Noise and Separation
Sara Arango FrancoThis blog post by Sara Arango Frango invites readers to reflect on our shared sonic territory. From a social, political, urban, and intimate perspective, the Medellín-based researcher examines the effects of noise on our lives and its impact on everyday coexistence.
Sound is the effect of moving particles that vibrate ossicles in our ears. It is a vehicle for information that is translated and transduced. In the beautiful sense of information, how “informative” a signal is is measured by how different it is from noise; in this sense, noise is the unreadability of a signal, the randomness of the information for which it is a vehicle. Think of absolute noise as the most destructive possible interference dissonance, that which does not allow any message to be transmitted.
Sometimes the sound signals - rich or poor in information - are so intense that they hurt our ears, and this happens in different measures according to each sensitivity. Sometimes such signals are aesthetically unpleasant, and this varies according to culture, personal taste and time. Hearing certain sounds is simply undesirable at certain times1, and such signals, however rich in content they may be, are also referred to in common parlance as noise2.
Thus, sound noise is subjective and can have different meanings depending on how it is understood. Moreover, the experience of noise is subjective to each being, signal and sensor3.
Why does it matter to talk about noise, here and now? I clarify that in this text I will talk about noise as the pathology we suffer from as a nation and as a disease of our times. Almost all of us have had a party in our homes and our existence on earth is joyful and inevitably sonorous.
Although this text is about sound noise, the definition from the sense of information that I used applies to all types of noise, and I will also refer to it in its abstract sense and as a quality that is about to permeate our spirit, and that certainly has already colonized our intimacy. This writing starts from and is about sound noise, but it intends to highlight its importance as a manifestation of other realities that we are taking for granted and the abandonment of common territories. It is an invitation to examine our common sound territory.
Noise and collective trauma in Colombia
Colombia is a country hurt by the dynamics generated around the illegal commercialization of the synthetic version of a plant whose sacred ancestral use in this same territory has been to grant the gift of the word as the cohesive and nourishing axis of the community.
It is paradoxical that the coca leaf is sacred for many of the ancestral communities that preceded us when the current reality of Colombia is that of a country where we do not talk about what we need to talk about. It is not strange if we think that since our founding we suffer from the lack of a country's narrative, and that one of the consequences of the conflict that has survived and mutated since the beginning of our nation is to cut social ties, to isolate community fabrics. It is the word, sacred by definition, that builds bridges between humans.
This paradox of not speaking when our history has been so intimately linked to the plant whose original gift is that of the word is one of many ways in which we experience separation as an evil of a country and an evil of an era. Surrounded by fertile abundance, many Colombians live in malnutrition, and the more fortunate ones do not know how to name the nature that surrounds us.
Expelled from our own land, and heeding a prominent call of this time, in Colombia it seems that we are also insistently seeking to stun4 ourselves so as not to listen to ourselves, to increase the separation between us, with ourselves and with our territory.
Separation prevents us from knowing or finding what is obvious, sometimes being in front of us or even inside us. Accelerating separation is almost all that we as humanity have been engaged in of late, and, like noise, I consider it an evil of our age. We have reached the extreme in which our physical sensations, our thoughts and our emotions scream isolated and dissociated in languages that we neither understand nor integrate, and we live similar realities in the ways in which we inhabit the territory, thought and, above all things, the activity of the public. Social networks, not to mention, are the epitome, caricature and pinnacle of this reality.
Noise is often the law even in the countryside and my city girl ears resent it. I try to understand it from the collective trauma: sometimes I think that in the countryside it is convenient that the sound of the speakers with music predominates, predictable, and in that sense preferable to the subtle omens of the birds, and to the schizoid -although mostly unconscious- activity of predicting what comes after the sound of the movement of some branches. For our brains, sound is anticipation itself5. In the sonorous silence of nature lies the potential for death6, and in a traumatized country it makes sense that we seek to isolate ourselves in the noise and deafen ourselves to the information that the sounds of the territory might bring7.
If motorcycles, ubiquitous throughout Colombia, are the precursors of almost every massacre and violent death in this country in recent decades, are we sure that living surrounded by the sound that has preceded so many misfortunes does not affect us? Could it be that our collective trauma is detonated, albeit to a minimal extent? Sonorously, motorcycles have a special way of persistently reminding us of the thousands of controlled explosions that must happen every second in almost every corner of Colombia for combustion to move them.
I fantasize that in the future it will be said of this era that we were so intent on crying deafness, that almost all our movement was powered by innumerable explosions, nested, recursive and incessant, and that we pretended to ignore it and be okay with it in order to keep moving wildly. I don't know the sound of what anymore. The sound of nothing.
Sometimes it is the - false? - silence that really stuns. Across the street from my house a human being was murdered, on a Wednesday at 4 pm8. As neighbors, we of course proceeded to avoid talking about it much among ourselves. We know that the extortionists, self-proclaimed owners of the territory and responsible for that crime, have eyes and ears everywhere. They take advantage of the place that we neighbors leave empty by uninhabiting the sound environment as a common space to bring us closer, take care of us and strengthen us mutually. This is a cycle that feeds back on itself.
This law of silence, a consequence of the social contract that was broken in front of our eyes, and that had already been yielding for a while, had its exception the following Saturday, when in a neighboring house there was a party with loud music until 4 a.m. Isn't this an almost caricatural representation of the separation I am talking about, of a kind of dissociation?
In reality, the noise that saturates is not the exception to the law of silence, it is the exaltation of it at all costs, the culmination of destructive interference. I mean that excessive noise is not very different from an inert and separating silence, lacking cohesive information, similar in its lack of relevant content to the inconsequential information transmitted by noise. And it seems important to me to distinguish such silence from that which so many of us long for, that which shelters and nurtures rest, contemplation, creation, enjoyment. The silence from which the imperative of consumption and production is resisted. We chronically suffer from the lack of that fertile silence.
In the countryside, towns, beaches and cities, this image is common: people coexisting in spaces where it is impossible to talk. Even if it were acoustically possible to do so, something else usually prevents it: alcohol ends up silencing in the mind what the speakers in the space cannot saturate. What is it that we seek to repress, to suffocate? How to read the noise? How would we inhabit the sound if we had words to say what we need to say?
Noise and common territories
Noise as destructive interference is both an illustration and a cause for separation. It is also the way in which we are trivializing the sound environment, the space for listening, disabling it as a common territory. Can we, as a country, afford to close this channel of our perception9? Can we live without listening to ourselves, and live without silence (of the fertile kind)? If our problem is that we have hardly listened to ourselves, are we really going to abandon this territory?
Sound gives us a sense of territory. Sometimes when I go to eastern Antioquia I hear certain bird songs that I know with certainty were the sounds that set the atmosphere of my world in my childhood. In my house in Medellín, day by day I listen to the subtle change of birdsong, which softly mutates throughout the day as the sunlight advances and retreats. It gives me an exact notion - but of course unconsciously, because my perception was conditioned for many years to ignore them - of where the beings with whom I share this block are. They migrate and change, but they are here nearby, eating, communicating and singing in the trees whose green accompanies me and soothes me all day long, visiting my balcony, flying above me and returning according to their rhythms.
In contrast to the soft and nesting circular cadences of the birds that anchor me in my habitat, at the traffic light on the corner every 3 to 5 minutes waves of cars and motorcycles appear, drivers with an ecstatic eagerness not to be where they are (their inability not to honk gives them away). I don't know anything about them, only that they come, their sound disrupts, and they leave, leaving us in search of reconnecting with that which does inhabit our territory. I want to say that there are types of sounds that give us a kind of comfort and security when inhabiting the space (although this is unconscious for most people), and that this comfort has to do with the temporal continuity of such sounds, and that there are other sounds, such as traffic, that somehow disconnect us from the territory.
We could say that, in addition to giving us a sense of territory, the sound environment is, in itself, a territory, and a common territory par excellence. It is the one that allows synchrony, concurrence, coexistence with others to the extent that we co-inhabit time. Purely visual signals lack this characteristic because they are not threaded in time10. Sound makes tuning possible, which is something like coinciding in tone, co-inhabiting sound. For example: co-inhabiting music is what we do when we dance, and that is why dance is an experience of communion, of community, made possible by sound as a common space.
Since sound space is a shared common territory, noise is a signal that in itself accounts for the social contract, for social agreements. In fact, could we speak of something like a sonorous social contract? Under what agreements do we inhabit sound?
It is worth noting that perception itself, the perception of each sense, that is, the visual or tactile or sonorous signals to which we pay attention -and in what way- and to which we do not, are also social agreements. It is enough to interact with a baby to notice that they pay as much attention to the sound of birds in the distance as to the sound of the machine they may have in front of them. It is only through the process of socialization that we (tacitly) agree, for example, to ignore the sound of birds and prioritize the sound of human voices.
In Colombian cities there seems to be an implicit agreement (part of our sonorous social contract) according to which noticing excessive whistles, excessive engines, music at excessive volumes, is only an indicator of excessive sensitivity; sensitivity that is otherwise ignored and stigmatized. The norm is to ignore each other in the midst of the noise, even when the purpose of sound is exactly the opposite. Let us remember: the purpose of sound as a signal -if we can speak of such a thing- is to transmit information.
Perhaps physical noise has become more and more noticeable to many of us11 because it has become an extension and illustration of what is happening more and more in our heads. That is, perhaps sound noise is being a reminder of the other types of noise that also carry the potential for separation, and that threaten such precious resources as attention and mental space.
Noise is what dwells behind our eyes and between our ears in the face of the commercial bombardment in the digital realm. This space, created with the laudable and more than justified intention of connecting human beings, is now a shopping mall in the ether, a corporatized space, where our behaviors, fears and intimacy are at the service of ever larger companies, which benefit from dazing and bombarding us with noise that becomes emotional and sensitizes and manipulates us to lead us to buy.
This virtual information noise occupies multiple channels (visual, auditory, emotional) and, like sound noise, it also threatens a common space, in this case the internet, or virtuality. Like sound noise, it leads to separation. Moreover, such noise - and dare I say all noise - separates us from our own intuition and from some sense of cohesion in our thoughts; it prevents us from holding our own threads. Noise blocks our ability to think about the world from complexity, something we increasingly lack in a chaotic, information-heavy world.
For its part, the corporatization of virtual space is nothing more than an extension of the material reality in cities, where inhabited and livable public space is increasingly scarce. Both physically and digitally (and more seriously: in the blurred space of our intimacy!), we are becoming more separated, and we are running out of common spaces, and common realities. Becoming aware of the way we relate to noise in common spaces can be a beginning of an antidote to separation.
Noise and privacy
In the face of noise, both physical and virtual, sound and the sense of information, the right to privacy is also at risk. Let us remember that one can close one's eyes with a mere impulse of the will, but not one's ears. “Don't stop balls”, is what the social agreement would say if it could speak. This is possible only in different measures according to each person and each sensibility.
And the fact is that all these manifestations of noise have the property of being able to mix with, or overlap with, or expel people's inner dialogue. If intimacy is at risk, creation, authenticity, mental health, and, above all, the notion that every human could have of a safe space is at risk. It is a very different conversation about security if every human in a society does not have a safe place in their head, in their intimacy: let us not forget that physical security as a characteristic of a society has a lot to do with the sense of security that every person in it has in their relationship with the world.
Isn't an imposition on a person's most intimate, that which is the least we could aspire to consider a safe place, intrusive? Doesn't destructive interference affect our privacy? Isn't the right to a kind of autonomy of privacy something we should strive for?
In Medellin, a city where young people are sometimes even physically violated by the para-state for smoking marijuana in parks12, that is, for doing what they want with the intimate space between their eyes and ears, it is not surprising that it is also naturalized to impose our noise on others, that is, to intrude on what happens within that intimacy in each person's head. By this I mean to indicate and observe a certain tendency or social proclivity to intrude into the privacy of others (something that social networks are responsible for enhancing). I believe that a useful consideration to reflect on noise is the sovereignty of privacy.
Noise and public policy
In the debate on the noise law in the Sixth Commission of Congress, a member of the National Police suggested that, just as meteorological models can predict the time and location of respiratory crises in the population due to poor air quality, in all cities of Colombia it is evident that noise calls become, as the night progresses, calls for fights, which in turn become, on many occasions, homicides.
One learning from 3 years of Edgelands Institute's residency in Medellín is that coexistence accounts for social agreements beyond traditional homicide metrics; it speaks to a cultural ethos.
Noise as an imposition and as a demonstration of an attitude towards others is so institutionalized that we all know stories of people who have been threatened or even assaulted for asking their neighbors to turn down the volume. Such was the case of journalist Ana Cristina Restrepo, and the heartbreaking crime against Hernán Darío Castrillón, an accomplished reader who was blinded for asking for the minimum: his right to sleep. It seems that those who are willing to impose their noise are sometimes also willing to impose themselves in violent ways13.
We have to live in an advanced state of dissociation not to understand why the sound environment is important. Hearing had and has a fundamental place in the evolution and survival of all higher vertebrate animals. It is inscribed in our nervous wiring. Sound is the sense of safety.
It is reasonable to think that a state of constant sound excitation (however conditioned we may be to ignore it), with unpleasant signals that often carry the information of “danger”, such as whistles, engines and loud impositions, can alter the nervous state of most human beings. And that a nervous state in an increased state of vulnerability can alter our decision-making capacity, and increase our reactivity and potential for violence.
How do we intend to reduce violence and homicide indicators based on evidence-based studies if human beings in cities have less and less right to see the sky, to find beauty somewhere, and now, to listen to birds and silence? How, if not being dazed seems an unattainable luxury for the majority?
I say this having been a “public policy researcher”, one of the labels I have worn in life: What study can replace common sense (and the connection with all the senses)? (And given all the studies there are: do we listen to the studies? ) How much more do we have to disassociate ourselves before we begin to attend to that which seeks to call our attention so sonorously? Does the death of 141 motorcyclists in traffic accidents in Medellín in 2023 suddenly tell us that we live and take on our transportation aggressively? Isn't the noise of horns a striking indicator and reminder of this?
Urban noise displacement has existed for years, and the nuisance it causes is not exclusive to any socioeconomic class. I know a lady who had to leave her house in eastern Manrique in Medellín because she could not stand the noise, and the experience in her neighborhood was that the police did nothing, and that the “muchachos” protected these dynamics.
By inhabiting the common sound space in abusive ways and by not regulating its shared use, we also forget about people with neurodiversity (especially children), the elderly, people with sleep problems and animals, all of which are vital considerations for public health. Do we not already know that excessive noise can increase anxiety and various mental health disorders? Could it be that in a society that has known how to manage its emotions through stunning or violence, noise can conjure up or at least warn of more aggression?
Noise disproportionately affects people in conditions of physical, mental, social or economic vulnerability, and as a public health issue it is also an equality issue.
In a world where we have no space left to think, where the excess of noise within us prevents us from having space to welcome the other, of course it is important to reflect on noise and the environment. We need to move from total disconnection to a connection with ourselves (mediated and led by a reconnection with the body) and with the environment, which allows us to receive the other and thus be able to think of societies where respect for all people and beings prevails. There is no place in me for the other if I impose myself in violent ways towards him. There is no room in me for the other if my head is full of noise.
And since there are such advanced stages of separation in which only the language of money is understood, let us speak in the language of money: in Colombia we live, with the noise emitted in the commercial context, a tragedy of the commons14 in which those who emit it - presumably, or according to them - get some kind of economic benefit from such emission. The unwitting recipients of the emissions are subject to the detrimental impacts of the emissions and are not compensated for them. Nor are such impacts mitigated, i.e., contained or kept within certain established parameters. An example of this: the owners of discotheques and restaurants act under the belief that a higher volume of music brings them more money, and do not invest in ensuring that such noise does not transcend the spatial limit of their premises, but the neighboring people not only do not benefit from such noise, but also pay the consequences of it.
It is called ‘tragedy’ of the commons because a common good is used/exploited by some economic agents to the direct and measurable (in money!)15 detriment of those who bear the impacts of such exploitation or use. In this case the common good is the sound space, intrinsically linked to the privacy and well-being of each person. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is written in dozens of economics books, and lies in mitigation and regulation: Do you want to emit high intensity sound and are very convinced that this is what gives value to your business?16 Then invest in acoustic soundproofing. The human beings surrounding the economic activity do not have to bear the cost of a few people's decision to emit loud sound.
We are facing a historic opportunity for a law that will help us give pathological noise the importance it deserves and the tools to manage it. Technology, with responsibility, can be key. In France, sound radars were installed to detect vehicles that emit sounds of greater intensity than those stipulated by the regulation (we know that the technical-mechanical review for this purpose in Colombia is a joke). Just as there are security cameras and remote detection of traffic violations, it is entirely possible that technology is in our favor in this cause. Of course, this must be treated with delicacy, stellar data treatment and absolute respect for people's privacy. Technology should be used as a means to reduce inequality and not to increase it.
I think that it would be convenient to carry out generalized surveys in the country to help us understand and characterize noise as an epidemiological phenomenon, and also the perceptions of citizens in relation to it, since it is so subjective. Maybe even restaurant owners would be surprised to realize that hurting eardrums does not attract more customers. Perhaps by lowering the separation, the dissociation, the security helicopters lords would realize that investing in beautifying the habitat of humans is good for security indicators.
Destructive interference
Noise helps us avoid conversations we owe ourselves as a country and helps us separate and disassociate from ourselves and others. Whether we choose to face it or not, it is there. It is both a setting and a representation of where we are going as humanity.
A dear friend shared this learning with me: all acts of people are requests for love, even if they are not understood as such through a predetermined and agreed language. I try to remember that every time a driver on the street honks because he can't bear to wait 2 milliseconds for the driver in front of him to comply with the traffic light change. Perhaps what is truly deafening in Medellín is the lack of love.
I propose that we think about what it would be like to re-inhabit the auditory space, to rethink the auditory social contract, to understand sound as a common territory and treat it as such. This is important because we suffer from fragmentation of reality, from a paralyzing separation that takes us out of our body and our environment, and from the loss of more and more common territories, those where community is built. Without that, we are a captive audience, carefully isolated in front of our screens, disposed only for consumption. Digital cattle in bodies that serve for what is strictly necessary.
May this be a call to listen and to question ourselves about listening. To not continue abandoning the common spaces we have left, especially when they are intimately linked to the sense of territory and our ability to think, feel and communicate. I have not found incorporable forms of resistance that do not involve beauty: I am going, then, to populate my sound environment with beautiful music and birdsong.
Footnotes
[1] Says Alex Ross in his essay “What Is Noise?” in The New Yorker magazine: 'Garret Keizer, in his incisive 2010 book, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, observes that the distinction between noise and music is ultimately an ethical question. If you choose to listen to something, it is not noise, even if most people find it unspeakably awful. If you are forced to listen to something, it is noise, even if most people find it ineffably beautiful. Thus Keizer writes: “Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, played at the Gramercy, is not noise; Gregorian Chant coming through my bathroom wall is.”'
[2] Sometimes we use 'noise' and 'bulla' interchangeably. It turns out that 'bulla' and 'bubble' share an etymological root in Latin. In Latin bulla is ball, shout, agitation. Bulbullia, is a repetition of bulla, onomatopoeic the thing, I would say without knowing much more. In Colombia we make nonstop bulla maybe because, as Gordon Hempton says, the world is a music box powered by the sun, and here we get a lot of sun all year round. Maybe that's why we continually bubble up like roaring bubbles.
[3] For more subjectivity: noise in its maximum expression -in the sense of information- sometimes helps us to concentrate. The sound that coincided with the writing of this text between these ears was that of white noise (and recordings of the sound environment in forests).
[4] In the original, in Spanish, the word “aturdir” is etymologically related to the thrush, a bird. Possibly because in 'summer it usually falls down stunned with heat', or because it is associated with a certain kind of “atolondramiento” (another word we owe to birds).
[5] Hearing is intimately linked to survival. It is for this reason that no higher vertebrates (such as mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians or fish) are completely deaf under natural and typical conditions, as Gordon Hempton notes in Silence and the Presence of Everything, a beautiful episode of the podcast “On Being with Krista Tippett”.
[6] In Spanish, the word ‘ruido’ comes from the Latin ‘rugitus’, ‘rugido’ or ‘sonido ronco’ and ‘sordo’, and seems to be etymologically related to words such as ‘rumor’, ‘rugere’, ‘runcus’, all used to designate sounds emitted by animals or similar to them.
[7] Another explanation, of course, not negligible, has to do with the beautiful company that tuning into the spirit of the radio provides to the solitary person.
[8] In Spanish, the word 'aturdir' comes from the name of the bird called ‘turdo’, which is said to fall fainted or ‘atortolado’ (another word we owe to the name of a bird). I want to note that whoever is killed with a firearm dies stunned, as well as whoever is killed by a bomb.
[9] Not least because it is the country with the greatest biodiversity of birds in the world.
[10] In fact, the noise of social networks has a lot to do with the lack of continuity of visual signals.
[11] Whales, which like all mammals are very sensitive to sound, changed the content of their sound messages with the marked decrease in marine noise from the COVID-19 enclosure in 2020.
[12] To avoid unnecessary interpretations, I clarify to recognize that marijuana consumption is contraindicated in persons under 25 years of age.
[13] It is not surprising that those who assaulted him were dazed with alcohol.
[14] As well as poor air quality, contamination of water sources and deforestation.
[15] Let us remember that physical and mental health is quantified in money; otherwise, insurance companies would not exist.
[16] Someday we will coordinate and integrate the senses enough to realize that the grace of Provence has much more to do with its trees and its ecosystems than with the deafening of its speakers.
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