach 115 decibels or higher. The risk of hearing loss is made worse, many note, because children have short arms, and generally play with their toys at a very close distance. For accuracy, decibel measurements thus must be taken from just a few inches away. Children also have smaller ear canals, which make them more susceptible to auditory damage even after a few seconds of listening.

Here is the Sight and Hearing Association’s top offender from 2008, the Shake ‘N Go, a toy car that reaches 120.8 db, in action.

The United States issues recommendations for toy volume, but compliance is voluntary. Canada has stricter regulations, but many toys surge past the limits anyway. A number of independent tests quoted in news stories found that well over half of popular holiday toys significantly exceeded guidelines or recommendations.

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The research in audiology is conclusive: children experience real risk by playing with loud toys. Hearing loss, especially at a young age, is not only inconvenient, but a demonstrable impediment to learning. There is a definite need for regulation that would limit these harmful effects.

Toys are loud because it’s profitable, and so in a sense necessary, to make them that way. We’ve discussed in this space a certain general trend toward greater silence in product manufacture, as a way to signify modern and especially “green” technology. But such a shift has hardly taken effect among children’s toys. One can see the stirrings, however, of a kind of elite response, underwritten by boutiqueish nostalgia, for playthings that would never blare out music or canned phrases. When I (b. 1980) was little, interactive educational toys were de rigueur among concerned parents; adjusted for the volume demands of the contemporary marketplace, would these still even qualify as safe?

With respect to noise, toys are in the same ironic position as most consumer goods. Even once sound became too loud for political comfort, industry couldn’t turn down the volume on consumer taste. Niche markets, ostensibly healthier for our ears, began to develop, but these are an incomplete solution, because they stigmatize noise rather than diminishing it. Meanwhile, those who consume “mass market” goods (i.e. the most affordable offerings), through no fault of their own, put their children in a disadvantaged position.

There is a clear burden on government to introduce significant regulation. But we should also recognize that the origin of the problem is deep-seated.

Even my fancy new tea kettle (a wedding gift), which naturally has to whistle, features a lovely, train-emulating, duotone Hohner harmonica for a mouth.

As Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson, and others have suggested, quieter technologies were a class-conscious response to an industrial-era love affair with noise. Whereas in the pre-Model T era the elite announced their status by being among the few who could move around town in engine-powered vehicles, by the early-20th century the roads were saturated. Traffic noise thus became uncouth, a marker of inefficient engineering and middle-class aesthetics, and the rich retreated to quieter alternatives. (Including the luxury car, with its hermetic interiority.)

Class-inflected desire for silent machinery has continued more or less unabated for the last century. So it was surprising to read, in an article from the New York Times published earlier this month, that some hybrid car companies are designing artificial sounds for next year’s models. Apparently, these companies have received complaints that their near-silent engines are a safety hazard, particularly for those less able to gauge traffic visually, such as children and the blind. As the article says about these vehicles, “they aren’t noisy enough.” A video from the British car company Lotus explains (and dramatizes) how the problem of silence is being addressed by its own engineers.

Fake speakers under the hood, with hyperbolic vroom-vroom noises designed by Hollywood sound engineers, join artificial shutter sounds on digital cameras in the category of sounds that had to be designed anew after their antecedents became obsolete. Only after engineering away the mechanical necessity of the source noises did we realize that those noises had also come to serve other critical functions in public space. For instance, warning us that two-ton motor vehicles were hurtling our way. The artificial camera click was created, in case you don’t remember the story, to thwart surreptitious picture-taking in locker rooms and the like. There are apparently certain dangers, to oneself and others, to being excessively unobtrusive.

Meanwhile, the silenced sounds of engines almost certainly promise to return, like ringtones, as customizations. That could get strange; look for future posts in this space on that subject.

The winner of the 2008 contest, who laughed for more than 12 minutes and reached 110 decibels

Contestants are judged on “loudness, length, content, style, and infectious quality.” Loudness is gauged by a decibel-level reader, while all the others (save length) are assessed by human judges.

The laughing contest fits the profile of your average provincial diversion – colorful, good-natured, and inexplicable to outsiders. The difference in this case is that Pattaya is a pretty rough town, with high rates of gang-related violent crime, prostitution, and drugs. It was also the site of the 2009 red-shirt protests against prime minister Abhisit, which forced the cancellation of ASEAN. And it remains a pretty bizarre place in more minor ways as well.

For the benefit of American readers, I was going to say that holding a laughing contest in Pattaya would be like holding a laughing contest in Newark. Then I thought Las Vegas – or Reno – would be a better choice. But Miami in the 1970s is probably more perfect. Both are formerly sleepy resort towns transformed in a short period by tidal waves of narcotics and commercial sex, and both have gone to great lengths to make themselves livable and (more crucially) visitable. In doing so, both cities also spin a narrative about winning a war against criminals, negating the impression that ill-gotten profits built the skyline in the first place.

The Thai Ministry of Tourism and Sports funds the laughing contest, along with its organizers, Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Much like the facile nickname, “The Land of Smiles,” the contest – whether it began with such an intention or not – becomes a kind of top-down viral tactic by the government for disseminating happy narratives. Laughter is an especially astute choice because of its “infectious quality,” which is to say its tendency to spread involuntarily to all those within earshot. This is in (metaphorically rich) contrast to the kind of infectious epidemiology that generally characterizes a major sex trade outpost.

Thanks to B.B. and immanent discursivity for the link.