Paper Short Abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Paris, this talk explores the difficulties of knowing a new type of noise called recreational noise, of turning human noises into environmental noises, and what the uneasy tension between observing and listening can tell us about noise and urban life.

Paper Abstract:

Since the EU’s Environmental Noise Directive (END) was established in 2002, noise pollution has become a leading atmospheric risk and public health concern (UNEP 2022). As the END tuned attention to the “mechanical” (Bijsterveld 2008) sounds and sources (airplane, road, railway) of environmental noise, it neglected another source: humans. The chatter from terraces, the music of portable stereos, street performers, tourists, or the sonic disturbances of what has been called “recreational noise” (Revol, Bernfeld, Mietlicki 2022) are central to noise issues within many European cities, and yet lacks standardised techniques for their measurement; it is not visible in official noise data or noise maps. While this source of noise was primary to the earliest anti-noise campaigns (Mansell 2016; Schwartz 2011), it does not easily fold into the now dominant categories of “environmental noise” or “noise pollution”. In Paris, recreational noise has become central to the city’s “struggle against noise,” gathering around it, resident associations (e.g. Droit au Sommeil), politicians, and institutional and infrastructural responses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a noise observatory (Bruitparif), city officials, and resident associations in Paris, and learning from their respective mapping techniques and expertise, this talk seeks to explore the difficulties of turning human noises into environmental noises and of producing “objective” knowledge through technologies, expertise, and inscriptions, and their contestation. Ultimately, the talk is interested in the uneasy tension between observing and listening (Peterson 2021), and what this uneasiness can tell us about noise and the epistemological challenges of listening to it.