Physical Proximity, Social Distance, and the Ethnographic Ear
The reading of Peter and Raymond’s apartment as the unheimlich double of Eddie and Mitchell’s home speaks to a deeper tension that runs throughout the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings: the proximity and distance between the eavesdroppers and the eavesdropped. The comedy, tragedy, politics, and ethics of the recordings are entangled with Eddie and Mitchell’s physical proximity and simultaneous social distance from their next-door neighbors. This double positioning is essential to their practice of overhearing (and over-hearing), recording, and, to some degree, the unheimlich performance present within their tapes.
Eddie and Mitchell’s “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes consistently set them apart from their neighbors. While Eddie and Mitchell may not have been able to afford a fancy apartment, the fact that they could move to the city at all is an indication of how utterly different their situation was as compared to their neighbors’. Unlike Peter and Raymond, both Mitchell and Eddie were able to eventually move out into comfortable homes of their own, far from 237 Steiner – in 2011 Eddie was a rare book dealer in Seattle, and Mitchell worked as an insurance agent in Wisconsin (Bate 2011). Mitchell and Eddie’s social, economic, and cultural status marked them as distinct from Raymond and Peter, not destined to follow the same path. Their homes, both before and after their brief tenure at Steiner Street, were in spaces and soundscapes far closer to the bourgeois domestic ideals of a quiet suburban home or cosmopolitan urban apartment than those occupied by Peter and Raymond. They were merely transient dwellers in poverty, slumming it for a brief period of time in their youth and looking or, rather, listening to their neighbors, first with horror and then with an almost tourist-like interest and curiosity.
I see Eddie and Mitchell’s home recording (at least initially) as a kind of field recording. Field recording, a term first coined in the 1930s to refer to the broad practice of non-studio sound recording performed by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, biologists, ecologists, musicians, sound artists, and even amateurs, has a complex and multilayered politics (Akiyama 2015). It has been used to document and preserve the languages, vocal intonations, and music of diverse groups of people, often those whose linguistic utterances and musical practices were thought to be in danger of disappearing – a gesture, of course, enmeshed with the politics of anthropology and the othering this brings (Brady 1999; Gitelman 1997: 265–290; Mullen 2008).[5] Similarly, field recordings have been used as a means of capturing the natural environment. Bird calls, whale sounds, and various ecosystems have been recorded for scientific study, environmental agendas, and new age entertainment (Ingram 2006: 126). Artists, composers, and academics have interrogated the aesthetics of everyday sounds, incorporating them into musical and artistic compositions and engaging in recording practices designed to represent various soundscapes (Akiyama 2015; Ingram 2006; Smith 2016b). Outside of these professional realms, amateurs have also been encouraged to engage in some forms of field recording. Promotional campaigns for home recorders encouraged consumers to use their new devices to document domestic milestones or capture exotic sounds from holidays, framing sound recording as a method for both documentary preservation and touristic remembrance (Bijsterveld and Jacobs 2009: 25–42).
Each of these field recording practices stems from a variety of motivations – ethnographic, scientific, preservationist, environmental, commercial, aesthetic, activist, sentimental – and entails different and sometimes ambiguous politics and ethical concerns. Many of these practices carry the risk of stimulating fetishization, othering, and exploitation, especially when the recordings engage with spaces and communities in which the sound recordist is an outsider. Here, the issue of informed consent is crucial. The act of recording and disseminating a person’s voice requires the consent of the person being recorded. The ethics of documentation demand transparency and explicit consent both for the making of the initial recording and for its subsequent use. Without this consent – a consent that must be given without manipulation and with an awareness of the structural inequities that shape its politics – this documentation becomes exploitation.[6]
Eddie and Mitchell’s mediated eavesdropping occupies an uncomfortable position in relation to the ethics of field recording. Eddie and Mitchell did not travel explicitly to document the urban poor, though their move to a non-gentrified area of San Francisco reveals an almost touristic motivation. Like other amateur recordists before them, their taping began in their own home. They documented voices and sounds heard through their thin walls and joined verandas. As such, they could lay a claim to the sounds penetrating their apartment. They did not ask Peter and Raymond for their consent to record their voices, but neither did they explicitly seek the pair out in order to document their sonic explosions. Rather, these explosions were unexpectedly forced upon them. Peter and Raymond’s voices invaded their home and violated the boundaries of their domestic space. They were recording within their own apartment and, in so doing, captured the voices of their neighbors. It is this dynamic that makes the ethics of the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings (at least initially) not entirely black and white. Peter and Raymond did not consent to being recorded, but, on the other hand, neither did Eddie and Mitchell consent to having their domestic space repeatedly assaulted by their neighbors’ yells or having their pleas for quiet met with threats.
Given their social disparity to their neighbors and outsider status within 237 Steiner Street, Eddie and Mitchell’s presence in the apartment building brings with it a kind of ethnographic distance that enables them to pay attention to Peter and Raymond’s noises in the first place. In interviews, Eddie mentions how the other residents of their apartment building, many of whom had substance abuse issues, suffered from unemployment, or engaged in illicit work, did not really notice or care about Raymond and Peter’s constant conflicts (Sausage 2003). Noise, as we know, is subjective. The sounds and vocal expressions that seem to violate the social order are not universal. As Yasmin Gunaratnam analyzes in her theoretical and ethnographic study of hospice care (2009), what is deemed acceptable in terms of sound – the volume and intensity of vocal expressions within certain spaces in particular – is culturally determined. Social position and cultural context determine norms of silence and noise, rendering certain kinds of sonic expressions, typically those shaped by race and class, unsettling, disturbing, and even frightening to those who have a different sonic acculturation.
It was only Eddie and Mitchell, two outsiders from the Midwest, who reacted in this way to their next-door neighbors’ fights. Their very decision to purchase a microphone, plug it into their home cassette player, and start recording Raymond and Peter sprang from fear. It was an attempt to gather evidence in case their neighbors’ violence suddenly became directed towards them. They were afraid of their neighbors and uncomfortable in a building whose soundscape violated the sonic norms to which they were accustomed. By assuming the position of ethnographer, Eddie and Mitchell asserted a degree of control over the sonic intrusions invading their home. Their mediation was an act of dominance – a means of transforming something frightening into something humorous, and eventually, something commercial. Therefore, Eddie and Mitchell’s physical proximity to Peter and Raymond did not lead to understanding or intimacy. Instead, this proximity, capitalized on through their technical know-how and sonic sensibility, provided the site for creative production and anthropological othering.
In making and especially in circulating their recordings, Eddie and Mitchell engaged in an act of middle-class control in line with a long history of noise abatement activism such as documented by Thompson, Picker, and Bijsterveld. This situation is where the ethical choices regarding the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings move from uncomfortable to deeply troubling. As Eddie and Mitchell shift from the role of scared neighbors, recording explosive fights as an act of self-preservation, to that of active media producers, they begin to cultivate Peter and Raymond’s hostility for entertainment. They distribute, trademark, and monetize their recordings. And in so doing, they transform Peter and Raymond’s domestic disputes into commodified ethnographic spectacles – all without the informed consent of their subjects.