Posts tagged with governance
From 1955 through 1963, the Acoustical Society of America published NOISE Control, a bimonthly journal dedicated to noise abatement. Focused mostly on technical solutions, NOISE Control was scientifically serious, though vexed by the subjective nature of listening for its entire life. It also ran amazing ads. (Interspersed here.)
Sound maps are graphic catalogs of music, noise, local ambient color, or anything else audible. Most often based on city boundaries, they typically plot sound on a Google Map (or something similar) – as art projects, policy evidence, historical archives, or consumer tools.
In 2009, Americans took a variety of steps in response to excessive noise. We petitioned our representatives, wrote letters to the editor, drafted ordinances, destroyed property, intimidated or shot our neighbors, sued celebrities, and much more. In today’s year-end post here at Weird Vibrations, we summarize 2009’s most notable noise control stories. The review is organized according to where each item fits within the five branches of American government – legislative, executive, judicial, peer pressure, and vigilante justice.
Enjoy.
LEGISLATIVE
- The city of Clio, Michigan passed an ordinance regulating roof-mounted wind turbines which, although “green,” produce a loud, annoying hum.
- In Venice Beach, California, the city proposed a lottery to deal with a plethora of street performers on the boardwalk. Local residents claimed they had become “captive listen[ers],” forced to hear music in their homes.
- In December, the CALM Act, which seeks to cap the volume of TV commercials, advanced from the House to the Senate. CALM stands for “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation.”
- A man in Mesa, Arizona wants to change local noise ordinances so that they apply to churches, which are currently exempt in all cases. According to the man, a local “Christian new-age church that plays rock music at weird hours” located 10 feet from his backyard not only disturbs him, but threatens to set a bad precedent for the entire city.
EXECUTIVE
- New York City police raided a West Village club in a residential neighborhood after numerous noise complaints. A Greenwich Village Block Association member recalled that neighbors had dealt with similar problems in the past by simply purchasing the offending establishment in order to ensure a more quiet operation.
- The city of Devens, Massachusetts debated whether to shut down or fine a manufacturer of solar panels that recently moved to the area. Neighbors are demanding that the plant shut down operations at night.
- The Brainerd, Tennessee District Attorney asked police to shut down Club Deep Blue after a series of noise complaints. One neighbor claimed to have called the police over 300 times, to no avail. After the D.A. filed a petition, reporters found a sign on the club’s door reading “‘Closed due to racial descrimination (sic) within the Chattanooga City Government.”
- Noise complaints are on the rise in Columbus, Ohio, but for some reason police citations are down. Officers are at a loss to explain the discrepancy.
JUDICIAL
- A bishop in Phoenix, Arizona was convicted of disturbing the peace because the bells atop his newly-built church rang too frequently and at too high a volume. An attorney for the bishop claimed the ruling was a First Amendment violation. “We were living in a bell tower,” said one resident.
- One of her neighbors on the Upper West Side of Manhattan sued Madonna. From the complaint: “Madonna and one or more of her guests repeatedly dance and/or train in Apartment 7-A to unreasonably high-decibel amplified music.”
- The Georgia Supreme Court denied a claim by two University of Georgia-Athens students that a local noise ordinance restricted their freedom of expression with regard to playing music at parties. According to an article, a lawyer for the students said that “Volume should be constitutionally protected because it is to the artistic quality of music as light and shade are to paintings.”
- The city of Virginia Beach has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after the state court overturned its local noise ordinance. The ordinance, which relied on the concept of a “reasonable [listener],” was said to be too vague.
PEER PRESSURE
- Responding to resident complaints about last year’s concert, the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco placed “sound monitors” in nearby neighborhoods, who could in turn contact “sound consultants” to assess disruptive noise and fix it between days of the festival. A complaint hotline was also established.
- Guanabanas restaurant in Jupiter Inlet Village, Florida, has tried its damnedest to be sensitive to neighbors’ noise complaints. According to the owner, John Zimmerman, no one from Sunni Sands, across the street, has complained since a series of acoustic renovations three years ago. Zimmerman even consulted with the owner of nearby Castaways restaurant and the Barrons Landing motel, but some residents apparently remain unsatisfied.
- An Erie, Pennsylvania man threatened a hunger strike to protest the noise from a pet food maker called Dad’s Products Co. down the street from his home. Harry Davies, 62, who built a shed in which to carry out the strike, wrote in a letter that “I guess you could say it’s either the noise or me.”
- The author of a motorcycle column in the Philadelphia Examiner suggested that proposed regulations on motorcycle exhaust pipes in New York State are discriminatory.
- 2009 witnessed a spate of complaints about grunting in women’s tennis. Critics charge that the grunts are tantamount to cheating by distracting one’s opponent, while defenders say it helps establish rhythm.
- A weekly San Francisco drag party was canceled voluntarily after neighbors approached the local Entertainment Commission about its noise. The organizers claimed the pressure was homophobic: “”The Polk no longer welcomes gay businesses.”
- A Charlestown, Massachusetts resident wrote a letter to the Commander of the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) complaining about the ship’s twice-daily cannon firing, a tradition that dates back to the 18th century. Most area residents seemed to feel that the firings should continue.
VIGILANTE JUSTICE
- An Arizona man was fatally shot after a confrontation with his neighbor over noise. “Now I have to take his body back and I had to tell his daughter that he’d never see his new grandchild,” said the slain man’s wife.
- Ashton Kutcher unleashed a viral video documenting his neighbor’s untimely construction work, which allegedly began some days as early as 7:00am. “I’m gonna lose it on this guy, I’m gonna lose it!,” said the star of What Happens in Vegas.
- A 46-year-old woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts spit on her upstairs neighbor while drunk, after the neighbor’s noise allegedly disturbed the woman’s parents on multiple occasions.
- A Tallahassee, Florida man was charged with assault after aiming a shotgun at two neighbors who had been doing construction work at odd hours. The suspect was specifically upset about their hammering.
- Several Durham, North Carolina residents posted signs on their street stating that speeding vehicles would be hit with paintball guns. As of August, no shots had been fired.
Few frustrations match the one that involves lying in bed, dead-eyed in the night, as the neighbor dog’s ten-billionth bark pierces the thin psychic veil between sanity and bloodlust.
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?
An Appeals Court judge in my home state ruled this month that police officers cannot give out speeding tickets based solely on the sound of a passing vehicle, unless they have some kind of specialist’s credentials as listeners. The ruling overturned two previous decisions against Daniel Freitag, who got a ticket in 2007 while driving on business in his Navigator SUV. The full ruling is here.
Last week, the New York City Police Department began outfitting patrol cars with a device called The Rumbler, a pair of subwoofers that serve as an alternative to sirens.
Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
by Frances Dyson
University of California Press, 2009
262 pps., $24.95
There are, today, somewhere on the order of 1.67 billion internet users in the world. Staggeringly, about 1.65 billion of these are new since the mid-90s. Today nearly a quarter of the world’s population has a degree of internet access. Just over a decade ago, that figure was a fraction of a percent.
The city of Pattaya, Thailand, closish to Bangkok, hosts an annual laughing contest.
The winner of the 2008 contest, who laughed for more than 12 minutes and reached 110 decibels
In the wake of the first domestic use of sound cannons, against protesters at the recent, sparsely-picketed G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which comes just a few weeks after the same technology was used to suppress protesters at a factory in Bangkok, I want to discuss sound as an absolute phenomenon – that is, at the point where a human listener experiences acute physical harm through exposure, where sound stops being musical or aesthetic and becomes quite literally indistinguishable from a blunt object or explosive device.
Bureaucratic departments – the DMV, the career services agency, the post office – are places of infinite, futile drama. Although they are designed to move customers with mechanical efficiency from the entrance to the exit, they are usually tense and messy.
Their drama, ironically, results from trying to maintain rigid structures in a liquid universe. On paper, in the abstract, less flexibility means a more streamlined service process. Take a number, proceed to the desk when you’re called, hand over the necessary forms, and wait for the thud of the stamp. In Plato’s post office, it’s that easy.
Outside the world of forms, however, there are always delays, because there is always serendipity, confusion, and disagreement, sometimes all at once. The man at the front of the line has a complicated question. He doesn’t speak English very well. The clerk can’t find his package. Now he’s arguing with her, although she legislates nothing and therefore can only argue back at him, all the more cruelly because she recognizes her own impotence. (Mutual impotence is the infinite loop that renders bureaucratic drama futile.)
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Sound is a useful tool in bureaucratic settings because, under the right conditions, listening can synchronize tightly with action. We can hear ourselves called faster than we can see our number appear on the stern little LED board. No matter what we’re doing – reading, staring, resting – we can mostly be responsible for hearing “68!” and then standing at attention and proceeding. In the post office/DMV/career center, we willingly reduce ourselves to veritable automatons – obedient listening machines – in order to finish our business quickly and get out. We submit to the authority of the system for our own ultimate benefit. Sound, which we don’t have to face to receive, is a great convenience to this end. With it, we can orchestrate a nearly immediate dynamic of command and obedience.
But noise is dangerous. In a bureaucratic utopia, a listener would hear only numbers, perfectly repetitive instructions, and the shuffling of feet. In actual offices, we hear much more. Dramas, futile as they may be for the actors involved, crash the noiseless utopia of efficient repetition, for better or worse. Noise is not only evidence of these dramas, but also a frequent cause of them.
If sound is expedient for an efficient bureaucracy, then we have an opportunity to hear the failure of bureaucracy in noise – sensation, metaphor, and disruption all rolled into one. (We will continue to listen to both the operations and failures of bureaucracy in this space.)
Ben Tausig, ed.
