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lichenthrope9 · 3 years

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pandemic soundscape: sonic precarity and trauma

The guttural hum of a box fan and the soft, coded tapping of keys in my laptop’s keyboard are enough to fill my small bedroom. My bird screams occasionally from the next room and breaks the spell of predictability and quietude, and my mother stomps around in the kitchen or upstairs, making my soundscape feel precarious and uncertain. Her loudness corresponds to her anger. It is the element of the soundscape over which I have least direct control. This has become my everyday: my performance as a member of the household is indirectly reflected in the level of calm the house’s soundscape provides that day. Did I wake up on time? Did I do my chores? Did I call out sick from work? My every scrutinized action is incorporated into the intensity with which the cabinets get slammed open and closed in the kitchen. How I wish my door locked. It doesn’t creak or bang when it opens, but I can still hear the difference when the open door allows more sound from beyond the threshold. Besides, a suddenly opened door is usually closely followed by a demand of some kind, which always seems loud no matter the absolute volume. I don’t even know if I would prefer if she knocked. She has no concept of softness. She is an abrupt person, or maybe I’m simply too sensitive.

It is my hope that this glimpse into the sonic affects of my daily life has provided a sense of anxiety, because I wish to explore the sources of this very tension. What is it about the pandemic that has intensified these interactions to a point where I feel such intense scrutiny through sound? How does one’s control over sound, or lack thereof, create feelings of comfort or dread? Why is it that my bird, who is physically louder than my mother, does not raise my hackles as much as my mother’s tone? I will draw on Tausig’s work on dynamic intensities in protest settings, and Hagood’s study of noise-cancelling headphones to explain these phenomena.

Before the pandemic, my relationship with my mother was certainly fraught, but I usually had the option to leave the house when necessary. Now that I’m more restricted to these walls, every sensation is loaded with politics and directly impacts my health. Too much of the same set of sensations for too long feels oppressive; the walls close in and I get migraines or anxiety attacks. On the other end of the spectrum, a totally unpredictable environment generates panic or triggers dissociative episodes. My sonic surroundings very much play into this gamut of experience, affording calm only within a narrow band that balances bland predictability with stressful novelty.

In Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy protocol to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I was often told that OCD makes me “allergic to uncertainty.” The joke rings true in my relationship with sound, and with my mother. When I don’t know how she’ll react to my behavior, I withdraw into a bubble of sensory control. Such strategies of intentional social and sensory withdrawal are common in places where “personal space” is hard to come by, such as in airports or trains. In the words of Mack Hagood, “Modern transportation puts us in close proximity with diverse strangers while leaving the rules for interaction largely up to negotiation and interpretation. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that many people choose to retreat from sociality through books, newspapers, and media devices” (2011: 580). Though Hagood focuses on how such retreat can be commodified, my interest is in what type of people benefit most from the ability to retreat, and who is afforded such abilities. Certainly, many obsessive-compulsives, including myself, crave the ability to discreetly and temporarily dull or turn off the chaos of the outside world. Autistic individuals and trauma survivors also come to mind; therapists of my own have even recommended sensory deprivation tanks to treat trauma-related tension and anxiety (which I have yet to try, but emerging research finds sensory deprivation therapeutic for both acute and complex PTSD). This has serious implications for the embodiment of cultures within entire populations struggling with chronic mental health conditions. When uncertainty is an enemy, and there is a product that can defeat it even temporarily, sometimes it seems like there is no choice but to consume that product. This also helps contextualize the higher rates of drug use, particularly central nervous system depressants, in people with anxiety disorders, trauma, and/or autism-spectrum disorders. We are desperate to dull the world’s loud and garish chaos by whatever means necessary, and since those means usually cost money, capital rears its ugly head once again and mentally ill populations become a market to exploit, divide, and conquer.

So, many engage in a cycle of attempting to control or distance from their sensory environments to manage their health within those environments. But what is it about the environments themselves that create such intensities? It isn’t enough to say that loudness or “absolute intensity” of sound and sensory experience always generates anxiety; if that were the case, my bird would always be more of a stressor than my mother. For clarity, we can turn to the work of Benjamin Tausig, who conducted ethnography with the Red Shirt protestors in Thailand, some of whom used silence to create extreme affects of pity and mourning: “Diew told this story [of military brutality toward protestors] visually, through his costume and iconography. But he also told it through sonic figuration, with quiet and silence as dynamic poetic resources. It is possible that his silence achieved a political mobility that no sound could have matched” (2018: 7). In his guest lecture, I asked Dr. Tausig to elaborate on the effect of the boundary between Diew’s silent performance and the loud protest around him. Dr. Tausig said that Diew’s performance created a small, temporary zone of peace in the loud protest, where the chaotic, extroverted, overlapping affects of loud protest felt slightly muted in a disconcerting way (2020: paraphrased from Tausig’s lecture).

It seems, therefore, that the intensity of sound is not directly related to a physical aspect of loudness. Rather, Tausig says that “This was a poetic play with the dynamic possibilities of the gathering [protest at all its noise volumes]” (2018: 8). That is, the relationship between Diew’s silence and the surrounding loudness was what generated the affective component of the performance. This rings true for my experience in the pandemic. The sudden isolation in a single sonic environment created a microcosm in which the slightest deviation from baseline takes on various intensities.

#me #school assignment #ethnography #sonic ethnography #sound studies #trauma

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