1.2. The City: Soundboxes as Local Sonic Citizenship
In his thesis “Inventing Havana in Thin Air: Sound, Space, and the Making of Sonic Citizenship” (2017) the Canadian sound and communication scholar Vincent Andrisani presents sonic citizenship as a concept for citizens' joint production and enactment of the local acoustic space. Following Andrisani, sonic citizenship presupposes an acoustic space that is neither politically controlled (imposed on the citizens) nor an expression of organized dissent or activism. Instead, this acoustic space emerges from the daily activities of the local population – through the way they listen and aurally express themselves in their everyday life (Andrisani 2017: 5). Sonically, it is a dynamic environment that alternately stretches out and compresses, continuously diluting and condensing in a multiplicity of overlapping rhythms and events. Central to Andrisani’s work is the concept of trans-liminal listening, which he uses to describe how citizens, through listening to sound propagation through open doors and windows, from behind the neighbor’s hedge or through the wall of the next-door apartment, become sonically knowledgeable and part of their social environment. From partaking in and attuning to their soundscape, people exercise sonic citizenship.
During the pandemic the trans-liminal nature of sound became an increasing problem as noise complaints reached new heights. The use of portable soundboxes in public urban spaces became a much-debated issue.[3] As people were not allowed to visit bars or discotheques, they would play music from soundboxes in parks or other public places. Historically, disputes about noise are common, not least in urban areas. From the Roman poets we know that noise was already an issue in ancient Rome.[4] Since the mid-nineteenth century, we have become particularly aware of noise problems because of the mechanization and industrialization of western societies (Bijsterveld 2012). The possibility of amplifying music that came with the invention of sound media such as the gramophone and the radio at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the mobility of battery-powered sound players from the mid-1970s, plays a role in the history of noise conflicts in public spaces. In the 1950s, citizens even filed lawsuits against public transport companies for their use of Muzak, advocating for the “right to an unannoyed journey” and “freedom of attention” (Russo 2009: 2). With Muzak the ubiquitous background music (Kassabian 2013) was coupled with capitalistic interests in creating specific kinds of citizens: consumers, commuters, workers, etc., demonstrating how questions regarding sonic citizenship relates to more than the freedom of speech, or the right to be heard. A key concern of sonic citizenship also involves being able to listen to, and pay attention to, what one wants (Vandsø 2023). The lawsuits were of course lost but the complaints over unwanted sound in urban spaces have been ongoing ever since. This demonstrates how soundscapes are interwoven with the interests of various stakeholders, negotiated via their sound production, their acts of listening, and their struggle to maintain some freedom of attention (Bijsterveld 2012).
This struggle to determine who has the right to fill the urban space with sound and who has the freedom to listen to what they want was emphasized by the proliferation of portable soundboxes in urban space during the corona lockdowns. Contemporary portable soundboxes with their high quality and sound pressure levels can easily cause an increase in noise conflicts in public spaces. These conflicts often unfold between revelers and residents. Discussions revolve around who has the right to sonically express themselves in a particular place, how loudly, and for how long. Public authorities are often involved through citizen complaints or by virtue of the duty of the police to uphold the applicable rules on noisy behavior in public spaces. The noise conflicts are also seen in public debates: different arguments are put forward, ranging from those who believe that further bans and political action are needed, to those who see the city as a place where one must expect a certain level of noise, and where noise is a condition to which citizens must adapt.
Conflicts about noise in public space relate to what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2006) refers to as distributed sensibility. Rancière’s thesis concerns the relationship of the individual to the collective, and questions regarding which speech and whose voices are audible. This relationship is negotiated and coordinated among citizens, and between citizens and authorities; it concerns the tension between the individual right to express oneself and let one's voice (or sound) be heard versus the duty to listen and ultimately obey the formal or informal norms, rules, and laws that apply for the benefit of the collective good. The relationship between the individual, the collective, and the authorities is asymmetric, because the authorities can ultimately impose restrictions on noisy behaviors, as well as the individual’s right to speak.
Using a term from zoology, conflicts about noise can be described as “territorial challenges.” Through the trans-liminal nature of sound, an acoustic territory is established within which the sound is audible, but that acoustic territory can overlap with other territories and hereby cause conflict. "The sound occupies our house and our lives," (Willumsen 2021, our translation) a woman desperately complained in a Danish newspaper interview about the noise from mainly young people's use of soundboxes in a city park in Aarhus next to where she lives. The woman perceived the boundaries of her private space to be flooded by the sound from soundboxes, and her home, as both a physical and an imaginary space, thus became uncontrollable to her.
Additionally, we can observe that post-phenomenological activism is spreading as a new element in conflicts about noise, as citizens make use of sound recordings and sound pressure measurements to document the nuisance that, for example, soundboxes create. American philosopher Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology describes how our perception of the world, and in this case acoustic phenomena, are technologically mediated. Post-phenomenology is based on the general philosophical understanding that technologies, through amplification and reduction, shape our way of recognizing, being, and acting in the world. Today, most citizens are equipped with relatively advanced measuring equipment by virtue of their mobile phones and apps, which they can use for documentation in noise conflicts. Here the technology itself becomes an actor in the conflict, which is a general theme with regards to the debates concerning sound boxes.
In relation to the increasing number of complaints about the use of soundboxes in public spaces, the then councilor for technology and environment in Aarhus municipality was asked, right after the pandemic, if the problem was caused by the legislation not keeping up with the technological development of powerful speakers like the soundbox. He replied that the problem is not the technology itself but the moral attitude of the citizens and the lack of mutual respect and consideration for each other. Using an analogy, he said: “Just because you have a weapon, you shouldn't use that either. Rather, it is the individual's responsibility to show consideration for others. And I think it is misunderstood if you think that we as a municipality can rectify the results of bad parenting” (Willumsen 2021b, our translation). Similarly, the Danish audio equipment company Hi-Fi Klubben includes the following admonition in an advertisement for the soundbox: "You can't always count on your neighbors to be in as much of a party mood as you. With great power comes great responsibility – so use your SOUNDBOKS with care!” (Hi-Fi Klubben 2021, our translation)
American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow is famous for stating that “if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail” (Maslow 1966: 16). Hence, the question is whether technology is an actor that, in the context of soundboxes, prompts users to turn up the volume or whether the responsibility falls solely on the moral habitus of the user or on the legislation that must regulate their use. However, as the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour has shown, determining who the actor is when we talk about technology is not that simple. Is it the weapon that kills citizens or is it the citizen who uses the weapon in question? Latour’s answer is that the agency is distributed between the human and the nonhuman, creating a “hybrid actor composed (for instance) of gun and gunman” (Latour 1994: 33).
We suggest that sonic citizenship has an explicit post-phenomenological implication. Noise conflicts demonstrate how sonic citizenship – despite “citizen” being the key word - does not merely refer to the actions of humans but also to the technological, or the distributed agencies between human and technology. In addition, we see how our everyday soundscapes are saturated by different actors and stakeholders and their specific interests and not just by sounds: there are laws, regulations, formal and informal norms, private actors, technologies, and technology vendor-interests at play in creating our sonic backgrounds. These diversified interests become apparent once sound is experienced as a problem, as it is when we talk about noise conflicts. Key to the concept of sonic citizenship is that we live in and with sound, and this sonic milieu is never external to the social. Our relation to sound is therefore full of negotiations, but also – as we will argue in the following subchapter – on a more subtle and often nonconscious level: attunements.