Sonic Mutualism (SM)

Sound migrates. It stubbornly crosses enclosed and semi-enclosed property demarcations where it meets a social world of listeners who have been culturally trained to understand certain sounds as intrusive noise and others as permissible or welcome. How do we manage complex, overlapping and often conflicting desires and expectations regarding sound and public space? Especially when sonic social life, which possesses the potential to figuratively and literally rattle the architectures of control, defies normative barriers between public and private life. How we perceive and navigate such dynamics is inherently political. Without centering strong interpersonal relationships based on proximity and community, a general sonic antagonism can easily transform into a life-threatening event when police or individuals acting as state-proxies use the farce of quality of life to justify racialized sonic fears and class-based expectations of criminality. The cultural idea of noise reveals how intensely our ability to deal with social conflict is reduced to the narrow outcomes of state-sanctioned mediation or the violence of informal state proxies who internalize state authority. The often dire consequences of our inability to mediate conflicting sonic desires and expectations foregrounds the need for negotiating the various feelings we may have about the sounds of the city. Sonic mutualism prioritizes social relations over property relations, while making space for antagonisms that do not defer to state mediation.

A central question for sonic mutualism is, what should we do when we hear sounds that we don’t like? This developing protocol seeks to address the question of how to interrupt internalized biases that arise when encountering sonic antagonisms:
1.) Refuse the cultural notion of silence
2.) Reserve judgement
3.) Disobey your internalized cop
4.) Allow yourself to experience curiosity
5.) Allow yourself to feel discomfort
6.) Tune your ear to the cultural history around you
7.) Exercise the capacity to hold difference
8.) Learn who your neighbors are and get invited to the party.

There is nothing noisier than the party you are not invited to.

Sonic Sovereignty

In the production and imposition of state legal fictions, sovereignty tends to refer to a nation’s authority over its so-called jurisdiction. However, critiques of settler colonialism allow us to challenge the power of the state by reflecting on pre-settler sovereignty as the immutable power of Indigenous people to determine and affirm collective community. While the former pivots on an axis of control and property, the latter is oriented toward relationality. Antithetical to neoliberal emphasis on individual agency, sovereignty “is realized by a people, not one person,” Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang note. At the same time, a people is neither a uniform collective nor a group of discrete individuals, but is intersubjective. Considering the shared and co-constituted making of a people foregrounds the importance of negotiating emergent uses of public space. For us, sonic sovereignty refers, in part, to the audible tension between competing and concurring assertions over territory, whether they are state oriented or realized by a people. Sonic sovereignty includes practices that have been formally addressed by law, as well as those that are outside of – or not yet criminalized by – the law. The collectively understood sonics of the underclasses affirm community through the social construction of diverse affective and aesthetic spaces of shared cultural knowledge, resisting authoritarian modes of social policing. Speaking about sonic public life in Washington D.C., Allie Martin says, “When you have these big protests and you have these big go-gos in the street, for a moment, for a day, for an hour, those are Black neighborhoods regardless of who owns the buildings on every corner.” Such practices call into question the state’s singular authority to define and redefine sensorial expectations within its so-called jurisdiction.

Sonic Insurgency (SI)

Attuning the senses to who is listening and what is heard not only reveals the sonic ruling order but also insurgent sonic life. Referring to a wide range of activities, sonic insurgency includes both formal militant rebellion against the ruling order and the everyday practices of the sonic otherwise that dominant society finds disagreeable, interruptive, unpalatable, or frightening. Sonic insurgency includes coordinated acts meant to challenge social control such as political address, call-and-response chants, noise strikes, radio jamming, protest songs, and exercising the right to remain silent. At the same time, it refers to those practices and activities not designed to overtly challenge the established order, but that nevertheless risk an agitated response by the state or an individual acting either as a state proxy, a boss, or the police. The postal worker who carries a portable speaker on their route to lessen the tedium. The youth who hides earbuds under their hoodie to tune out authority. The woman of color in public “talking too loudly” on her cellphone who, as Jillian Hernandez notes, is perceived as aesthetically excessive by white supremacist standards. When simply living becomes an act of subversion in itself, everyday sonic practices also function as rebellion, deliberate or not. To the subject living under domination, intentionality and non-intentionality are pointless ends in an abstract binary. Beyond the individual, sonic insurgency includes the sounds that accompany large-scale organized forms of living-as-subversion like cookouts, quinceañeras, birthday parties, block parties, church functions, family reunions, and powwows. As the sonic ruling order fortifies its dominion through the production and enforcement of sonic legal spaces, sonic insurgency reterritorializes public and private life and asserts sonic sovereignty. It is within the convergence of auditory social life, public space, and covert and overt refusals, risks, rebellions, and transgressions that sonic insurgency sounds out. 

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.