Concluding Remarks
In my telling of the story of sounds that extend from Almira and Anders’ home into Claudia’s apartment, Claudia’s reactions to them, and Almira’s subsequent attempts to adapt her movements, I have amplified the involuntary aspect of their relation. I conceive of the sonic as the core of this relationship, rather than a by-product, conceptualizing it as a sonic relation made up of Almira and Claudia’s sensorial and bodily engagement with each other when, for example, Claudia’s heart is ‘touched’ and Almira carefully places her feet.
As Voegelin writes, “Noise is a social signifier” that can determine “unseen boundaries” (Voegelin 2010: 45). This is exactly what happens when noise causes Almira and Claudia’s domestic-personal spheres to converge with each other: extending Almira’s sphere so that it bulges into Claudia’s home, rendering Claudia’s bedroom unavailable to her and underscoring her intense need for a boundary that separates the interior of her home from the exterior.
Years of being exposed to her previous neighbor Philip’s nightly parties have altered Claudia’s experiences of sound in her home, making her extremely sensitive to sounds seeping towards her from the apartment upstairs. Meanwhile, Almira’s experiences of various homes and notions of privacy have colored her expectations of what a home should be, her consideration for Anders who communicates with Claudia, as well as the way Claudia’s sensitivity to sound now influences the way Almira moves around inside her home – her most intimate, personal sphere.
In her book Relations: an Anthropological Account, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern describes how social relations – although, or perhaps because, they are at the core of most anthropological work – are rarely defined within anthropological literature, and she emphasizes the potential of not only defining them but of “making relations explicit” (Strathern 2020: 16). The sounds passing from Almira’s home into Claudia’s and the ways in which Almira restricts her bodily movements become concrete expressions of their relation. By amplifying the meaning of sound in this context, it becomes clear how the home and its borders, are important arenas for negotiations of personhood and space in the city. “Noise,” as Voegelin writes, “amplifies social relations and tracks the struggle for identity and space within the tight architectural and demographic organization of a city” (Voegelin 2010: 45).