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.