1.3. The Home: Private Sonic Citizenship
The fact that families were largely forced to allow work, school, and leisure to take place at home during COVID-19 made it necessary to renegotiate the family's sound activities to avoid cacophony and, in both a concrete and metaphorical sense, disharmony. Daily sounds from the activities and behaviors of family members, roommates, and neighbors suddenly filled our lives, and they significantly changed the soundscapes of the dwelling, the housing community, the apartment blocks, and/or the neighborhood. While the other cases we have discussed concerned citizens' rights, duties, and opportunities in relation to a local or national community, the situation in the home concerns the close relations with family, roommates, and neighbors in a time when work and school went online. These new living conditions raised new sonic problems and accentuated the challenges of the individual's relationship to the aural community, including the boundary between the private and the public; work and school activities now had to take place at home and, for some, even in the same room with others. This situation made clear that, even in our private spheres, we are always connected via sound to larger communities. The problem of the blurred lines between the public and the private during the lockdown must be seen in relation to the cultural fact that the home, at least in a Scandinavian context and according to the Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, is often seen as the last bastion against the rapidly growing modernization, regulation, and rationalization of society (Gullestad 1991: 484). Thus, the ongoing work of holding this bastion and maintaining a boundary between the private sphere and the outside world was challenged from within when the workplace moved into our homes. Consequently, the challenges of online homework, school, and studies were recurring themes in the media's reports. They made it clear that citizens’ different socio-economic conditions determine the acoustic conditions under which they balance their work and personal lives, regardless of the location or size of their living environment
The challenge of managing the often-messy sonic citizenship at home was followed by the fear that unintended sounds from one's private surroundings would spread to the online communities that now represented citizens’ workplaces. Therefore, the boundary between the private and the public became something that you had to work more intensely to maintain. The English anthropologist Tom Rice, discussing a hospital and its patients, has described a patient’s fear of their private sounds leaking into a public space as a form of sonic incontinence. In a hospital study, he observed how the patients, through a panaudic (instead of panoptic) self-regulation, adapted to constantly being surrounded by other patients who could always hear them (Rice 2003). Similarly, the fact that the digital technologies that surround us are potentially constantly listening seems to contribute to a similar fear of sonic incontinence and may lead to an internalized panaudic self-regulation. An article on the website of Danish Broadcast Corporation reports that every third Dane believes that their electronic devices listen in on their conversations at home (Mirzaei-Fard and Moltke 2020). The German anthropologist Holger Schulze describes how the internalization of ubiquitous mediated listening leads to a surveillance sensology (sensory ideology) by which our senses are attuned to ubiquitous surveillance, which can lead to us putting restraints on ourselves and to a domestication of the senses (Schulze 2019: 336).
We see here how sonic citizenship at home during the pandemic complicates practiced citizenship at a fundamental level, as the boundary between private and public is not determined in advance but is one that we, as citizens, continuously maintain, negotiate, and handle sonically. Here it becomes particularly clear that we are always part of acoustic communities, even in our private spheres. In the article "Sound and the Korean Public: Sonic Citizenship in the Governance of Apartment Floor Noise Conflicts" (2016), the Korean sociologist Eun-Sung Kim analyzes how noise negotiations are handled in housing complexes, of which there are many in South Korea, via either technocratic or cooperation-based management. Technocratic governance involves external investigations, which are subsequently set out as general rules, while collaborative governance is upheld through citizen meetings and investigations governed by a committee of residents, which lead to voluntary agreements between the residents on guidelines related to noise. Kim shows how our relationship with the sounds around us is determined by diverse conditions that cut across social, cognitive, material, and legal (such as the legal noise limits) horizons; the design and nature of the architecture and building materials; and the meeting between different types of citizens with different circadian rhythms and family forms. Kim concludes that the various studies and negotiations result in a collective sonic knowledge, which comes to define the norms corresponding to a shared idea of who counts as normal or abnormal listeners.
In Danish anthropologist Sandra Lori Petersen's report on neighborhood noise in Denmark, similar themes recur. She presents ideas for practicing sonic citizenship or “ways towards creating an acoustic community” (Petersen 2020: 7). For Petersen, negotiations of neighborhood noise entail shifting the focus from the individual to the community, and she suggests acoustic tours and the preparation of joint neighborhood noise manifestos as possible solutions. With both Kim and Petersen, we see how concrete negotiations about sound are central to sonic citizenship in the private sphere. In addition, they both emphasize that it is not just our individual cognitive conditions – for example, how sensitive we are to sound – that determine our soundscape in the home, but also the material nature, size, etc., of our home as well as other socio-economic aspects. Although the concept of sonic citizenship, to some extent, puts citizens at the center, we must also look at the agency of material conditions and broader distributed agency to understand how it unfolds. This conclusion is in line with the one we presented in relation to the noise problems related to soundboxes. In the case of domestic housing, however, the specific materiality and socio-economic conditions are a less evident factor because they do not stand out as specific sonic features.
Interacting with the sounds of others inside the private sphere also has a positive side: it links us to, and defines, the community in which we are included. The sounds of others indicate everyday routines, rhythms, and tasks, functioning as information about the actions that take place in our immediate vicinity. Petersen’s study on neighbor noise not only contains accounts of noise nuisances between neighbors but also testifies to the feeling of security and a sense of belonging that comes from knowing that you are not alone – that your neighbor’s rhythm is recognizable and understandable in the daily humdrum. Here, the consequence of the trans-liminal nature of sound is not the emergence of a territorial conflict, as we saw with the sound boxes, but, similarly to Andrisani's study of urban neighborhoods in Havana, an opportunity to understand oneself through sound as part of a collective and a social formation. In June 2021, when Danish society began relaxing Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, journalist and author Felix Thorsen Katzenelson described in the Danish newspaper Politiken how the summer's backyard soundscape was changed by people's open windows: "The whole building becomes a large open space with the yard as a sensory amplifier” (Katzenelson 2021, our translation). In addition to providing the opportunity to feel part of a sound community and thus to be "invisible guests at each other's dinners," the shared soundscape is also used to orientate oneself affectively in a common circadian rhythm in which one can tune the inner clock with the sounds of the backyard. The sonic incontinence or the trans-liminal sound is, therefore, in the true sense of the word, transgressive for better and for worse, as Katzenelson's description indicates. In this way sonic citizenship opens to otherwise hidden perspectives that can enable citizens to renegotiate the terms of hegemonic forms of sensory belonging, stressing the bodily and sonic basis of engagement and exclusion.
At home, many of our attuning actions take place on a habitual or unconscious level based on past stories, memories, and experiences. The body resonates affectively (understood as the ability to be touched or touch) even if we rationally try to control our reaction. Petersen describes the feelings of a resident in an apartment complex the second their upstairs neighbor comes home – how the anticipation of his disturbing footsteps goes straight to her heart, the annoyance causing her heart rate to rise, even before the actual sound of footsteps reaches her (Petersen 2020: 12). The affects are thus built up and shaped in the dynamic everyday relationship with sounds, and they not only have to do with the nature of the sounds but also the relationship they create. In other words, the affective potential is not inherent in the sounds: it is established in the interaction between the listener and the sound itself, by which the listener's listening mode and experience also influence the affective reaction. Therefore, two sounds that resemble each other, such as the rushing water of the river and the noise of a highway in the distance, have very different affective values depending on the specific situation in which the individual listener finds themselves. A study has shown that tourists who visited a nature area experienced motorized vehicles as either negative or positive, depending on whether they were for or against such vehicles in nature (Benfield, Weinzimmer, and Newman 2018: 22).
Community affectivity – the affect between listener and listener – is as key to consider as affect between listener and sound. As Phelan describes it in connection with community singing, sonic citizenship is established via a bodily and an aural practice in which one lets their voice be heard, listens to, and follows the singing of others. In this way, one shows both openness and hospitality and participates by listening to and obeying, according to the premises of the community. In a choir, you must adapt to the common rhythm, accept your voice as part of a common sound, and try not to stand out from the whole. In this perspective, Petersen's description of reckless conduct among residents in residential corridors can be understood precisely as the behavior that breaks the community's rhythms and rules. Such “reckless” conduct opposes the common orchestration of the 24-hour “composition” of built-in breaks and more lively parts, such as quieter night-times and louder daylight hours. This choir metaphor can also be used to understand how “reckless citizens” are often not aware of how significant their breach of norms will be perceived by others, which might also be the case with an off-key voice in a choir.
If we include the insight that we are constantly creating a sonic background for each other, the affective aspect is thus one which permeates sonic citizenship and which constitutes a strong motivation for our ongoing attuning behaviors. The negotiation and drawing of sonic boundaries is thus something that is done consciously as well as unconsciously to master the soundscape. For example, the closing of doors and windows, speaking softly, turning the volume on the TV or radio up/down, turning various electrical remedies off/on, etc. The element of negotiation indicates that there are several types of attuning behaviors, ranging from direct negotiations about noisy conduct to ingrained bodily habits at home, such as when you step softly on a creaking floor to avoid unnecessary noise (Petersen 2020: 12). Thus, the attunement does not necessarily take place directly between two or more parties: it is a constant conscious or unconscious attunement to meet the needs and intentions of others and yourself, of one’s own sounds and the sounds of others.