Abstract
“Sound and the public” offers an opportunity to re-engage with longstanding questions about music, democracy, and the public sphere in light of new disciplinary configurations, modes of analysis, and political configurations. While there is a robust literature on music and public life, addressing topics from urban public concerts to protest movements, only recently has attention turned to a more general consideration of sound. At the same time, the conceptual turn toward materiality, sensation, and affect opens new modes of investigation of the formation of publics and public life, something for which sound is well situated. And while tenets of liberal democracy tend to still hold as aspirational and defining characteristics of public life, in the current global political climate the nature and meaning of the public might be fundamentally altered—this we have yet to see.
An inquiry into “sound and the public” is prismatic, approachable from multiple perspectives. Here, the intent is to understand current configurations of the public as lived, imagined, and sensed through sound. In their attenuations with “the public,” sonic materiality and sound as signifying meet, as a seeming openness and generalizability that is idealized as everyone vibrating together may also carry normative impulses in which mappings of sound and social groups divide rather than unify. We invited submissions by pointing to this potential with two broad questions: How does a public organize itself acoustically—through listening, feeling, or orienting toward one another? And how does sound serve as force, object, or “actant” in composing publics? The resulting contributions address these questions and more, indicating the ways in which, while something coheres in this framework, more is left unresolved, with sound and the public both unstable categories.
Articles included in this Special Issue probe the dynamic between sound and the public through a wide range of issues and themes, including affect, listening, acoustic environments, and embodiment. As they show, the public is an expansive concept that includes public feelings, public rituals, public space and democratic modes of participation, the public sphere, publics and counterpublics, public speech, a networked public, a transient public, and a mediated public. Publicness is as much a disposition as a social formation, in which, even with a contemporary condition of neoliberalism, ideals of democratic participation hold. These, however, are both emphasized and undermined by sound and its uses—while sound might contribute to the formation of affective, intimate publics, it can also be used to maintain normative spaces of public life, excluding, rather than including, populations based on taste. Hence, sonic publics raise questions about their relative openness and representational scope—of, that is, their democratic bases. Sound, it seems, is very good at creating horizons of membership that territorialize, or demarcate their limits, whether through technologies of measurement and control or by designating another person’s sound as noise. In this way, sound in public is also a domain of policing relative inclusion and exclusion, of constituting citizenship along axes of race, class, gender, and nationality. And while most of the cases discussed are in countries where claims can be made on a democratic state, the case of Chinese radio under Mao and into the present reveals somewhat different configurations of a national public.
When the subject of “the public” is engaged through sound, aspects of bodily experience and the production of space come to the fore. Taking up conceptualizations of publics and counterpublics that are organized around texts, an emphasis on sound invites an exploration of intimate, affective, and sensory dimensions of such publics. Affect plays an important role in how people feel, think, and act while engaging with (un)organized sounds. Affect is “the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around” (O’Sullivan, 2001). Or as Guattari (1996) suggests, it is that which is “installed ‘before’ the circumscription of identities, and manifested by unlocatable transference, unlocatable with regard to their origin as well as with regard to their destination” (p. 158). Both Artur Szarecki and Marie Thompson put affect at the center of their analysis.
Through a detailed case study of a live hip pop concert in Poland, as Artur Szarecki analyzes how “affective publics” take form audience bodies were directly affected by the material and vibrational forces of sound, thus moving and being moved together. Szarecki, drawing from Georgina Born’s definition of three kinds of “co-present musical or sonic publics,” argues that the third kind of public—which Born describes as minimal and negligible insofar as it does not inspire signification beyond itself—is nonetheless constitutive and consequential as a mode of “intensive relations” that are affective, sensory, and nondiscursive. Locating the formation of a public in a shared experience of vibration, Szarecki contributes to a theory of audience grounded in the experience of listening—in, that is, the sonic immanence of a musical performance. While his case is a heightened example that incited violence, it is potentially productive to turn this analysis back onto cases in which audience affect seems more subdued, or nominal. What, for instance, is the affective experience of the silent audience, which, while ostensibly concerned with inner thoughts, might also describe their experience as that of being “moved”?
While Artur Szarecki explores a case of desirable sonic affects, Marie Thompson focuses on negative affects through a discussion of the use of classical music as an anti-loitering tool in neoliberal public spaces in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Used by the police as a technology of social stratification, classical music amplifies negative affects including irritation, annoyance, and alienation, effectively keeping the youth and other loiterers out of commercial public spaces. As a tool in a sonic battle over public space, classical music is used as a weapon to police boundaries, designating space (and sound) as belonging to one group over another. Emphasizing the affective dimensions of this process draws into focus the relationship between bodies, built environments, and atmospheres that underpins a reproduction of social stratification. As these strategies are used principally in neoliberal (“revanchist”) cities, they reflect a shift in the nature of public space that is played out through sound. Sound is caught up not only in mapping populations, but in the forces of capital that have altered the dynamics of urban public space and undermined a notion of the city as inclusive. Affect, thus, in its attenuation to identities, is also historical and political.
Verbuc’s article shifts the discussion from affect to the “sticky intimacy” of do it yourself (DIY) communities in the United States. American DIY culture advocates creative and communal life and uses DIY practices and paces to challenge commercial and institutional distinctions between public and private. Verbuc shows how events such as punk squat events, house music shows, and community-oriented public art and educational activities constitute counterpublic spaces, which transcend tensions between private and public distinction. Verbuc draws out the achievement of their intentions, emphasizing the ways in which public and private distinctions are transcended through house concerts that use domestic space for gatherings, such that a public emerges that is marked by bodily presence and active participation. Sound is thus world making, forming communities that are organized around a DIY aesthetic that espouses a democratic horizon of openness and inclusion. At the same time, Verbuc offers a critical reading of the counterpublic space of American DIY culture. While these spaces aspire to create intimate atmospheres, communally oriented reciprocal economic relations, and social inclusiveness, their aspirations of openness are often limited by both ideology and taste.
Sound territorializes. As Deleuze and Guattari write, territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive (1988: 315). Sound is a means of creating or taking space, as with birdsong or the act of playing loud music to build sonic walls in a house party. Sound studies scholar Brandon Labelle uses the concept of “acoustic territory” to emphasize the acoustic politics of everyday life (Labelle, 2010). Zachary Stiegler extends this concept through a consideration of the regulation of New Orleans’ acoustic territories as a form of cultural control, with special attention to musical labor, race, and socioeconomic class. Stiegler argues that excessive restriction of music in public space threatens cultural expression and endangers New Orleans’ cultural identity and way of life, while affirming the importance of grassroots advocacy in a relational understanding of the city’s acoustic territories. Drawing out ways in which municipal noise regulation is entangled with labor and cultural politics, Stiegler demonstrates how these latter are also both public concerns, even if not necessarily cast as such. Ultimately, music as labor is a crucial dimension of civic inclusion; in New Orleans, those making the sound for which the city is known are increasingly unable to afford to live there. As “quality of life” is pitted against city branding—a neoliberal strategy of increasing revenue through tourism—the musicians are doubly excluded: no longer members of the urban public who complain about noise, they also lose their source of income when bars are required to close earlier, or decrease their volume.
Wei Lei and Wanning Sun’s article, “Radio Listening and the Changing Formations of the Public in China,” brings a fresh view to the meaning of civic engagement and public good, by introducing the Chinese case. Through the prism of Chinese radio under Mao and after, their article explores the formation of the public in China under changing political, social, and cultural conditions. They demonstrate how listening in the era of Mao was central to the production of a Chinese state-defined political subject and collective identity. In the Mao era, the sound of loudspeakers in a nationwide wired radio network constituted a socialist soundscape. In a post-Mao era, listening to radio has shaped the formation of privatized and stratified consumer publics. Today, radio actively cultivates a middle-class sensibility and identity, producing a new kind of social exclusion.
Droumeva’s discussion of “sound mapping as critical cartography” invites a critique of the foundations of sound maps and the relative publicness of the representation of environmental sound. The article puts pressure on the rarification of recording technologies and audio production, the gap between recorded sound and the multiplicity of actually existing sounds, the transparency and legibility of the map, the participatory mode of crowdsourcing that many sound maps rely on, and their dissemination. Suggesting that sound maps have the potential to “provide [the] basis for historical inquiry, context for negotiating urban space, insights into urban renewal and livability,” the examples discussed all fall short of these aspirations. As such, one is left to imagine possibilities of radical, democratic sound maps—perhaps community driven, with recordings that might convey concerns related to gentrification, environmental justice, or immigration rights. Yet, while such a map may be possible, what lingers are questions about the nature of representation itself, and its political and aesthetic manifestation in the form of field recordings, mapped. That “publicness” and sound maps are seemingly fundamentally at odds on multiple levels suggests, perhaps, an instability of both tropes of democratic participation and environmental sound as “public.”
Along with articles, we have also included artists’ essays in the issue, in which they reflect on their own sound art practices in relation to the concept of the public. Artist and scholar Budhaditya Chattopadhyay discusses publicness in relation to his practice of making field recordings on site—in places such as public markets in Bangalore—and composing with these field recordings to transform their site-specificity. Chattopadhyay suggests that his creative ethnographic methodology might provide a model for generating more engaging and realistic ambient sound for Indian popular films. While Shanghai-based sound artist Yin Yi also uses field recordings in his work, they are mostly used in sound installations. For Yin Yi, field recording serves as a way to discover and understand public space in Shanghai. Through a reflection on three sound installations, Yin Yi brings our attention to the issue of retired people and public parks, Shanghai Dialect and public transport system, and music in commercial space in contemporary China. Interestingly, Yin Yi’s public sound art installation, “Gift” (2017), is inspired by his experience of the use of classical music in Hamburg Railway Station during his residency, the phenomenon addressed in Marie Thompson’s article.
This Special Issue presents an array of current scholarship on the topic of sound and the public, opening up further intellectual discourses to add, expand, or challenge the evolving understanding of public and sound. Finally, we want to thank all of the contributors, and acknowledge the work of our reviewers, the journal editors Pan Zhongdang and Yang Guobin, and the editorial assistant Rosemary Clark-Parsons, for their excellent support of the publication of this Special Issue.