Atmospheric Sensibilities

Abstract

This article examines noise as composing an atmospheric that is at once sensed and made sensible. Itself atmospheric, environmental noise amplifies ways of thinking and sensing the atmospheric: as a logics of indeterminacy, as a physicality of the ephemeral, and as an entanglement of air-body-matter. Drawing principally on material related to the politics of noise around Los Angeles International Airport from the 1960s to the present, this article takes up three episodes in which figurations of the atmospheric have been shaped by and cohere in and through noise. At the dawn of the jet age, civic mobilizations against airport noise revealed jurisdictional gaps between airspace and ground; noise, in providing the basis for airspace territory and property, produces the atmospheric as space. By the end of the 1960s the category of noise pollution was established as a legal and social norm. In this context annoyance—noise pollution’s unstable ground—serves as an affective and corporeal register of the permeability of bodies and buildings, a crucial dimension of the atmospheric. And lastly, edge spaces of infrastructure reflect the interplay between sounds from the sky and sensation, an indefinite urbanism. John Divola’s photo series Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone (LAX NAZ) of homes in the flight path slated for demolition visualize the atmospheric quality of this process.

Policing sounds

“…Police discretion in relation to sound sometimes intersects with community concerns related to divergent interpretations of “noise”—a situation that can reveal deep cultural fissures, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods. In these cases, we see how sound leaks across existing boundaries of private property and is unevenly experienced (Peterson, 2017). Margaret M Ramírez (2020), for example, theorizes gentrifying Oakland as a borderland, where new arrivals call on the police to regulate soundscapes that have long been part of cultural life in those neighborhoods.…”

Noise viscerality

“…As an embodied experience, noise blurs the boundaries between humans, objects, and other species and prefigures the permeability of bodies and the sonic environment. This is in relation to the materiality of sound in the form of physical vibrations (Cox 2018; Goodman 2012;Henriques 2008;Trower 2012), as well as the boundless qualities of noise described as "infinite" (Marks 2013) and "atmospheric" (Peterson 2017). By attending to noise specifically, I trace the visceral responses through which people react to certain sounds as noise, or when their bodies affirm that what they are hearing is noise, and the relational processes that result.…”

Sound + Bodies in Community = Music

“…Sound becomes noise when it occupies the center of legal, political, or cultural disputes. 8 Of course, music scholarship has been in existence for centuries, grounded in the celebration of the classic composers of the European tradition. It is well known that traditional musicology attempted to isolate musical sound and musical listening not only from other auditory signals, but from all connection to political, social, or cultural determination.…”