Methodology
This article draws on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 as part of fieldwork with residents of multistory housing complexes as well as construction and housing professionals in Denmark.[1] These approximately 50 hours of interviews include about 30 detailed accounts of how residents experience sounds in their homes, with a particular focus on perceptions of home life and on when residents experience the sounds of their neighbors as disturbing.[2]
Rather than trying to select a representative sample of interviewees from the Danish population, my colleagues in this project and my goal in recruiting residents was to speak with as many neighbors as possible and as many people sharing the same building as possible. The residents interviewed represented a wide range of profiles in the Danish capital of Copenhagen and in the small town of Struer. Interviewees ranged from young adults in their twenties to retirees and from people involved in sound production for a living to individuals unaccustomed to using words to describe the sounds of their everyday lives.
Interviews were conducted in residents’ homes and usually included a tour of the apartment, which was guided by the inhabitant while I asked questions about daily habits, characteristic sounds, and the history of the home. As a means of eliciting descriptions of the sonic environment, most inhabitants were asked to sketch out a floor plan of their apartment and to mark and evaluate the sounds they regularly hear on the drawing. Another visual tool used to elaborate the conversation was a 24-hour wheel upon which the resident could indicate the periods in which they would value quiet, make noise, etc. The wheel and the floor plan offered a visual form to the sonic features of neighbor relations. When inhabitants marked the spots in their apartment where they often heard sounds from specific neighbors, the drawings became a spatial map of neighbors’ sonic influences on each other’s homes.