As part of the Sonic Commons explorations at CTHQ, Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG) is developing a glossary of terms that unpack and critique the language of sound and power. Each month, between June-December, SIRG will share a new addition to the Sonic Index.

Sonic Index: An Abbreviated and Critical Glossary on Sound and Power

—by Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG)

Josh Rios, Matt Joynt, Anthony Romero

Key to developing any critical framework is the establishment of conceptual imagery and descriptive vocabulary, which in this case comes from a long-term creative and research-based engagement with sound, power, the built environment, legal frameworks, and most importantly, the liberatory practices of sonic sovereignty. While articulating imagery and terminology may seem detached from the world of political struggle, it is important to note that the concrete conditions of lived life also condition the imaginary and that the conceptual world is inseparable from the material world. Working through sonic research and practice, we have arrived at a variety of ideas about sound and power, most of which have their origins in dialogue within and beyond our collective. A fundamental condition of a dialogic practice is its open-ended incompleteness. As a result, this glossary is partial. Not only is it limited to a handful of terms which can and should be expanded, but each definition is an invitation to dub, edit, remix and transpose the conversation. A key concern we share with many others is the ongoing crisis of our ever-shrinking public sphere. Where do we engage in revelry, audacity, occupation and even the creation of new resonant territories that refuse the colonialist, capitalist, and neoliberal order? While sound may have a close relationship to control in the form of audio surveillance, sonic weapons, and racialized listening practices, sound is also a powerful world changing tool. As a resource readily available to the marginalized it can disrupt enclosure, communicate solidarity, affirm a people in the face of strategic erasure, and make sense of what has been made senseless by racial capital and colonial extraction. Lastly, the terms in this glossary do not arrive in the singular form, but carry with them the reverberations of something else. They bounce off the world, returning indexed and multiplied by the barricade, mass protest, and skyscraper. As part of the Sonic Commons explorations at CTHQ, Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG) is developing a glossary of terms that unpack and critique the language of sound and power. Each month, between June-December, SIRG will share a new addition to the Sonic Index.

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.