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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 Legal Space (SLS)

The modern city is constituted by a range of social, economic, and spatial relations, all of which are deeply impacted by an ambiguous legal system that claims objectivity as it serves the interests of power. By extending the legal space of the city to include sound, the ruling order not only claims control over the spatial territory of property, but the spatial territory of the air as it listens for sounds that signal disruption, transgress enclosure, and bleed into commercial and private property. The logics of sonic legal space intersect and overlap at scales ranging from extralegal building policies, to city, state, and national regulations. Municipal governments—expanding on national standards—have implemented a litany of procedures and policies to control the sonic space of the city, including permit applications for busking/block parties and noise ordinances regulating boomboxes, car radios, and the crows of roosters. State control over the sonic space of the city also includes listening tools used to weaponize the idea of certain sounds in the justification of social control and armed enforcement. Shotspotter (renamed Soundthinking), for example, uses audio sensors placed throughout the city to detect gunshots and alert police to their locations. Activist campaigns to end contracts between cities and gunshot detection corporations cite the technology’s direct links to the carceral state, its exorbitant price tag, and inconclusive results (overall, 88.72% of incidents flagged by ShotSpotter end with police finding no incident of gun-related crime). Since 2018, the City of Chicago has spent approximately $49 million dollars contracting gunshot detection companies. As sound accrues associations of race and class under regimes of capital, people of color and the poor are inordinately impacted by the uneven application of citations, fines, policies, permits, the police, and surveillance used to legitimize ruling class dispositions of taste and social control.

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.