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.