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 particle movements that make ossicles vibrate in our ears. It is a vehicle for the translation and transduction of information. From an information theory point of view, how “informative” a signal is, is measured by how much it differs from noise; in this sense, noise accounts for a signal’s unreadability, or 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 for any message transmission.
Sometimes sound signals –rich or poor in information– are so intense that they hurt our ears, and this happens in different measures according to each person’s 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 moments1, and such signals, however rich in content they may be, are also referred to in common language as noise2.
Thus, sound noise is subjective and can have different meanings depending on how it is approached. 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 a 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 joyfully, merrily and inevitably noisy.
Although this essay is about sound noise, the information theory definition that I used above applies to all types of noise, and I will also refer to noise in its abstract sense and as a quality that is about to permeate our spirit, and that certainly has already colonized our intimacy. This text 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, for example the withdrawal from common grounds. It is an invitation to examine our common sound territory.
Noise and collective trauma in Colombia
Colombia is a country deeply wounded by the dynamics generated around the illegal commercialization of the synthetic version of a plant whose sacred ancestral use in this very territory has been to bestow the sacred gift of speech and expression as the cohesive and nourishing backbone 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 needs to be talked 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 silence in a history so intricately tied to a plant whose original gift is eloquence, is one of the many ways in which we experience separation—as a curse of a country and a curse of an era. Surrounded by fertile abundance, many Colombians live in malnutrition, while the more fortunate cannot even name the nature that surrounds us.
Expelled from our own land and responding to a prominent call of our time, it seems that in Colombia we are also insistently seeking to numb4 ourselves, to avoid listening to ourselves, deepening the separation between one another, within ourselves, and from our territory.
Separation prevents us from knowing or finding what is obvious, sometimes right in front of us or even within us. Accelerating separation has become nearly all that we, as humanity, have been engaged in of late, and, like noise, I consider it one of the great evils of our time. We have reached an extreme where our physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions scream in isolation, dissociated, in languages we neither understand nor integrate. We live similar realities in the ways we inhabit our territory, our thinking, and, above all, the realm of the public. Social networks, needless to say, are the epitome, caricature, and pinnacle of this reality.
Noise is often the norm, even in the countryside, and my city-dweller ears resent it. I try to understand it through the lens of collective trauma: sometimes I think that in the countryside, it is convenient for the sound of speakers playing music to predominate—predictable, and in that sense preferable to the subtle omens of the birds or the schizoid—though mostly unconscious—activity of predicting what might follow the sound of moving branches. For our brains, sound is anticipation itself5. In the resonant silence of nature lies the potential for death6, and in a traumatized country, it makes sense that we seek refuge in noise, deafening ourselves to the information the sounds of the land might carry7.
If motorcycles, ubiquitous throughout Colombia, have been the precursors of nearly every massacre and violent death in this country in recent decades, can we truly be sure that living surrounded by the sound that has heralded so many tragedies does not affect us? Could it be that, even if only to a small degree, our collective trauma is triggered by it? Sonically, motorcycles have a particular way of persistently reminding us of the thousands of controlled explosions that must occur every second in nearly every corner of Colombia for combustion to propel them.
I fantasize that, in the future, it will be said of this era that we were so intent on crying deafness that nearly all our movement was powered by countless explosions—nested, recursive, and incessant—and that we pretended to ignore it and be fine with it, just to keep moving frenetically. I no longer know to the rhythm of what. To the rhythm of nothing.
Sometimes it is the –false?– silence that truly stuns. Across the street from my house, a human being was murdered on a Wednesday at 4 pm8. As neighbors, we naturally proceeded to avoid talking much about it among ourselves. We know that the extortionists, self-proclaimed owners of the territory and responsible for the crime, have eyes and ears everywhere. They exploit the void we neighbors leave when we abandon the soundscape as a shared space to connect, care for, and strengthen one another. This is a cycle that feeds itself.
This law of silence, a consequence of the social contract that was broken before our eyes—and had already been eroding for some time—found its exception the following Saturday, when a neighboring house hosted a party with loud music until 4 a.m. Isn't this an almost caricatural representation of the separation I'm talking about, of a kind of dissociation?
In reality, the noise that saturates is not an exception to the law of silence; it is its exaltation at all costs, the culmination of destructive interference. I mean that excessive noise is not very different from an inert and isolating silence, devoid of cohesive information—similar in its lack of relevant content to the inconsequential information conveyed by noise. And I think it is important to distinguish such silence from the one so many of us long for: the silence that shelters and nourishes rest, contemplation, creation, and enjoyment. The silence from which we resist the imperative of consumption and production. 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, something else often prevents it—alcohol finishes silencing in the mind what the speakers in the space fail to saturate. What is it that we seek to repress, to suffocate? How do we read the noise? How would we inhabit sound if we had the words to say what we need to say?
Noise and common territories
Noise, as destructive interference, is both an illustration of and a cause for separation. It is also how we are trivializing the sound environment—the space for listening—rendering it unusable as a shared territory. Can we, as a country, afford to close this channel of our perception?9 Can we live without listening to ourselves, and live without silence (the fertile kind)? If our problem is that we have hardly listened to ourselves, are we truly going to abandon this territory?
Sound gives us a sense of territory. Sometimes, when I visit eastern Antioquia, I hear certain bird songs that I know with certainty were the sounds that shaped the atmosphere of my childhood world. In my home in Medellín, day by day, I listen to the subtle shifts in birdsong, softly mutating throughout the day as sunlight advances and retreats. It gives me an exact sense—though of course unconsciously, because for many years my perception was conditioned to ignore them—of where the beings I share this block with are. They migrate and change, but they are here, nearby, eating, communicating, and singing in the trees whose greenery accompanies and soothes me all day long. They visit my balcony, fly above me, and return according to their rhythms.
In contrast to the soft, nesting circular cadences of the birds that anchor me in my habitat, every 3 to 5 minutes, waves of cars and motorcycles appear at the traffic light on the corner, driven by people with an ecstatic urgency not to be where they are (their inability to resist honking gives them away). I know nothing about them—only that they come, their sound disrupts, and they leave, leaving us searching to reconnect with that which truly inhabits our territory. I mean to say that there are types of sounds that provide a sense of comfort and security in inhabiting a space (even if this is unconscious for most people), and that this comfort is tied to the temporal continuity of such sounds. Then there are other sounds, like traffic, that in some way 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 quintessential shared territory. It allows for synchrony, concurrence, and coexistence with others to the extent that we co-inhabit time. Purely visual signals lack this characteristic because they are not woven into time10. Sound makes tuning possible, which is something like aligning in tone, co-inhabiting sound. For example: co-inhabiting music is what we do when we dance, and this is why dance is an experience of communion, of community, made possible by sound as a shared space.
Since the sound space is a shared common territory, noise is a signal that, in itself, reflects the social contract and social agreements. In fact, we could speak of something akin to a sonorous social contract: Under what agreements do we inhabit sound?
It is worth noting that perception itself—the perception of each sense, whether visual, tactile, or auditory signals—is also shaped by social agreements. Which signals we pay attention to—and how—and which we ignore are part of these agreements. It is enough to interact with a baby to notice that they give as much importance to the sound of distant birds as to the machine 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 human voices.
In Colombian cities, there seems to be an implicit agreement (part of our sonorous social contract) that noticing excessive honking, roaring engines, or music at blaring volumes is merely a sign of excessive sensitivity—a sensitivity that is, in turn, ignored and stigmatized. The norm is to ignore one another amidst the noise, even though the very purpose of sound is 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 increasingly noticeable to many of us11 because it has become an extension and illustration of what is happening more and more in our minds. In other words, perhaps sound noise serves as a reminder of other types of noise that also carry the potential for separation and threaten such precious resources as attention and mental space.
Noise is what inhabits us behind our eyes and between our ears in the face of the commercial bombardment of the digital realm. This space, created with the laudable and more than justified intention of connecting human beings, has now become a shopping mall in the ether—a corporatized space where our behaviors, fears, and intimacy are at the service of ever-larger corporations. These corporations profit from dazing and bombarding us with noise that becomes emotional, sensitizes us, and manipulates us into buying.
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, this noise—and I dare say all noise—separates us from our own intuition and from any sense of cohesion in our thoughts; it prevents us from holding onto our own threads. Noise blocks our ability to think about the world through complexity, something we increasingly lack in a chaotic, information-overloaded world.
The corporatization of virtual space, in turn, is nothing more than an extension of the material reality in cities, where inhabited and livable public spaces are increasingly scarce. Both physically and digitally (and more seriously: in the blurred space of our intimacy!), we are becoming more separated, running out of common spaces and shared realities. Becoming aware of how we relate to noise in common spaces could be the beginning of an antidote to separation.
Noise and intimacy
With noise—both physical and virtual, both sound and informational—the right to privacy is also at risk. Let us remember that while one can close their eyes with a mere act of will, one cannot close their ears. 'Don't pay attention,' is what the social agreement would say if it could speak. This, of course, is only possible to varying degrees depending on each person and their sensitivity.
The fact is that all these manifestations of noise have the ability to mix with, overlap, or even expel a person's inner dialogue. If intimacy is at risk, then creation, authenticity, mental health, and, above all, the notion that each individual might have of a safe space are also at risk. The conversation about security changes profoundly if every person in a society lacks a safe place in their mind, in their intimacy. Let us not forget that physical security as a characteristic of a society is closely tied to the sense of security each individual has in their relationship with the world.
Isn't an imposition on the most intimate aspects of a person—what we might consider the bare minimum of a safe space—intrusive? Doesn't destructive interference infringe on our privacy? Isn't the right to a form of autonomy in our privacy something we should strive to protect?
In Medellín, a city where young people are sometimes even physically punished 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 imposing our noise on others has also been normalized. In other words, intruding on what happens within that intimacy in each person's mind. By this, I aim to point out and observe a certain social tendency or proclivity to intrude upon the privacy of others (something that social networks actively amplify). I believe that a useful lens through which to reflect on noise is the sovereignty of privacy.
Noise and public policy
During 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 timing and location of respiratory crises in the population due to poor air quality, it is evident in all Colombian cities that noise complaints, as the night progresses, turn into calls about fights, which in many cases escalate into homicides.
One takeaway from three years of the Edgelands Institute's residency in Medellín is that coexistence reflects social agreements that go beyond traditional homicide metrics; it speaks to a cultural ethos.
Noise, as an imposition and as a reflection of an attitude toward others, is so institutionalized that we all know stories of people who have been threatened or even assaulted for asking their neighbors to lower the volume. Such was the case of journalist Ana Cristina Restrepo, and the heartbreaking crime against Hernán Darío Castrillón, an avid reader who was blinded for asking for the bare minimum: his right to sleep. It seems that those willing to impose their noise are, at times, also willing to impose themselves through violence13.
We must be living in a deeply advanced state of dissociation not to understand the importance of the sound environment. Hearing has played—and continues to play—a fundamental role in the evolution and survival of all higher vertebrate animals. It is hardwired into our nervous system. Sound is the sense of safety.
It is reasonable to think that a state of constant sound excitation (no matter how conditioned we may be to ignore it), with unpleasant signals that often carry the message of 'danger'—such as honking, engines, and loud impositions—can disrupt the nervous state of most human beings. Moreover, a nervous system in a heightened state of vulnerability can impair our decision-making capacity and increase our reactivity and potential for violence.How can we aim to reduce violence and homicide rates through evidence-based studies when human beings in cities have less and less access to seeing the sky, finding beauty somewhere, or even listening to birds and silence? How can we, when not being overwhelmed seems an unattainable luxury for the majority?
I say this as someone who has been a 'researcher,' one of the many labels I have worn in life: What study can replace common sense (and the connection to all our senses)? (And considering all the studies that do exist: do we even pay attention to them?) How much further must we disassociate ourselves before we start attending to what so loudly demands our attention? Does the death of 141 motorcyclists in traffic accidents in Medellín in 2023 suddenly tell us that we live and approach transportation aggressively? Isn't the noise of horns a striking indicator and reminder of this?
Urban displacement due to noise has been a reality for years, and the nuisance it causes is not exclusive to any socioeconomic class. I know a woman who had to leave her home in eastern Manrique, Medellín, because she couldn’t stand the noise. Her experience in the neighborhood was that the police did nothing, and that the 'muchachos' protected these dynamics.
By inhabiting the common sound space in abusive ways and failing to regulate its shared use, we also neglect people with neurodiversity (especially children), the elderly, those with sleep disorders, and animals—all vital considerations for public health. Do we not already know that excessive noise can exacerbate anxiety and various mental health disorders? Could it be that, in a society accustomed to managing its emotions through numbing or violence, noise might conjure or at least signal the potential for more aggression?
Noise disproportionately affects people in conditions of physical, mental, social, or economic vulnerability, and as a public health issue, it is also a matter of equality.
In a world where we have no space left to think, where the excess noise within us prevents us from making room to welcome others, reflecting on noise and the environment is undeniably important. 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—one that allows us to receive others and imagine societies where respect for all people and beings prevails.
There is no space in me for the other if I impose myself on them violently. There is no space in me for the other if my mind is filled with noise.
And since there are such advanced stages of separation in which only the language of money is understood, let us speak that language: in Colombia, we experience, with the noise emitted in commercial contexts, a tragedy of the commons14. Those who produce the noise—presumably, or so they claim—derive some sort of economic benefit from it. Meanwhile, the unwitting recipients of these emissions are subjected to their detrimental impacts without compensation. Nor are these impacts mitigated, meaning they are neither contained nor kept within certain established parameters. For example: nightclub and restaurant owners operate under the belief that louder music brings them more profit, yet they do not invest in ensuring that such noise does not extend beyond the spatial boundaries of their premises. Meanwhile, neighboring residents not only fail to benefit from the noise but also bear its consequences.
It is called the ‘tragedy of the commons’ because a common good is exploited by certain economic agents to the direct and measurable detriment (in monetary terms!15) of those who bear the impacts of such exploitation or use. In this case, the common good is the sound space, intrinsically tied to the privacy and well-being of each person. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is outlined in dozens of economics books: mitigation and regulation. Do you want to emit high-intensity sound and firmly believe it adds value to your business?16 Then invest in acoustic soundproofing. The people surrounding your economic activity should not have to bear the cost of a few individuals' decision to produce loud noise.
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 believe it would be useful to conduct widespread surveys across the country to help us understand and characterize noise as an epidemiological phenomenon, as well as citizens' perceptions of it, given its highly subjective nature. Perhaps even restaurant owners would be surprised to realize that hurting eardrums doesn’t attract more customers. Maybe, by reducing separation and dissociation, those who think police helicopters are the answer to every security problem would realize that investing in beautifying (YES, BEAUTIFYING, FILLING-WITH-BEAUTY) human habitats is actually good for improving security indicators.
Destructive interference
Noise helps us avoid the conversations we owe ourselves as a country. It helps us separate and disassociate from ourselves and from others. Whether we choose to face it or not, it is there—both a backdrop and a reflection of where we are heading as humanity.
A dear friend once shared this insight with me: every act of a person is a request for love, even if it is not understood as such through a predetermined and agreed language. I try to remember that every time a driver honks because they cannot bear to wait two milliseconds for the person ahead to respond to a traffic light change. Perhaps what is truly deafening in Medellín is the lack of love.
I propose that we reflect on what it might mean to re-inhabit the auditory space, to rethink the auditory social contract, to understand sound as a shared territory and treat it as such. This is crucial because we suffer from a fragmentation of reality, from a paralyzing separation that disconnects us from our bodies and our environment, and from the loss of more and more common spaces—the very spaces where community is built. Without them, we are nothing more than a captive audience, carefully isolated in front of our screens, reduced to mere consumers. Digital cattle in bodies that exist only for the strictly necessary.
Let this be a call to listen and to question our relationship with listening. A call to stop abandoning the few common grounds we still have, especially those that are so intimately linked to our sense of territory and our ability to think, feel, and communicate. I have not found any forms of embodied resistance that do not involve beauty: so, I will go now and fill my soundscape 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 noise/music distinction is ultimately an ethical one. If you elect to hear something, it is not noise, even if most people might deem it unspeakably horrible. If you are forced to hear something, it is noise, even if most people might deem it ineffably gorgeous. Thus, Keizer writes, “Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ performed at the Gramercy is not noise; Gregorian Chant piercing my bathroom wall is.”’
[2] Sometimes we use 'noise' and 'bulla' (buzz) interchangeably. Interestingly, 'bulla' and 'bubble' share an etymological root in Latin. In Latin, bulla means ball, shout, or agitation. Bulbullia ('burbuja' means bubble in Spanish) is a repetition of bulla, an onomatopoeic term, I would say—though I’m not entirely sure. In Colombia, we make bulla nonstop, perhaps because, as Gordon Hempton says, the world is a music box powered by the sun, and here we get plenty of sun all year round. Maybe that’s why we’re constantly bubbling up like roaring bubbles.
[3] For a more subjective take: noise in its purest form can sometimes help us concentrate. The sound that accompanied the writing of this text between these ears was white noise (and recordings of forest soundscapes)..
[4] The word aturdir (to stun or daze) is etymologically linked to the tordo (thrush), a bird. Possibly because 'in summer it often falls stunned by the heat,' or because it is associated with a certain kind of atolondramiento (a flustered confusion, derived from londo, meaning lark), another word we owe to birds.
[5] Hearing is intimately linked to survival. This is why no higher vertebrates—such as mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, or fish—are completely deaf under natural and typical conditions, as Gordon Hempton observes 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, meaning ‘roar’ or ‘hoarse, muffled sound,’ and appears to be etymologically related to words such as rumor, rugere, and runcus, all of which were used to describe sounds made by animals or resembling them.
[7] Another explanation, of course, not negligible, has to do with the comforting company and solace that tuning into the spirit of the radio provides to the solitary person.
[8] As mentioned above, in Spanish, the word aturdir comes from the name of the bird turdo (thrush), which is said to fall faint or stunned. I want to point out that anyone killed by a firearm dies stunned, just as someone killed by a bomb does.
[9] Not least because it is the country with the greatest bird biodiversity in the world.
[10] In fact, the noise of social networks is closely related to the lack of continuity in 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 artificial 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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