The art of noise: Comment on The sound
of silence
Tania Zittoun
University of Neucha
ˆ
tel, Switzerland
Abstract
This article explores a possible cultural psychology of sounds, or rather, constitutes a
call for an inclusion of sounds as part of our analysis of people’s daily experience. The
reflection is based on social sciences as well as on artists’ work on the limits of sounds.
The argument is, first, that soundscapes are as much constitutive of our experience as
the spatial and material components of our lived spaces. Second, sound can be con-
sidered as specific semiotic system; as such, a cultural psycholog y has to examine
experienced sounds, as one modality of social meaning-making and personal sense-
making. Third, if sounds are organized as semiotic systems, then a developmental
approach can be defined. Fourth, empirical implications are highlighted; the proposal
here is to combine people’s perspectives on perceived sounds, the semiotic resources
on which they draw to make sense of them, the location of these sounds in actual
sociocultural settings and the relations between these various perspectives.
Keywords
imagination, noise, semiotic system, sound, sphere of experience
The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different
machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines
multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises,
not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our
imagination.
(Luigi Russolo, 1916)
Corresponding author:
Tania Zittoun, Institut de psychologie et e
´
ducation, Faculte
´
des Lettres et sciences humaines, Louis Agassiz 1,
CH - 2000 Neucha
ˆ
tel, Switzerland.
Email: tania.zittoun@unine.ch
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Published in Culture & Psychology 18, issue 4, 472-483, 2012
which should be used for any reference to this work
‘‘ouitchi-tchatchitchatchaouitchitchatchitchitchaNIAAAAAAH ...ouitchi-
tchatchitcha ...’’
(Simonds, 1988, p. 45)
Listening to Martin King’s ‘‘I have a dream’’ is a different experience than reading
the same sentence (Mu
¨
ller, 2012), and reading an account of the numbers of deaths
in the world war trenches has nothing to do with a description of the sonar envir-
onment in which young men have learned to live (see for instance Remarque’s
[1928/1989] depiction of his ear-recognition of various types of flying and explod-
ing bombs). In an engaged article, Mu
¨
ller (2012) brings us to reflect about the
importance of sounds in our experience of the world, and shows how partial and
incomplete depictions of the past would be without recordings of their aural qual-
ity, or at least depictions of their sounds. A historian, Mu
¨
ller argues for an inte-
gration of a study of soundscapes (Schafer, 1977/1993) – the sound environment –
to develop a full-bodied history.
Mu
¨
ller partly bases his argument on the psychological functions of sound. In
effect, he argues, sounds can be seen as ‘‘a source of information’’, as ‘‘a tool of
orientation’’, a ‘‘means to gather experience’’ and a ‘‘component of communica-
tion’’ (Mu
¨
ller, 2012, p. 446). On this basis, the author interestingly suggests that the
study of sounds is fundamental to understand in which world people lived in spe-
cific past situations, how they could orient themselves in it, how they could confer
sense to these sounds, and how they could communicate.
These two points raise issues which directly triggers the curiosity of a cultural
psychologist. First, if sound is a source of information and means of communica-
tion, then it means that people can interpret sounds as mode of understanding the
world. We therefore need to consider the active role of listeners seriously. Second, if
the world of people of the past cannot be understood without a proper account of
their soundscapes, then social scientists and psychologists should also account for
people’s current experience of sounds. Third, it raises the question of what people
who hear little or not at all orient themselves in their environment. In what follows,
I will address the two first questions – and leave out the third to other enquiries.
Here, I will continue Mu
¨
ller’s call for a history of sounds by suggesting that cul-
tural psychology should integrate sounds in its enquiry. Doing so, I call for a non-
naı
¨
ve approach of sounds as sociocultural psychological phenomena.
Social spaces, soundscapes and the semiosphere
Through its interest for the social, psychology has early developed an interest for
people’s context or environment, describing social groups, social fields, and then
institutions. Strangely, the concrete, material aspects of these places is still only
scarcely studied and has only recently come back to the fore in cultural psychology,
for instance with Kharlamov’s analysis of the experience of being in the urban
space (2012), or Valsiner’s interest for people’s movements in ornamented world
(Valsiner, 2007; 2008; but see Fuhrer, 1998).
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These geographical, material and urban spaces interest cultural psychology
because they constitute human environments, and more precisely, because as
people move through them, in time, they are constantly exposed to their presence,
shapes, volumes, colours and sounds, and contribute to them. These geographical
environments guide our physical movements, and also, because we keep being
exposed to shapes, colours and sounds at the periphery of our consciousness,
they actually guide our thinking (Valsiner, 2011). First, in the here and now,
street signs and colours suggest to us some places, inform us about the status of
others, induce us to spend money or to not come any closer. Second, in a deeper
sense, our long-terms experience of the places in which we move is also the situated
process by which we learn to move and to see; we therefore internalize and gener-
alize these relationships to space, colours of the landscape and textures of the
buildings. Our spaces become the texture of our minds, in a very essential sense.
Hence, the nostalgia of migrants for their homeland landscapes or for the shape of
the houses of their village speaks for such deep connections between our material
environments and our identities and sense of what feels homely. Third, we actually
also contribute to the transformation of the material space – we create sounds as
we walk in the streets, drive cars and play the drum, we transform our gardens and
houses, we paint walls and make urban plans.
Sounds are spatial, and they thus are part of our physical environment. As
Mu
¨
ller suggests, they constitute soundscapes, three-dimensional, physical sound
environment, in which we live. As much as physical spaces, they are perceived
by humans through their senses and their physical, embodied experience; and as
their experience of space, experiences of sounds needs to be treated, analyzed –
these becomes signs for humans. Like physical spaces, sound is pervasive; first, it is
always on the process of being experienced, catching our attention or disturbing us;
second, it is also and always exposing us to endless social meanings; and third, we
participate to sounds. Sounds constitute one modality of the semiosphere in which
we live.
The notion of semiosphere has been proposed by Lotman to designate the world
of culture in which we live, made out of semiotic units – the minimal conditions of
carrying meaning through time and space among humans (if not other species) –
and as ‘‘the result and the condition for the development of culture’’(Lotman, 1990,
p. 125). The notion was built in analogy to that of biosphere, used to designate ‘‘the
totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for the
continuation of life’’ (Lotman, 1990, p. 125). If sounds are relevant to humans,
whatever their cause is, it is because they become one of the modalities by which
culture functions.
Boundaries: Noise, sounds, music, meaning
To contribute to a reflection of a possible cultural psychology of sounds and
soundscapes, I will explore a few attempts made to reflect on people’s experience
of sound in specific spheres of experience. Using an old technique, I will approach
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sounds through contradistinctions: when the idea of sounds becomes blurred and
meets a limit – noises, words, or music. This exploration is in no way exhaustive.
‘‘Sound’’ designates ‘‘(what is heard because of) quick changes of pressure in air,
water, etc.’’ (Procter, 1995, p. 1378) – a sound is a vibration interpreted by an ear,
and here, a human ear (with no major dysfunction). Something which is heard can
also be interpreted in a different ways.
The cultural construction of the meaning of sounds
In a foundational essay for cultural psychology, Boesch (2007) reflects on ‘‘the
sound of the violin’’ and questions what makes its beauty. He examines the epi-
genesis of the violin through history and in different places in the world, as well as
the developmental trajectory of the young violinist who needs to discipline his
movement and hearing so as to produce a beautiful sound. The essay brings him
to reflect on the mutual adjustment of person and instruments, through a life
course and history, and mediated by dynamics of recognition. More relevant for
the current discussion, Boesch particularly reflects on the tension that justifies the
search for a ‘‘pure’’ sound – a utopia of something not yet heard, but powerful
enough to mobilize the effort of civilization and musicians:
Utopia is the imagination of a world entirely in harmony with our fantasms, of reality
totally in tune with our inner experience. In other words, Utopia abolishes the ‘‘I’’–
‘‘non-I’’ antagonism. The beautiful sound, an external phenomenon, yet produced by
our mastery and corresponding to – or even surpassing – our ideal standards, thus
becomes a proof of our potential to create a phenomenon which, by its appeal, sym-
bolizes Utopia. (Boesch, 2007, p. 186)
Eventually, Boesch suggests, the beautiful sound is a mythem, linked to a cultural
ideal of purity, in opposition to noise – or ‘‘sound dirt’’ (Boesch, 2007, p. 188). He
goes as far as suggesting that rock music is looking for this ‘‘dirt’’ – through its
noisy music and dirty clothes and greasy hair.
But what then, is noise? In such a view, noise is sound which has not been
cultivated – either because it has not been produced by humans, or because
humans have not yet developed a system to identify and name it. But ‘‘noise’’ is
also very often simply the sound of ‘‘Others’’, as Gonseth, Knodel, Laville and
Mayor (2011) observe through the history of musicology.
If we now examine the perspective of individuals, the boundaries between
sounds and noise manifest slightly differently. In an intriguing case study of a
Thui village in Northern Thailand, Chuengsatiansup describes the illness of
women which is foremost manifested by a hyper-sensibility, or even a feeling of
being attacked by daily noises, ‘‘blasting motorcycles, drunkards, quarrelling
neighbors, machines eating up the forest’’ (Chuengsatiansup, 1999, p. 297).
These ‘‘noises’’ are perceived as highly unpleasant and participate to the ill-state
of these women, manifested by deep tiredness, numbness and insomnia, without
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having a physiological explanation. To account for this, the author proposes a
complete analysis of the village’s mode of life, which has been questioned by
regional and world legislative and economical changes, and was forced to undergo
through deep transformation. Hence, for reasons of animal protection, the trad-
itional elephant trade became prohibited, which demanded that new occupations
for elephants and new trades for villagers be found; the forests were being sold to
large foreign groups which started to use extensively its wood, preventing trad-
itional uses; the media brought new leisure to young men, such a motorbikes and
alcohol. In that perspective, the ‘‘noises’’ that make women sick are actually the
sounds of all the aspects that impose a rupture on the previous way of life of
villagers and women: The sound of woodcutting is interpreted as the noise of
machines destroying the physical environment, the sound of young mean having
fun with their motorbikes becomes the noise of young men risking death
through dangerous mechanical objects. In that sense, a noise is a sound which is
perceived as rupture – whether it designates a real source of danger, or because it
questions who one is, the relationships between the person and her social and
material environment, or one’s vision of the future and the meaning of existence.
Chuengsatiansup’s (1999) coup de force consists in her analysis of the complete
semiosphere: why specific sounds are interpreted as noises having the power
to somatically aggress people can only be understood when these are put in
relationship to other meanings, diffracted through other material means and
modes. In that sense, for what they designate and what they are not, sounds are
part of a semiotic system.
Artists’ explorations: From non-sound to sound
What is a sound, and how sounds touch us or disturb us, has been systematically
explored by musicians and composers. Since the beginning of modernity in the Arts
– mainly after industrialization and the First World War – the pursuit of beauty
became secondary in painting and in music; artists engaged in making sense of,
admire or denounce the new conditions of existence. In his 1916 Futurist mani-
festo, Russolo enthusiastically asked his readers to learn to listen and discriminate
the sounds of modernity, which could become a new material for creative inven-
tion. Over the last 100 years, and especially after the Second World War, musicians
and composers have developed complex ways to create a wide diversity of sound
experiences, using for this natural sounds, instruments, synthesizers and new tech-
nologies. Since the 1950s, through stereophonic effects, multiple tracks, uses of
samples and drones, and thanks to the quality of sound systems, headphones
and physical places, they manage to create sounds which have a deep spatial struc-
ture – it is possible to literally hear sounds that move through space and have
complex layered architectures – and a strong materiality: vibration, drums and
palpitations create deliberate physical experiences of pressure, tensions, etc., as
in the sound showers of electronic music.
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In such work, different sounds are
transformed for new composition; whether they are natural or industrial, pleasant
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