Becoming noise animals – a strategy for listening in urban landscapes
Growing up among large urban complexes such as Shenzhen and Hong Kong, my childhood was accompanied by the low drones of industrial machines and visceral symphony of unending construction. In the past 30 years, Shenzhen has grown into a global central hub for electric circuit parts and technological advancements. Youth in their 20s and 30s come in and out of the city– to be digitized, to become 1s and 0s, to live in an impossibly artificial environment, internally and externally.
Walking through the city with headphones became a self-hypnosis and a necessary meditation toward an idyllic sonic dystopia. The vast amount of auditory materials that we encounter daily is largely ungraspable to the unprepared ears. Instead, we are intrigued, confounded and seized by the incomprehensible mains hum from the numerous, gigantic data centers[1]. As sonic animals that conceptualize our spatial existence with sound, we let the confusion become an addiction – to a hyperreality of a sound world of the mundane, paranoid at its own authenticity.
In Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, I witnessed the growing obsession of “HI-FI” technology among the youth of my generation – expensive static headphones and active noise canceling made for recreating the soft and delicate sounds that otherwise can’t survive the brutal sonic reality[2]. We then live in an inevitable deafness caused by an intentional blindfold – a pursuit of high fidelity made only possible through simulacra. The natural acoustics and soundwaves are transformed into on/off digits. The data are not perceived with the spectro-temporal features of natural sound traveling through air, nor the nuances of embodied gestures and spatial reflections; instead, our brain’s auditory cortex is confronted with a synthetic lack.
The Chinese live-streaming scene has exploded in popularity, with the country’s live streaming industry estimated to be worth over $4 billion in 2020[3]. Users spend hours watching their favorite streamers perform various activities, from singing and dancing to eating and gaming. In a live streamer’s life, where every tiny fracture of the throat is captured in the mic, while thousands of people pay to listen closely to one person. The distance between the soundsource and the microphone, between the microphone to the listening ear, is infinitesimal.
One of the most prominent issues that one encounters in digital signal processing is what is known as “aliasing”: an effect that causes different signals to be confused with, or become aliases of one another when sampled, resulting in a distortion or loss of signal when a digital sample is reconstructed to be a continuous analogue output. A phenomenon of the new digital auditory age is thereby conjured: the aliasing of a live body. The listening act itself has reduced the body into an ear in the process of de-stratification of sonic meanings and the destruction of energy transfer. There comes a body without organs, stretching and intensifying to be itself the listening machine—one that then captivates and catatonicizes the murmuring of the mechanized and stratifies another resonating body into an ear toward a single aliased body –the anti-production of sound.
While over-stratifying our ears out of self-protection only leads to the uncontrollable production of no-thingness in sounds, opening them allows noise to crawl in. But this opening is an invitation to a necessary evolution – to become an animal of the noise, to develop a “nocturnal” vision for the treacherous vibrations…
From what LaBelle describes as the listener to “the space between as a roaring world”, one can envision a tactful noise animal in the sonic dark night, who hears, with “tact and tenderness,” the ever-changing, complex, and confusingly deceptive sonic environments. A noise animal is sensitive to intelligent ears in the rooms, cooperating with a redefining narrative of encounter with them to sense what is otherwise unimaginable.
Cox paints a beautiful picture of a hypothetical cyborg race that migrates via “DNA-Transmolecularization Vibrationsurfing” and creates new patterns of meaning with noise. A noise animal is a music-maker who sniffs out and reimagines a futuristic set of acoustic vocabulary that stems from the present sound world[4].
A noise animal listens with hunger and without an answer. The current technology focuses on solving problems, finding answers, and providing clean and directional illusory soundscapes. To become a noise animal is not a survival strategy, but a creative one that leads us to redefine a sonic reality we critically exist in.
Ivy Fu
[1] B. Bosker, “Why everything is getting louder,” The Atlantic, 08-Oct-2019. [Online]. Available: https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the- end-of-silence/598366/. [Accessed: 18-Mar-2023].
[2] Carey JM, Rossler K. The How When Why of High Fidelity Simulation. [Updated 2023 May 1]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559313/
[3] Zhang, Ruiwen. “Live streaming platforms in China: a comprehensive review.” Asian Journal of Communication, vol. 29, no. 6, 2019, pp. 595-611.
[4] Cox, Jessie. “Cyborg Concert Synopsis.” Jessie Cox, 2020. https://www.jessiecoxmusic.com/cyborg concert-synopsis.
