Image by Seth Denizen

Episode One is the pilot. Its purpose is to explain sound studies in a nutshell (less than 15 minutes), and then to set the table for the project to come. Each future episode will aim at specific, aurally rich situations in Bangkok: street sound, protest, musical performance, noise, commerce. Perhaps you’ve read about what’s happening in Bangkok now – there should be plenty to talk about. I’ll post whenever new episodes go up on Triple Canopy.

By the way, back in 1997, Steven Connor created a five-part series for the BBC called Noise that you can hear here. In addition to being a good academic writer, Connor has an almost Dr. Seussian gift for language, when he wants to turn it on. For the pilot of BiR, it was useful to hear Connor’s work, although I expect to move in a different direction with future episodes, since the content will be field recordings rather than general discussion. Keep tuning in.

Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon
Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder, editors
Dia Art Foundation, 2009
140 pps., $35 ($21.75 on Abe Books)

As an art critic, it must be an awkward assignment to memorialize the work of an artist who rejected memorials. Sound installation pioneer Max Neuhaus, who died in 2009, productively confronted the limits of artistic form throughout his long career, but at no moment was this challenge more powerful than in death. A recent book by the Dia Art Foundation, one of Neuhaus’s key patrons, engages just this paradox.

Neuhaus was among the first modern composers (if that title even applies) to work with sound in a deliberately non-musical idiom. Breaking from predecessors and contemporaries in the field of sonic art, Neuhaus was never interested in how to bring concrete sound into composition, let alone the concert hall. To whatever extent possible, his work was publicly situated – on streets or in subway stations, for example. His authorial presence was supposed to be as invisible as his art. The idea was to engage audiences without ever signaling to them that they’d entered an artistic space. Working in the mid- to late-20th century, Neuhaus shared a number of insights and goals with contemporary Modernists in the visual arts, but his use of sound as a primary material gave his work a distinct status.

Neuhaus’s most famous piece is Times Square, an ambient drone that issues from beneath a grate on 7th Avenue between 45th and 46th streets in Manhattan:

Times Square is unmarked, and essentially unrecognizable as art. Passersby notice it all the time, and may even stop to listen, but generally in the assumption that the sound, however unusual, has something to do with the subway or Con Ed. In this respect, it can induce a kind of self-discovery for those who come upon it. Neuhaus hoped that such moments would be a gateway to more attuned listening down the line.

This piece, like much of Neuhaus’s output, was initially temporary. The Dia Art Foundation, however, has funded its continued installment since 2002. The quasi-permanence of Times Square, its objecthood, stands in ironic contrast to its intention – to project an artistic intervention without, at least as far as the listener realizes, marking itself off from the rest of the world.

The individual contributors to Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon (namely: Lynne Cooke, Alex Potts, Branden Joseph, Peter Pakesch and Ulrich Loock, Liz Kotz, and Christopher Cox) seem not to have read each others’ essays – their discussions are at times redundant – but this is actually a good thing. Perspectives shoot off like branches, parallel in some places, jutting sharply in others. The same quotes and chestnuts about Neuhaus are deployed repeatedly, but each interpretive treatment has its own gloss.

The question most consistently addressed in the catalogue is that of the migration from time to space. Neuhaus, by rejecting music, was also rejecting the proscribed duration of artwork. Rather than asking an audience to sit still and listen for a particular span of time, he wanted to alter the mood or character of public environments – of spaces. Alex Potts quotes Neuhaus: “Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time.”

This concept seems to have been initiated as a means of transformation, in which sound would decorate an already-installed architecture and make it feel different, to one where sound was itself treated as an autonomous spatial reality. This distinction is critical, recognizing as it does that sound is a material form rather than an ethereal engima. Sound, like any other space (including conventional architecture), requires both labor and maintenance.

Nevertheless, there was a register to Neuhaus’s politics that rejected the temporal structures of a capitalist society, and thereby its logic as well. So, even though his sound installations drew attention to the potent reality of sound, they also promoted a form of community predicated on phenomenological non-differentiation. Sound thus was used as a form of bodily envelopment that could envelop everyone at once. The question here, as Potts writes, was “How [ ] to make public art for a society that is intensely individualistic and whose public spaces, while shared by and open to a multitude of people, atomize the perceptual and mental world of those passing through it?” In other words, Neuhaus hoped people would hear his work as part of a massive flow of time rather than as a single, discrete signal. The last essay in the catalog, Christopher Cox’s Installing Duration, situates Neuhaus’s philosophy within broader mid-century debates about the nature of time – though politically radical in some sense, he was mostly in the mainstream among artists.

On a practical level, Neuhaus’s ethos of how to manage urban space was laid out most clearly in an Op-Ed published in the New York Times in 1974. In brief, aesthetics, joy, and discovery should trump the rationalization of space. The piece is reprinted in its entirety here:

“BANG, BOOooom; ThumP, EEEK, tinkle” by Max Neuhaus

The popular concept of ‘noise pollution’ is a dangerously misleading one. In reality, dangers to hearing do exist in prolonged, excessively loud sound levels. However, the residue of the idea that has ended up in the mind of the public because of misleading publicity is that sound in general is harmful to people.

A brief examination of a pamphlet Noise Makes You Sick published by the Department of Air Resources of the city’s Environmental Protection Agency is typical of the literature and clearly illustrates the problem.

The first sentence, ‘Sound is instantly transmitted from your ears to your brain and then to your nerves, glands and organs’, is of course literally true. Actually the reaction doesn’t normally go as far as the glands and internal organs.

However, we are left with the impression that we have absolutely no defense against unwanted sound. This is untrue. The body has automatic reflex barriers, both physical and psychological, to deal with sounds it does not wish to react to.

The pamphlet goes on, ‘Any loud or unexpected sounds put your body on alert’. This is true with a newborn child or in primitive societies, both of which need this reaction to survive. But certainly the modern urban dweller is not put into a state of fright (except of course when there is actual danger) very often by the sounds around him.

A human being conditions himself fairly quickly to what is ‘loud or unexpected’ in his particular environment.

Once having ‘established’ the impression that we are constantly in a state of ‘fright’, though, the brochure goes on to extrapolate in august pseudo-medical terms: ‘Adrenalin, an energy-producing hormone, is released into your blood stream. Your heart beats faster, your muscles tense, and your blood pressure rises. Sudden spasms occur in your stomach and intestines’. This finally gives the impression that every honking horn brings us a little bit closer to death.

The law defines noise as ‘any unwanted sound’. Surely several hundred years of musical history can be of value. At the very least they can show us that our response to sound is subjective, that no sound is intrinsically bad. How we hear it depends a great deal on how we have been conditioned to hear it.

Through extreme exaggeration of the effects of sound on the human mind and body, this propaganda has so frightened people that it has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before and in effect robbed us of the ability to listen to our environment.

Admittedly it may be necessary to oversimplify an idea to bring enough public pressure to bear on the producers of ear-damaging sounds in our environment to stop this victimization of the public. This degree of misrepresentation is not only unnecessary, but irresponsible and ultimately negative.

This present concept of noise pollution condemns all sounds by leaving, in the public mind, the impression that sound itself is physiologically and psychologically harmful.

It is this exaggerated and oversimplified concept that is doing most of the damage, not sound, damage that can and should be rectified by curtailing misleading propaganda and showing people other ways to listen to their surroundings.

Obviously we need to be able to rest from sound just as we do from visual stimulation; we need aural as well as visual privacy. But silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black. Certainly just as our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing.

Max Neuhaus is a composer

New York Times Op-Ed by Max Neuhaus, December 6, 1974

Undoubtedly, the most difficult claim here is that anti-noise legislation “has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before,” that the problem of noise is a consequence of a particular political reality that refuses listening as an art form. Neuhaus, tellingly, retreats from pure relativism, but remains adamant: we benefit by being receptive, and suffer by being too defensive.

Such a celebration of listening, because it locates artistic agency not in singular geniuses but in everyone, leads logically to the kind of anti-elitist stance that Neuhaus ultimately took. Thus, despite his explicit rejection of capitalism, Neuhaus was actually a proponent of installations and even mass-market gadgets that could bring avant-garde sonic experiences to the common man. Branden Joseph’s essay, An Implication of an Implication, discusses a couple of these fascinating ideas. One was a “silent alarm clock” that slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in volume; the after-image caused by the cessation of sound would be the effect that woke its user, rather than the typical series of jarring beeps.

Another, called “Max-Feed,” was a machine that users could place next to their stereos, causing a wall of feedback noise.

These devices, though fascinating, were arguably the weakest ideas of Neuhaus’s career. They were attempts to objectify and lend semi-permanence to sound installation. On the contrary, the strength of Times Square is precisely its resistance to objecthood. That piece appeals to listeners without revealing itself as emanating from anywhere – and indeed, maybe it doesn’t. The fact that this catalog doesn’t even attempt to contain the artwork that is its main focus is really the highest compliment to an artist who, at his best and for all the right reasons, didn’t want to be pinned down.

The piece is titled “This is Sound,” and it is an 11-minute lecture/journey about the effects of sound on the human body. It was produced, loosely, in the style of NOVA.

You can enjoy the installation yourself at home, if you have a closet and some pillows to lay your head on. Here are the instructions: “This is a didactic piece about sound for two or three listeners. Each person should lie on the floor in a comfortable position, with some part of their clothing or body touching the adjacent listener(s). Press play, and lie down.” You can obviously also listen to the piece without following the instructions, but the impact will be much less. The purpose of listening in a closed space, next to other people, is to accentuate resonance and materiality.

You can download the file directly here, or stream it:

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

In many cases, reducing sound to a visual field is a bit awkward – do we really hear better while looking at a two-dimensional picture on a screen than we would if we were actually in the space being represented? Maybe not, but the general desire to control sound is very strong, and what better way to control something than to pinpoint it? In this way, for example, compositional maps bring the urban din into a realm of aesthetic order, policy maps subject it to regulation, archival maps protect it against decay, and application maps help us navigate it. There are obvious appeals (and complexities) in each.

Below is a typology of the most common kinds of sound maps, with examples. Many of these come from recent discussions on the Sound Studies listserv, and from an item on Wayneandwax. Have I missed any important categories? Do you know of other examples?

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Collaborative Documentary
This is probably the most straightforward category, and the most logical outgrowth of available technologies.

Open Sound New Orleans is a simple map of the city that allows users to upload self-recorded sounds in the categories of “voice,” “music,” and “ambient,” and to plot them where they were made. The site functions as a local forum, with an emphasis (based on the most frequently used tags) on post-Katrina revitalization, business, neighborhoods, and community. Many of the recordings are interviews. Like many sound maps in this category, Open Sound New Orleans uses sound (as opposed to text) to better emulate “being there.”

In a similar vein, SoundSeeker.org overlays user-submitted field recordings on a map of New York City.

A sound map of Montreal.

Soundwalks in San Francisco, Lisbon, Istanbul, Basel, and more.

Composition/Artwork
This is actually a very diverse category, and one that relies comparatively less often on mapping in the standard visual sense. For example, GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface is a piece of software that uses GPS to assign musical snippets to small circles of land all over the planet. As users walk or drive around, they traverse different circles, creating a beat-matched mix as they move:

There is also a lot of politically oriented work in this category. Heidi Boisvert’s sonicWarfare hands listeners a map of midtown Manhattan, overlaid by a semi-transparent map of the section of Baghdad where U.S. troops invaded in 2002. You follow a route on the map while listening to a recording of an imaginary war – the intended effect is to make conflict seem real, even personal: “Protest in Vietnam was mobilized by images, but today images of war barbarity do not pose the same disgust, disquiet. We have become inured by the spectacle of violence paraded on TV and in movies. Why though when you see war reportage on the news are we not forced to endure the sounds of war? Is it harder to bear the pain of others through our ears … ? ”

Consumer Empowerment
There is something mildly unsettling to me about this category, even though I recognize its utility.

Soundaroundyou.com is a project under development at the Audio and Acoustic Engineering Research Centre at the University of Salford, for which people are asked to add their own recordings to a large data pool for professional analysis. Sounds are also tagged by users with their own qualitative opinions. According to the site, the project “could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.”

As you can see at the end of the clip below, sound clips are rated from 1 to 10 in several areas, such as tranquility, activity, soundscape quality, etc. It is implied that the research could ultimately identify areas of sonic pollution, allowing them to be cleaned up through various strategies. But a rating system like this invites much subjective disagreement, since sound is notoriously prone to differences of interpretation. And subjectivity, especially in metropolitan cities, is always bound up with issues like class and ethnicity. The (very difficult) question not asked here is how we can manage sound in a way that is also socially just?

Meanwhile, GeoGraffiti is a cell phone application that allows you to “tag” any place with a voice recording. You might leave a restaurant review, an event announcement, or a funny comment. Other GeoGraffiti users passing by that same spot could then call in and hear your message.

Preservation
This category essentially has two subsections: historical and natural sound. Both of these are animated by an impulse that ethnomusicology knows very well, that is, the need to save “endangered” sounds through archival preservation.

The most prominent historical effort is the BBC’s global Save Our Sounds audio map. Save Our Sounds is built on an engine much like the collaborative documentaries above; however, its purpose is explicitly ecological: “Precious sounds are dying while new ones enter our lives … So here at the BBC we want to build a sound map of the world – and save endangered sounds from extinction.”

Another site, Sydney Sidetracks, offers historical material, including sound and video, tagged to a map of Australia’s largest city. The site encourages you to “download a version to your mobile or load up your player and take the stories with you. When you next visit the city, you can listen to the crowds at Martin Place celebrating the end of WWII or watch George St., 1906, from a moving train.” Sydney Sidetracks combines documentary and artistic approaches to produce a heightened sense of verisimilitude about the past.

Preservation of natural sound has a slightly different flavor. This type of work often vilifies man-made noise, and calls for a greater appreciation of natural or environmental sound. Groups like the Right to Quiet Society call for outright abatement, while artist-researchers like Gordon Hempton (whose recordings are fantastic) pursue sonic purity and plot it geographically. Not silence, per se, but spaces where human sound is totally absent. Such a pursuit is, clearly, about more than volume. However, it is increasingly clear that the preservation of sonically “natural” space requires lots of work – campaigning for awareness, lobbying for changes in flight patterns, hiring park rangers to enforce sound restrictions in wooded areas – all of which, ironically, produces noise.

Policy Data
This is by necessity the most reductive category of sound mapping. Cities pursuing noise control need clear data that can be translated directly to enforcement. Unfortunately, this usually means maps not linked to actual sonic events, that estimate decibels based on things like infrastructure and traffic level.

San Francisco Department of Public Health, noise pollution map

Noise map of Central London

These maps are meant to help city planners be more aware of the impact of sound when making choices about zoning and construction, which is a good goal. However, acoustics (especially theoretical acoustics) can only predict so much about aural imposition.

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.

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.

“Sound Studies,” while increasingly common in the academy, still lacks basic definitions. This post is part of an ongoing effort to provide clear, descriptive expositions of what the study of sound encompasses – as an art form, as a humanistic science, and as a general philosophy.

The piece is 54 minutes in total, but the interview is only the first 45 minutes or so. Follow along with the annotations below as you listen, for further comment on some of the issues that might be extracted from the conversation.

0:00 – 1:40 Introduction, bio

1:40 – 2:40 Discussion of a silent moment in The Beach Boys’ “The Little Girl I once Knew”

Music is one of the most important areas where “Sound Studies” makes its interventions. This discussion is a nice example off the bat of how attention to sound can connect with other topics. DeLaurenti aptly identifies that radio often functions like a friend, a companion on long drives, for example. And that, “like a good friend, you want to make sure that that good friend doesn’t go away.” For this reason, dead air is the scourge of radio, the thing to avoid above all else – even babbling is far better than making the listener feel abandoned. This accounts for the failure of an otherwise marketable pop song.

2:40 – 3:45 Discussion of places where radio transmitters overlap

We all know what this sounds like. DeLaurenti regrets not having recorded some instances of it on a recent drive in the western U.S. Moments like this, where sound is disconnected from intentional meaning (i.e., where it strikes most ears as noise) is exactly what the Phonographers Union is most interested in treating as art.

3:45 – 8:15 How the Phonographers Union performs live

As a process, the Union takes concrete sounds and organizes them into improvised compositions. Shades of musique concrète. The host plays an example of one of the Union’s improvisations. Japanese temple bells, water, accelerating in pace, birds. Compiled from multiple sources. DeLaurenti quotes Stravinsky in suggesting that this improvisation should be heard as a composition, since it’s “frozen.”

7:50 On not relying on visual cues onstage

“We are incredibly boring to look at, and that’s deliberate … we have to react only with our ears.” There is no way for the members of the group to know who is doing what. In Sound Studies, there is a tendency to rely on a supposed binary between sound and vision. Proponents of this binary will argue in broad generalizations, that western culture is visualistic, that it relies on fixed images, but is meanwhile inept at coping with the ephemeral relationality immanent to sound. This position has a point, even if it is extremely overdetermined. DeLaurenti, however, is too good at what he does to engage in this kind of polemic.

His goal in withholding visual cues is to facilitate heightened attention. If the listener leaves a performance more aware of the world, the performance was successful. “The world is continually trying to give us gifts through our ears.”

9:30 – 10:45 The host will play some listener recordings

10:45 – 13:10 First sound sent in by a listener – boat passing under a drawbridge

Colossal metal scrapes, pulleys. The big, soft reverb of wide-open spaces. Melancholy, if you feel like reading it in emotional terms. Followed by an excerpt from that Beach Boys song.

15:10 – 16:50 Second sound sent in by a listener – hummingbird’s wing

Jim Culp, a former city-dweller now living in the country, one day heard a hummingbird at his feeder, and liked the sound. “It was kind of like listening to a didgeridoo played by an Australian aboriginal, but there was a little hint of helicopter in there.” References to aboriginal/native/primitive people are quite common in descriptions of sound, especially abstract ones. In classes I’ve taught, when playing unfamiliar sounds for students and asking them to note their impressions, the notion of “tribal people” (usually of unspecified ethnicity) is often invoked to account for wild strangeness. Many scholars of sound have suggested that imagistic descriptions serve to domesticate aural mystery.

16:50 – 18:50 Awareness of the microphone’s presence
Listening to the recording, DeLaurenti picks up the gentle friction of Mr. Culp’s sleeve against the feeder, as well as the proximity effect of the microphone as it moves around. DeLaurenti explains how the proximity effect works – in both mics and ears. “Microphones are themselves instruments.” This is a wise, if surprisingly rare, point. As with cameras, listeners tend to assume that what a microphone picks up is immediate – that is to say, not mediated – and that it is therefore true. In fact, microphones are very idiosyncratic, and what they pick up depends heavily on both their design and on how we use them. Being aware of the microphone as a form of mediation that affects sound is a key part of being a good sound artist/scholar.

18:50 – 20:50 Fidelity

DeLaurentis says that high-fidelity is a fine goal, but that the aura of imperfection becomes “part of the music” on many recordings. “Fidelity is wonderful, however, you can walk to my CD shelf and you’ll still see Robert Johnson there.” Microphones lie, but it’s a noble lie.

The host mentions the phenomenon of cleaned-up, remastered recordings, on which old pieces are “rescued from the way they were recorded.” Sound is more manipulable now.

20:50 – 21:20 Third sound sent in by a listener – an old tugboat engine from the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle

Hydraulic, clanking, exhausted-sounding. The host calls it “forlorn,” and it reminds DeLaurenti of the fact that Stravinsky used to notate environmental sounds, especially mechanical ones.

22:10 – 24:25 Fourth sound sent in by a listener – tree branches rustling in Riverfront Park, recorded with a contact mic

Rubbery, internal. Again on the subject of how microphones mediate what we hear and thus experience, contact microphones (which are super cheap and easy to build) respond to sound in a very different way from mics that respond to disturbances in the air.

For those who haven’t gotten to it, the physics of sound is a great read. Once you understand that air is a medium through which sound travels, but that other materials (including walls, bodies, etc.) also conduct sound, you can understand the fundamental difference between normal mics and contact mics.

24:25 – 26:30 A listener calls in to talk about a mysterious sound – he confused Beluga whales for horses

“Whale recordings have been proliferating for the last forty years.” Water is also a medium for sound; marine animals have rich aural communication systems that we understand only in part. Don Ihde has written about whether what whales do is singing. But no conversation about whale sound is complete without consulting the work of Roger Payne.

The device of choice for recording underwater is called a hydrophone.

26:40 – 28:55 Fifth recording sent in by a listener – bats (slowed down)

Chirping, mild. Bats use a technique called echolocation to assess their surroundings. They send out chirps, and then interpret the resonance created by them to figure out their spatial position. Their ears are sensitive enough that they can immediately tell where they are, and what’s nearby. In familiar terms, this is akin to “seeing” with the ears. By listening to echoes, bats can tell the precise shape of nearby walls, whether there are bugs (food) in range, and even how those bugs might be moving.

The first thing the hosts notice is the variety of sound in the recording. “Our ears are not only receptacles, but they’re also filters.” At noisy, polyphonic cocktail parties, for example, we can focus on the sounds that matter to us, but a microphone could not reproduce that kind of filtering.

DeLaurenti suggests that we are “trained” to focus on specific, clearly relevant things, and to filter out noise. He says he’s spent years trying to untrain himself, to listen more broadly.

28:55 – 30:55 On listening polyphonically

DeLaurenti made an album of “surreptitiously recorded intermissions” at concerts. Other phonographers and composers have also specifically tuned in to crowds as a source of sonic interest.

Different people, even recording the same event or same type of event (which happens often), will inevitably come up with different recordings. This effort is predicated on deep listening and environmental awareness.

31:00 – 33:00 Sixth sound sent in by a listener – irrigation pipe

Round, small glissandos, fluid. The piece was made by Gordon Hempton, who DeLaurenti has written on. GH evokes place, depth. Master field recorder.

One more piece by Hempton. Dropping pieces of wood into a well. Fuzzy lasers, neurotic ghouls.

34:15 – 35:40 Station identification, ads, weather

35:40 – 37:30 Phonographers Union will perform in Seattle a few times in the coming days

DeLaurenti compares the Union to Yes and Deep Purple.

37:30 – 39:25 Seventh sound sent in by a listener – wasp in bedroom

High, pleading, slippery, human. Leads to a discussion of recording eerie things. DeLaurenti did this recently, only to figure out it was I-5 being repaved.

39:25 – 40:30 Eighth sound sent in by a listener – kitten in heat

Unnerving, piercing, moist. “Sound helps us see through walls … compresses the distance.” Sound is a source of information about the otherwise unaccessible. I would add that sound-without-vision is also, frequently, a major source of consternation. People dislike being aware of things whose identity they can’t confirm. Sound, then, can be an invasion of privacy, a way of asking for our attention (maybe repeatedly) without saying why. Neighbors, at least those I’ve spoken to, usually hate hearing each other. One of the great things about the Union is that they invert this relationship into one of fascination.

40:30 – 41:35 Ninth sound sent in by a listener – walking over a wooden floor with microphones attached to feet

Doom and leather. There are multiple labels devoted to releasing albums of field recordings.

41:35 – 43:05 Tinnitus

The host has tinnitus (my wife the doctor says TINN – it – tus, but apparently pronunciation varies), and puts an electronic “masking sound” in his ears to quell its effects. DeLaurenti adds that the ears actually emit sound. I’ve heard this physiological phenomenon described as akin to warming up a gong before hitting it, so that it will react with more sensitivity when struck. The eardrum is covered with little hairs that move constantly, keeping the drum “warm.” Their movement creates a sound of its own. Hearing is also sonorous.

43:05 – 44:25 Tenth sound sent in by a listener – walking down a muddy stream at midnight

How might this sound different if you hadn’t heard it was recorded at midnight? Part of a movement of “improvising with natural sound in natural spaces.” As a field recorded, it is sometimes necessary to provoke reactions in order to make a recording. A muddy creek bed on its own may not be recognizable, but once you walk through it you’ve got something clear to record. This is also true for, often, interview subjects.

45:00 – 46:05 Email from listener

Banal sounds can become musical. We hear with our entire bodies, in a sense. I would add that they also connect very powerfully to space – this particular listener hears wind and boat sound as “quintessential western Washington.” Our aural experiences are a huge part of the way we define and remember the areas we inhabit. Usually, cities are represented by their skylines, but cities also have sonic identities.

46:05 – 47:00 Eleventh sound sent in by a listener – drumming busker in San Francisco

Street performers improvise with objects at hand. Public performances have a particular immediacy.