Sound in Context
In recent years, the implications of noise pollution have been the focus of attention across disciplines. From the natural to the social sciences, the concerns are alarming: the abundance of sound is a health threat (Goines and Hagler 2007; Basner et al. 2014; Kohut 2015; Mayor 2018) or, as Reybrouck, Podlipniak and Welch (2019) pose it, a non-specific biologic stressor. There are, however, many assumptions implied in these ideas. Why is it that we refer to noise when it comes to pollution? And by contrast, why is it that, when it comes to health, we refer to sound (as, for example, in the trend of “sound healing”)? Sonic health and noise pollution seem to be opposites, but are they not on the same spectrum?
What exactly qualifies as sound and/or as noise? Despite the many attempts to discuss sound beyond what is audible, there is a tendency to qualify sound within a specific audible spectrum, usually the human audible spectrum (Horowitz 2012; Trower 2012; Stocker 2013). But when does sound turn into noise, and what are the main sources of noise? According to cultural theorist Tom Kohut, “(s)ince the Western Medieval period, noise has been defined as ‘unwanted sound,’ which renders noise a subjective phenomenon dependent on listeners' particularities” (Kohut 2015: 5). Does this mean then that noise is a subcategory of sound? According to Kuwano et al., “it is true that the term is an important clue for estimating the sensation or emotion” (Kuwano et al. 1991: 423). But, as Kohut adds, “noise is always in excess of delimitation” (Kohut 2015: 5). Within this line of thought, noise is a sound that cannot be defined or organized; it is an excess, a disturbance in communication. Noise is unpredictable; it is chaotic. Therefore, noise does not follow a structure that can be categorized. In its complexity, noise is wild.
Often the discussion contrasts noise to natural sound (Goodman 2010), but that too does not suffice, for “nature is a transcendent term” (Morton 2009: 16). Indeed, “living next to a waterfall might expose one to decibel levels comparable to living next to a highway” (Kohut 2015: 6), taking the difference between sound and noise beyond volume. If noise cannot be automatically related to volume and if it can be described as “unwanted sound,” it follows that noise is contextual, mostly depending upon the judgment of a listener. And if noise is context dependent, so is sound: sound is sensation and vibration, and it depends on matter and propagation . Besides, a sound is never just a sound: sound is a compound of many particles, variables, and conditionings. Sound is plural.