Sonic Ruling Order (SRO)

The sonic ruling order defines, enforces, and naturalizes what sounds are permitted in public space, including new ambiguous configurations of space that are privately owned and publicly accessible such as plazas, atriums, and non-city parks. Among those shaping the ruling order of sonic public space are elected officials, policy makers, developers, landlords, and others who have an investment in private property and the city as a site of commercial exchange. They determine which neighborhoods will be subjected to the continuous din of an airport, which will receive a sound barrier against the roar of an interstate, and which will be monitored by gunshot detection technologies. While city police, municipal administrators, and private security are deployed to enforce legal definitions of noise, the ruling order also serves colonial racial capital by naturalizing dominant ideas about what constitutes proper and improper sonic practice. For example, new arrivals to gentrifying neighborhoods unattuned to the sonic life of long-time inhabitants expect the enforcement of noise ordinances as well as the informal prioritization of their sonic norms within the class-based, racial flows of suburbanization and urban renewal/removal. Allie Martin describes such sensorial transformations of neighborhoods as sonic gentrification. The sonic ruling order constructs sonic public space, not only through the physical enforcement of often ambiguous legal definitions of noise, but through the production of sonic values regarding what is good, proper, expected, abject, and antithetical to the interests of the materially dominant classes.