Negotiating with the Collective Ear

Abstract

This article presents sound studies as a critical framework for architectural analysis. It positions architecture’s long-honored monogamy with visual communication as limited and instead connects the collective decision-making that constitutes listening with dynamics of power in shared and personal space. With this understanding, I argue that architects can be attuned to the audiosocial spaces they help to enforce and make different collective decisions about the removal and discipline of sound.

Keywords:

• sound
• negotiation
• audiosocial space
• acculturation
• ubiquity
• power

Notes

1 Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, & Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 24.

2 Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019), 13.

3 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA Identifies Noise Levels Affecting Health and Welfare,” EPA, District of Columbia, 1974, https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/epa-identifies-noise-levels-affecting-health-and-welfare.html, accessed July 14, 2023.

4 Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010), xvii.

5 Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Canadian Electronic Library (Montreal [Que.]: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 3, 7–8, 10, 13; Gernot Böhme and Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 14; Michael Bull and Les Back, eds. The Auditory Culture Reader (Sensory Formations Series, Oxford, UK and New York: Berg, 2003), 3; Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, & Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 14; Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1990), -004; Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010), xvii; R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape : Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994), 3; Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003), 2; Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 3; Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.

6 Milton Santos, The Nature of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5.

7 Santos, The Nature of Space.

8 Santos, The Nature of Space, 7.

9 The acronym, which comes to us from coding language, stands for What You See Is What You Get, which is increasingly used to describe architectural documentation in programs like BIM (Building Information Modeling). John Markoff, “The Real History of WYSIWYG,” New York Times, October 18, 2007, https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/the-real-history-of-wysiwyg/, accessed October 9, 2023.

10 Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 5.

11 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), xx.

12 Kodwo Eshun, “Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 452.

13 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994), 7.

14 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 109; Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc, 2005), xxi; Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, 6.

15 Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, 13.

16 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 12.

17 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 24.

18 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 9.

19 Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 20.

20 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 12.

21 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 9.

22 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003): 257–37.

23 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 177.

24 Luc Ferrari, Presque Rien, December, 2012, Recollection GRM, vinyl.

25 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 2.

26 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA Identifies Noise Levels Affecting Health and Welfare,” EPA, District of Columbia, 1974, https://www.epa.gov/archive/ epa/aboutepa/epa-identifies-noise-levels-affecting-health-and-welfare. html, accessed July 14, 2023.

27 Christina Zanfagna and Alex Werth, “Introduction: Soundscapes of American Gentrification,” in Journal of Popular Music Studies 33:4 (December 1, 2021): 67.

28 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 16.

29 Jess Myers, Here There Be Dragons, produced by Adélie Pojzman-Pontay, podcast, Waveform audio, https://soundcloud.com/jess-m-815590066/sets/here-there-be-dragons?si=656ff92ab36f4c3fab803af7d2d27491&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing, accessed October 12, 2023.

30 Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 138.

31 Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 123.

32 Pauline Oliveros, Camille Norment, Bernie Krause, Glenn Gould, Emeka Ogboh, Zoe Todd, A. M. Kanngieser, Miyuki Jokiranta, JT Green, Dima Mabsout, Gascia Ouzounian, and Camille Hannan are just a small fraction of those engaged in such practices. Although many of these practices are associated with geography, art, radio, and composition, the spatial focus of the work has an evident intersection with those interested in using sound for architectural research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jess Myers

Jess Myers is an urbanist and assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University whose practice includes work as an editor, writer, podcaster, and curator. Her personal interests and research engage multimedia platforms as a means to explore politics and residency in urban conditions. Her podcast Here There Be Dragons takes an in-depth look at the impact of security narratives on urban planning through the eyes of city residents. Her work can be found in The Architect’s Newspaper, l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Avery Review, Places, Dwell, and Funambulist Magazine. Myers received a BA in Architecture from Princeton University and an MCP from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.