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.

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
by Gordon Hempton
Free Press, 2009
368 pps., $26 ($4.20 used on Abebooks.com)

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
by Steve Goodman
The MIT Press, 2009
240 pps., $35 ($25.20 on Amazon)

“As for cost-benefit analysis,” Gordon Hempton begins a climactic soliloquy to an audience of frowning Federal Aviation Administration agents, “we have three million visitors to Olympic Park each year. We’ve had two timber mills close. I have seen the poverty in the town of Port Angeles. I live there at the park. To be designated the world’s first quiet place and to develop quiet tourism in that area – let me tell you, I do a lot of traveling and it is so noisy. There is a tourist need for this quiet place. It would be a tremendous benefit.” ^[1]

Hempton is a professional sound artist with a Utopian environmental streak, and he arrived in Washington D.C. with a mission. His conversation with the FAA concludes a cross-country funeral for a time when you could still hear yourself think, damn it, a death he’d like very much to undo. He blames noisy machines and an etiquette deficit for the deadly din, but is pitching his one square inch of silence campaign in an effort to turn things around and restore some peace and quiet.

^[2]

The proposition is simple: reroute a few planes each day, and the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park will be perfectly free of man-made noise, especially the mechanical kind, at all times. According to Hempton’s empirical calculations – and he is an impressively-credentialed listener – the Hoh is the last place in the United States where this condition might yet be possible. But if one place can reach that state, perhaps visitors will awaken to the value of silence, and spread the word.

Hempton’s mission is deeply sincere, and he can be convincing. His field recordings in national parks are among the loveliest I’ve heard, infinitely more attentive to species and their spaces than garden variety “nature sounds” recordings. (The book comes with a CD that aurally annotates each leg of his trip.)

The most urgent argument in the book is that human beings are not the only sonically-aware species on the planet. When a given ecosystem gets noisy, animals that communicate through sound must either compensate or leave. A substantial body of research attests to these ecological effects; Hempton gives us a visceral sense. Further, for species that instinctively associate loud noise with predators, industrial sound will always compel them to flee – there is no potential to rationalize the source, as there may be with humans. Without question, sound needs to be folded into any environmental conversation that wants to consider other species.

Unfortunately, in the move from awareness to political action, things get murkier. Except for brief passages where he admits a nostalgia for the quaint aurality of trains, baseball, and local restaurants, Hempton paints all human sound as a blight. If you’d never lived in a city, you might think they existed to steal your hearing – thank goodness the trip doesn’t run through New York. Bluntly, the wholesale dismissal of urban space for containing too much human sound is a brash move when more than half the world’s population lives in such places.

The reader may want to know: What options exist for urbanites? This isn’t really Hempton’s concern. During the meeting with the FAA, however, something predictable happens, suggesting that perhaps it should be: the conversation turns to money. Flight patterns cannot be rerouted, the FAA reps insist, because even a brief deviation from a straight line costs precious minutes, which means burning extra fuel, which means significantly higher ticket costs in a climate where even pretzels are a luxury.

Hempton fantasizes that airline passengers might be willing to pay more for the knowledge that their flight was not disrupting a delicate serenity below. Even if that were true, this moment in the book compels us to reflect on the entire journey: the journalist drove a rattling VW bus across the entire United States, with a brief intermission to fly back to Washington state from Chicago, and at the end shipped the bus back coast-to-coast to avoid it breaking down on the way. The amount of noisy travel time logged in the name of silence here was tremendous. And that is not to mention the equipment – cell phones, laptops, noise meters – that had to be manufactured and shipped, nor the importation of gas, and so forth. I mention these things not to paint Hempton as a hypocrite, which I have no reason to think him, but to suggest that in a globalized, capitalist world, human noise (and pollution more broadly) is a consequence of everything we undertake – including activism. There are simply too many people on the planet, with too many modern tendencies that speak to plenty of legitimate needs, to think that we can return to a noiseless Utopia. Even the success of Olympic Park as a mecca for quiet-seekers would be self-defeating, once too many people showed up. The only way around this would be a capitalist dystopia in which everyone was isolated, all the time, in their own soundproof pod, a future that Hempton is too much of a humanist to be tempted by.

The challenge thus becomes creating a thoughtful and ethical soundscape, one that doesn’t bother portraying human sound as unnatural since we all know it’s inevitable – one that thinks about the modern sonic environment like an architect and a good citizen.

The book that takes us there remains to be written. (If it arrives as a book at all.) But in the meantime, Steve Goodman offers an opening. The appeal of his new monograph, “Sonic Warfare,” is to consider the politics of sonic frequency in addition to volume, specifically within capitalism.^[3] Though the distinction between volume and frequency may seem merely technical, it certainly has its consequences. Differently pitched sounds do different things to bodies, within the audible spectrum as well as above and below it. Unfortunately, the recent history of research on the effects of frequency has largely taken place within the military and industry for the sake of coercion. Paranoid Cold War technicians failed to find a sonic magic bullet that might paralyze the enemy’s will, but modern security forces make liberal use of illiberal technologies like the Mosquito, the LRAD, and the Rumbler. This is an addition to Muzak and other vaguely musical decorations meant to keep consumers docile.

If noise, for Hempton, is the consequence of neglect – a mound of radioactive garbage that humanity refuses to stop feeding – for Goodman it is itself an ecosystem in need of tending. He argues that the human sonic environment has been polluted not only by sound that moves bodies through space (a “sonic architecture of control”^[4]), but by sound that conditions people for things that haven’t even happened yet – a creepy futurity that fills us with dread. Instinct and culture here are separate but complementary domains: Noise above 80 decibels activates a low-level fight-or-flight response in the human body, making us jittery, and the effect is enhanced through specific sounds: “burglar alarms, ring tones, alarm clock, fire alarms: a whole directly affective asignifying semiotics of emergency, a call to action, the inducement of a state of readiness, initiating a kind of technical antiphony. Wake up! Run! Beware! Respond! Act!” ^[5] Noise suddenly sounds less like a pollutant and more like a deliberate form of control, rewarding some while limiting others.

In less intentional moments, sound may also behave like a virus, moving among hosts. Earworms, for example, extend the ubiquity of sonic logos (Goodman suggests that corporations are well-attuned, these days, to sonic branding) long after they’re played aloud. This type of virus is a mild but not insignificant problem for the host, who during infection may pass the worm on to others. Meanwhile, the viral metaphor is an apt description for modern music distribution, in which piracy and traditional control are harder and harder to tell apart. To his credit, Goodman does not commit to an equation of pirate resistance with liberation – like a virus, sound mutates, and will certainly have unintended effects, both good and bad. The book ends with a strong rebuke to the techno-optimists: “The military makes nonstandard use of popular music, while underground music cultures make nonstandard use of playback technologies, communications, and power infrastructures.” ^[6] Once technologies exist, they are politically up-for-grabs.

However, he is sensitive to the fact that sounds are not only made to control, but also to empower. Special consideration is given (a la Kodwo Eshun and Paul Gilroy) to figures in black music who thematize race as an ongoing history of alienation, including the least-literal-luminaries of free jazz, Detroit techno, and DJ culture, and who offer their art in all sincerity as a means of short-circuiting the system. Deep bass, for example, felt more than heard, can be euphoric, resulting in the precise opposite effect of crowd-scattering security devices.

Still, as much considered attention as it pays to artwork, “Sonic Warfare” is neither a piece of music appreciation nor a map, through music, to liberation. Rather, it offers frequency as a much-needed addition to the field of sonic ecology, and draws our attention as ecologists to the realm of human relations. It is in fact tempting to say that, despite their often profound differences as writers and philosophers, Hempton and Goodman actually complement one another as sonic ecologists. They share, if nothing else, a defiant stance toward the predatory tendencies of capitalism. And Goodman’s gesture toward frequency is one that cannot be taken too seriously by someone like Hempton. Simply put, this is because other animals hear at different frequencies than we do – a dBA reading says little about how human noise affects bats, since the bulk of their communication occurs too high in the frequency band for us to pick up with our ears.

The trick, now, is to develop a sonic ecology sophisticated enough to tell us something about the interworkings of biology – not just human biology – and capitalism.

Footnotes

^[1]
Hempton, p. 311

^[2]
Hempton, CD accompanying “One Square Inch of Silence.” Track 5.

^[3]
Hempton measures everything in dBA, a variation on standard decibels that assigns different frequencies specific weights according to how loud we hear them, rather than as absolute pressure in the air.

^[4]
Goodman, p. 64

^[5]
Goodman, p. 66

^[6]
Goodman, p. 194

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/04/review-3-sonic-ecologies/feed/ 5 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/01/open-thread-acoustic-ecology/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/01/open-thread-acoustic-ecology/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:21:49 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=1079

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.)

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/01/open-thread-acoustic-ecology/feed/ 11 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/10/atlas-sound-a-typology-of-sound-maps/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/10/atlas-sound-a-typology-of-sound-maps/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:24:44 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=939
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 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?

—

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 … ? ”

sonicWarfare, by Heidi Boisvert. 1:37.

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.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/10/atlas-sound-a-typology-of-sound-maps/feed/ 3 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/12/22/noise-the-solution/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/12/22/noise-the-solution/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:06:37 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=842 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?

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

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