Noise in Public and Private Space
Any analysis of eavesdropping in the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes must be understood in relation to studies of the modern soundscape, urban life, and practices of listening. In particular, the tapes must be contextualized within the larger history of noise and attempts to control it – attempts intertwined with civic politics. In their historical research, John Picker, Emily Thompson, and Karin Bijsterveld explore how changes in technology, architectural design, and acoustics altered the ways sound was conceptualized in Europe and the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While noise has always been part of social life and a subject of complaint, the concentration of unwanted sound in the nineteenth century increased “the frequency (as well as urgency)” of noise complaints (Thompson 2002: 116). Noise was rearticulated as a problem, a phenomenon that could be studied, managed, and controlled. In the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands, citizens formed lobbying groups that advocated for noise reform. These organizations worked to limit the types of sounds permitted in urban space. They lobbied for changes in urban zoning regulations and sought “to legislate the landscape of urban life, to control not only its physical appearance but also the behavior of those who inhabited it” (Thompson 2002: 125). In the Netherlands, these efforts resulted in local laws that attempted to restrict noise, although enforcement proved to be challenging, especially in the case of noise generated by neighbors (Bijsterveld 2008: 160–171). These efforts to control urban soundscapes were rooted in classist and xenophobic biases (Picker 2003: 41–81; Thompson 2002: 115–168). They focused on prohibiting the sonic productions of individuals – organ grinders, street musicians, vendors, and shopkeepers with radios and gramophones – whose activities violated bourgeois British and American notions “of a well-ordered city” (Thompson 2002: 124).
While efforts to define and control the public soundscape elicited mixed reactions and results, noise reformers, architects, and engineers had much more success “exerting control over the soundscape of private life” (Thompson 2002: 167). In the 1930s, architecture and acoustics merged in the construction of acoustically-insulated, soundproof buildings. Utilizing sound-absorbing materials in modern architectural designs, architects and engineers sought to control acoustic space and eliminate unwanted noise. By shifting noise control from the public domain of the street to the private domain of the home, modern acoustics became a commodity. Silence was no longer a public right but a private good. Just as noise reform sought to control the seemingly disorderly sonic expressions of members of the lower and working classes, architectural acoustics embedded silence in class hierarchies. Only those individuals who worked in modern office buildings or could afford a newly built home – typically members of the middle class – had access to this new quiet and controlled interior soundscape (Picker 2003: 41–81; Thompson 2002: 168–228).
Early twentieth-century efforts to control and commodify acoustic space embodied bourgeois ideals of privacy and domesticity. With the attempt to construct soundproof buildings, the expectation that interior space should be both quiet and private became especially pronounced. In their efforts to create quiet domestic spaces, the middle classes sought to “escape urban realities and attain a degree of separateness and self-definition within the home” (Picker 2003: 44). During this time, many white, middle-class families, increasingly mobile due to modernized transportation systems and the automobile, began moving out of the city into newly built suburban neighborhoods. In the United States, with the implementation of laws like the 1956 G.I. Bill, which gave World War II veterans access to low interest and no down payment mortgages, suburban life became increasingly accessible to working class (as well as lower middle class) families as long as they were white.[3] Indeed, the desire and capacity to move out of the city – with its diverse population, multi-unit dwellings, and varied soundscapes – was distinctly racialized (Lipsitz 2011). White families fled urban spaces for the quiet, controlled suburbs whose boundaries were secured by racial covenants and white supremacist mortgage policies. In these new suburban spaces, the domestic sphere became increasingly isolated, private, and quiet, far removed from the noise of neighboring apartments, the hustle and bustle of city streets, and, of course, the presence of racial minorities.
The suburban home, however, was by no means the only residential ideal in mid-century America. The urban apartment persisted throughout this period, representing a domesticity different to that of the suburban dream home – one more independent, cosmopolitan, and public (Marcus 1999; Wojcik 2010). Apartment buildings emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinct from other forms of urban and rural housing. Characterized, at least initially, as residences for the middle and upper-middle classes, apartments were seen as distinct from both the tenements and row houses occupied by the urban poor as well as the detached suburban home whose residents might have a similar class background but lack the bohemian ideals and desire for metropolitan access. As an “urban form of housing that combined the relatively private spaces of individual apartment units with the common spaces of shared entrances, staircases, and party walls, the apartment house embodied the continuity between domestic and urban, private and public spaces” (Marcus 1999: 2). The apartment functions almost as a microcosm of the city. It is a space that is at once individual and communal, an entry point to and an embodiment of the encounters and pleasures of city life.
Although urban permeability was an essential feature of apartment domesticity, this does not mean that neighbors’ sonic intrusions were embraced. Thompson cites several cases in which individuals took their neighbors to court, suing them (unsuccessfully) for their loud parties or constant fiddle playing (Thompson 2002: 127–130). Bijsterveld notes how in the Netherlands, columnists regularly discussed – with a touch of irony – the problems of neighborly noise. Alluding to noise abatement regulations, they bemoaned the onslaught of unwanted sounds while also mocking attempts at their policing, particularly through the purchase of pocket noise meters (Bijsterveld 2008: 171-178). In my own research, I found many news articles that discussed the problem of noise in urban apartments and reported an increase in noise complaints and sound control efforts (e.g., “Noise Complaints Growing” 1965: C15; “Apartment Residents Learn Fast About Sound Control” 1966: C19). A search of newspapers.com revealed over 100,000 apartment ads promising tenants a “quiet” home. Additionally, the postwar period also saw the first consumer-grade white noise devices appear on the market in the United States. These devices, such as the Marpac Sleep-Mate and Study Screen, produced ambient sounds designed to mask disruptive noises that threatened to disturb one’s rest or concentration (Hagood 2019: 75–115). They tackled the problem of noise in the home, not by silencing it, but by masking disruptive sounds with soothing, banal, peaceful noise.
When sounds permeate the boundaries of domestic space, individuals can either attempt to block them out, or they can choose to listen, embracing these sounds as part of their own private sonic sphere. Through this practice, residents turn from unwilling acoustic witnesses into active eavesdroppers. They transform uncontrolled noises that invade their domestic space into a source of entertainment, a secret sonic performance within the home. Unlike conversations in public space – where Erving Goffman asserts that communication is rarely restricted to the speaker and the designated recipient but is overheard and sometimes interrupted by unintended listeners, communications within the home are assumed to be private (1981: 129–140). Domestic space exists as a territory of the self, something over which individuals claim ownership, an extension of their bodies and identities (1981: 45–47). However, these territorial boundaries do not go uncontested. Sounds penetrate domestic space more easily than physical bodies. Crossing from one territory into another, these sonic traces can be claimed by multiple people. Through actively listening to these sounds, individuals can assert ownership – and consequently control – over their neighbors’ sonic performances, claiming them as part of their own personal territory.
By eavesdropping on and recording their neighbors, Eddie and Mitchell explicitly make a territorial claim, transforming Raymond and Peter’s voices into their own audio productions. In this sense, I regard their listening practice as not merely one of overhearing but of “over-hearing.” In a short essay on the topic, Jacob Smith uses the term “over-hearing,” not to refer to the accidental or surreptitious witnessing of others’ sounds (although this, of course, applies to the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings) but to describe “episodes in the cultural history of listening in which hearing is discursively framed as overactive, overindulgent, or excessive – when consumers of sound are thought to be listening too much or to the wrong sonic objects” (2016a: 225).[4] These modes of over-hearing, which include playing records backwards or at slowed speeds to access their alleged Satanic messages or hidden suggestive lyrics, involve both a playful violation of the intended uses of sound media and an excessive investment in these mediated sounds on the part of listeners. They are “techniques of popular listening that are irrational and even occult” (Smith 2016a: 225), the acoustic underbelly of the rational and scientific practices of the “audile technique” – not so much their opposite as their counterpoint (Sterne 2003: 87–177).
Although the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings do not fit neatly into the forms of mediated experimentation comprised in Smith’s examples of over-hearing, they follow a similar spirit. Eddie and Mitchell’s eavesdropping practices are excessive and over-involved, fundamentally transforming the act of hearing noise into listening to it. There is a somewhat cloudy distinction between the terms “hearing” and “listening.” As Kate Lacey notes, the two words have different etymologies. While “hearing” refers to the “perception and sensation of sound,” “listening” is more complicated. It emerges from multiple linguistic roots that both signify the act of “attention and giving to another” and, as with the old English word “list,” mean “to like, desire or lust to do something” (2013: 17). Eddie and Mitchell do not just “hear” Raymond and Peter’s explosive fights, they choose to listen to them. And they do more than merely listen. During their time at 237 Steiner, Eddie and Mitchell became obsessive eavesdroppers, not only listening themselves, but inviting others to listen with them, recording and distributing their neighbors’ voices. Just as Peter and Raymond’s fights violated the norms of domestic quiet and the sonic boundaries of the home, Eddie and Mitchell’s eavesdropping practice violated the norms of rational listening. They both overheard and “over-heard,” forging a listening subculture with their tapes. It is this closeness, this slippage between those recorded and those recording, that leads us to a discussion of the unheimlich in “Shut Up Little Man!”