Noise as a Symptom of Progress
There has always been noise in Buenos Aires, but it has not always been perceived as a problem. Indeed, at first, noise was a symptom of a growing city.[6] As the status of Gran Aldea (Big Village)[7] was abandoned, Buenos Aires started a process in which speed, connectivity, and industry become values of the model of the envisioned city. In 1912, Fray Mocho magazine published an extract from the Spanish writer Adolfo Posada’s book La República Argentina. The author places a porteño[8] at the top of a building, the Majestic Hotel, which opened in 1909. This character admires the inhabited pampa[9] “with his spirit embroiled by the never-ending noise coming from the street” (Posada 1912). He is not tormented by the hustle and bustle nor by the smoke; rather he looks and listens to a future of greattness in the process of being synthesized. It is the moment of the material construction of the city, with the production of paved roads, industry development, and the erection of public administration buildings such as the Congress’ palace in 1899. This is the context in which a new acoustic sensibility is formed from a conjunction of sounds that are the city’s movement forwards. “Surely the bochinche[10] increases with progress” announces Luis García, a writer from Buenos Aires, in a text in 1901. The organillo makes its appearance in the streets. Cars, bicycles, carts – they all come together in the urban scenario, sounding their horns and bells and causing inevitable crashes. This combination of sounds reflects the progress of a city that searches for its place in a context of worldwide growth centered in urban movement. Buenos Aires is the city of noise, attracting the world’s curiosity for its greatness and radiance. That noise is the explicit testimony that allows the city to be part of “the concert of nations” (García 1901). These new stimuli, or perhaps the concurrence of all of them at the same time and in the same space, are noise (and not mere sounds) because they are not listened to with aesthetic pleasure. They are in opposition to what is called “useless noise” in the historical documents that we have analyzed:
[T]he masters and carters are not happy with the loud noises made by the steel tires of the wheels or the horseshoes [...] Is it necessary to tie bells and rattles to the neck of each animal, by means of which these travelling and early-rising “jazz-bands” that congest like rivers on the narrow streets are completed? Is it necessary to annoy people who sleep in the early morning, who work all day, or who are simply at home? (Encina 1924)
This is in contradiction with the idea that
proper traffic noises […] while fatal and indispensable in a work center such as Buenos Aires, are not annoying. One gets accustomed to the natural urban rush. (Encina 1924)
We used this particular text by the writer Encina as an example of a distinction being made between useless and necessary noises. Modernity’s blasts, in a time and space of inevitable movement, are part of the city’s sonic background. They are vital, and people learn to assimilate them as part of the environment. If they did not exist, the material being corresponded would not be the city, but something else. Thus the countryside, in contrast with the urban, became a place that embodies a sonic alterity. The pampas, with their rural dynamics, comes to represent silence and sonic peculiarities the urban man is not used to. Worldly noise turns into that which people need to escape from; therefore an emphasis on silence and tranquility becomes important in the touristic exploitation of towns and small scale cities outside of the metropolis. These contrasts between the sonority of the city and of the countryside are the first quotes from our research corpus that identify urban sonority as a cause of problems. It is not only the noise or the rush, but the constancy of these two that produce negative effects in people, for whom vacations are now associated with the relief of being away from the city. When they come back, they immediately integrate back into the movement, and amazement soon dissolves in everyday life. Buenos Aires gradually becomes a symbol of the sonic haze that is an inextricable part of the identity of densely inhabited places in permanent growth.
However, according to these sources, there are sounds that must be removed, as they disturb the inattentive listening to that necessary background. In light of the sonic environment’s saturation, an economy of noise is proposed. Horse bells, vehicles’ free flow exhausts, changadores’ yelling,[11] and horn misuse are a few of the sonic practices that exceed the limits of what is tolerable, produced by subjects perceived as morally inferior in the context of urban civilization. Our sources establish two types of citizens with different aural cultures and different tolerance thresholds. We note, however, that this expressed sense of superiority is relative, as subjects rarely categorize their own sound production as noise. This socio-historical construction of the concept of noise is precisely what distinguishes an acoustic emission from its culturally-mediated perception.
Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4: These images represent useless noise in public spaces. Yelling, horns, metal wheels and horses’ hooves are all unnecessary sonic practices and materials that add to everyday traffic noise.
Figures 1 and 2: (De La Serna, Jorge and Caballé 1939)
Figure 3: (anon. 1940)
Figure 4: (Driver and Caballé 1940)
Modern sonority, therefore, is founded on a dichotomy that separates necessary and inevitable sounds from noises that bother and burst into everyday city life. The limit of auditive tolerance is marked by an acceptable sonority that identifies the city, which means that every acoustic event that disrupts from this system will be identified as part of a social problem.
