Sonic Citizenship
About the Messy and Fragile Negotiations With and Through Sound[1]
Marie Koldkjær Højlund, Anette Vandsø and Morten Breinbjerg
Introduction
In March 2020, the Danish government implemented a complete societal shutdown owing to the spread of COVID-19. As in many other countries, most citizens were asked to work from home; schools and universities were required to offer education online; cafes and public buildings were closed; and public transportation was stopped. The crisis brought forth a novel dynamic in the interplay between the state and its citizens. Some sociologists aptly characterized this situation as an "approximate state of emergency" (Nikolajsen 2020), underscoring how extraordinary it was for the European states to impose such severe restrictions on their citizens. Furthermore, the pandemic spotlighted the relationships among citizens themselves, accentuating their civic, sensory, and social responsibilities towards one another – a concept encapsulated by the Danish term medborgerskab (co-citizenship). Examples included keeping a distance or wearing a mask for the safety of others. Throughout this article, we adopt the term citizenship in this dual connotation, encompassing both the formal association with the nation-state and the social and sensory responsibilities towards fellow citizens.
In the introduction to the handbook Senses and Citizenships - Embodying Political Life, Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau and Julie Park argue that the sensorial aspects of citizenship, including the sonic, are an essential but highly under-analyzed area. They coin the term “sensory citizenship” to widen the concept of citizenship, analogously to medborgerskab. “Sensory citizenship” not only encompasses the rights and duties in nation states, but also includes the sensory aspects of participation in collectivities to either create or counteract forms of belonging. Through this lens the dialectic between sensory experience and ideological and political forces is revealed, thus making it possible to investigate systems legitimating particular kinds of citizenry, systems that are otherwise often hidden as normative ideologies naturalizing certain forms of belonging (Trnka et al. 2015: 1). Disregarding universalist conceptions of citizenship also opens to perspectives of those not included by virtue of e.g. gender, nationality or sexuality and helps renegotiate the very terms of hegemonic forms of sensory belonging and representation, stressing the bodily and sensory basis of engagement and exclusion.
The everyday sensory citizenship during the COVID-19 outbreak bore a discernible sonic dimension. This manifested in various forms, from the communal singing on balconies, where people tried to bridge the enforced social distancing through singing, to the surge in noise complaints stemming from heightened tensions in densely populated living conditions. Concurrently, there were notable shifts in the everyday soundscape, with reports indicating a decrease in human-made noise emanating from vehicles, juxtaposed against a noticeable increase in sounds originating from nonhuman sources, particularly the singing of birds.
In this article we posit that these instances of sonic citizenship, as observed during, and right after, the COVID-19 situation, are not exclusive to this extraordinary situation. However, the pandemic period seemed to catalyze communities' difficult relationships with sound. The profound and abrupt transformation in the social landscape of our daily lives accentuated aspects of our relationship with and through sound and listening that are generally applicable, but which often goes unnoticed in everyday (non-pandemic) life. Consequently, we propose that the concept "sonic citizenship" is a fruitful framework for the multitude of ways in which we, in the rhythms of our daily lives, form the aural background of each other, and how through our everyday sonic activities citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained. Sonic citizenship opens a discussion of how we aurally take part in and attune to our community, and who in the community has the privilege to raise their voice (to talk and make sound), a right to be heard (listened to), and how we conform to each other through attunement and regulation, and thereby assume the role of citizens. Sonic citizenship, as a concept, extends across various levels of the collective. It encompasses the micro-social intricacies of attunement – everyday, often unnoticed, habits of sonic interaction that shape our connections with those in our immediate vicinity. On a meso-level, it encompasses public negotiations within shared sonic spaces within a city. At macro-social levels, sonic citizenship pertains to the imagined communities of nations.
With the concept of sonic citizenship, we wish to build on and add to the framework for soundscape research, in later years referred to as the Soundscape Approach, as described for example in the ISO 12913 standard series on soundscape (Institution, T.B.S. 2014, 2018, 2019), building on the foundation of a soundscape tradition that Canadian music educator and composer R. Murray Schafer laid in the early 1970s. Through his studies, the ambition was to tune the world's sonic environment to the human ear, as indicated in the title of his ground-breaking 1977 work The Tuning of the World. Applying ideas of sonic citizenship, we argue that the effort of tuning the soundscapes of the world to the human ear needs to be complemented by an attuning approach that focuses on the negotiations in which we are constantly involved in our everyday life. The soundscape approach in the tradition of Schafer implies that the soundscape is there as a landscape that we can uncover and tune. Conversely, the attuning approach of sonic citizenship understands soundscapes as relationships and dynamic configurations to which we must continuously attune, and which are themselves reconfigured via breaks in habitual attunements.
We pursue our argument by presenting a theoretical overview on existing research centered on sonic citizenship in an introduction of four examples of everyday sonic citizenship in Denmark, during and right after the COVID-19 period: community singing during the pandemic; post-pandemic conflicts with soundboxes in public spaces; the close micro-attunements in our homes as a framework for both work and leisure during the pandemic; and, finally, the questions of the silencing of anthropogenic noise. With these examples we show how the changed conditions, under which we suddenly had to live because of the pandemic, exposed and actualized the sound challenges of communities in general. The examples deal with the right and duty to speak, listen, and obey[2] within the communities we are part of physically and digitally, and which also addresses the unequal conditions under which we have to enter these community contexts. In the latter part of the article, we consider how this framework, with its emphasis of habituating practices of attunement, relates to the soundscape approach with a specific focus on the development of the soundscape ISO-standards. Towards the conclusion of the article, we provide an outline of the methodological and theoretical implications of a sonic citizenship approach to the study of soundscapes. As such our motivation and aim with this article is twofold: first to suggest sonic citizenship as a fruitful concept for studying the messy and fragile relations of everyday soundscapes, and second to argue for its relevance in the context of the soundscape approach, both as a theoretical contribution as well as an opening for the relevance of developing attuning methods – such as practice-based, artistic, and design research – as a part of a mixed methods toolbox when doing soundscape research, analysis, and interventions.