Sensory Studies

Blurred Rhythms: a brief audio-textual journey into the messiness of everyday sonic life

Craig Farkash
PhD Student, Social and Cultural Analysis program
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University

Image taken by author, Rue Wellington 2022.

STOP! Before you read any further make sure to listen to the accompanying sound composition. As you listen, there are a few things that I would encourage you to think about. What sounds do you hear (or think you hear)? Are there similar sounds in the place you’re listening from? What memories come to mind with certain sounds? How do certain parts of the composition make you feel? Anxious? Calm? Indifferent?

Blurred Rhythms Sound Composition

Done listening? Let us proceed…

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Montreal is loud. That was one of the first things I noticed when I moved here. The day after my partner and I unpacked all of our boxes and started to settle our things the street in front of our apartment was closed and excavators, hydrovacs, gravel trucks, and other equipment moved in and started tearing it up. Every two or three weeks for the next few months, a strip of asphalt would be removed, pipes would be replaced, and the hole would be filled. Even if you couldn’t hear the sounds of construction, you could feel them, as the reverberations of jackhammers traveled through our windows, walls, and floors, bouncing back and forth in a tactile and auditory loop.

Winter hasn’t been much different. I’m not sure what I expected of the sounds of everyday Montreal. The amount of sound might be down to the way the winter season has progressed, with large dumps of snow followed by snow clearing cycles. Back home in Edmonton, the snow and ice on residential streets is largely left to melt with the spring. But here in Montreal, snow isn’t given much time to settle on the road – graters and snowblowers come and go, and through our back window, backup alarms mingle with birds and squirrels. There’s a constant blurring of sonic boundaries. This being my first Montreal winter, I don’t really have anything to compare it against. For that you would have to ask a true local.

Perhaps the loudness that I’m experiencing has more to do with my expectations for the apartment that we moved into. It’s by far the newest place I’ve ever lived, built around ten years ago. My family home in the country was built long before my parents bought it in the 80’s. Every house or apartment I ever rented in Edmonton had a build date of at least the 70s. And one of the places I rented in Belgrade was in an old socialist apartment block, with an open courtyard and bordering an elementary school’s playground. The point is, these were places where you expected the walls to be paper thin. You knew that the scents of your neighbours cooking would waft through the vents and the cracks in doors. You expected to hear your upstairs neighbours’ footsteps meandering through the soundtrack of whatever show you had playing on the television at the time.

It’s not like I’m not used to loudness. The last house my partner and I rented in Edmonton before we moved here bordered the new LRT construction on 83 Street. In Belgrade we had to fight against the din of traffic coming off of Brankov Most, the bridge connecting old Belgrade on one side of the Sava River to Novi Beograd, before pushing through a set of heavy wooden doors that would muffle the sounds behind us. So, it’s not that I think that Montreal is really louder than other cities, it’s just a different loudness formed out of a different combination of sounds, out of a different assemblage of sensory experiences. It is the sense of loudness that happens when fascination gives way to routine and you’re no longer a traveler but living in it.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘loud’ as “marked by intensity or volume of sound” (n.d.) and we can extend that definition elsewhere. Take, for example, the many ways in which music writers talk of a city or location’s particular sound – of the Nashvhille sound, of Montreal’s indie character, of Chicago Blues, and so on. Do these kinds of labels necessitate that the music being made in these spaces is of an inherent quality? No. There are blues musicians who would melt your mind in Edmonton, just as the quality of Winnipeg’s indie scene might surprise outsiders. A lot of the differentiation of scenes comes down to the strength and ability of local mythmaking practices to filter outwards (Farkash 2019, Fauteux 2015). It just means that there’s a critical mass of vibrations emanating from Montreal or Chicago or Nashville, that their myths are louder than those from elsewhere. Its about more than just the quality of musicians in each place.

Yet this also points to the subjectivity of sensory experience and of listening more specifically. What we define as loudness may also point as much to how we’ve trained ourselves (and been brought up) to hear. We all have different volume or intensity thresholds for different sounds. I’m often amazed at how my father and mechanics like him can diagnose certain problems through sound or feel. In much the same way, as someone trained in music and who has written about music and sound previously, I find it amazing the different tones and textures of sound that musicians and sound artists can detect compared to others. It was with this in mind that I set about recording my apartment and the surrounding community of Pointe-Saint-Charles.

In her chapter in A Different Kind of Ethnography, Boudreault-Fournier discusses the process of recording and editing, both of visual and sonic materials, and its usefulness for ethnography.  Recording devices allow us to “creatively and imaginatively relate with the various environments in which we conduct research,” (Boudreault-Fournier 2017: 71), producing montages that are both fluid and fragmented. This process also requires intensive listening, “both directly with the ears and via the microphone, a process that engages both creator and listener directly in their environment” (Boudreault-Fournier 2017: 81-82). But the act of recording also “alters what it records” (Kim-Cohen 2009: 179), not only performing a Schaferian schizophonia, but reorienting the act of listening, conjuring images unrelated to the physical environs and directing the listener’s attention as much to how the editor hears as themselves. Hearing, in this sense, is also non-cochlear (Kim-Cohen 2009).

At the end of Boudreault-Fournier’s chapter, a series of student exercises are suggested, the first on producing some sort of audiovisual sequence and the second in performing a soundwalk. In following these suggestions, my soundscape composition fell somewhere in between. As mentioned earlier, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the boundlessness of sound, in the ways that the sounds of public and private spaces permeate one another.

I started by drawing a map of my apartment (figure 1) and decided that I would try to capture a selection of the sounds that I would normally hear or create within its bounds in a given day, synthesizing a portion of my daily sonic experience –  the sounds of daily chores (coffee making, dishes, laundry) and hobbies (guitar and piano), as well as my general movements around the space. Yet, not all of the sounds in my apartment were being made in my apartment. It became necessary to turn my attention to the sounds of the city that trickled into the apartment from elsewhere. At the time of recording, there had been a relatively recent snow dump and machinery revved up and down the streets surrounding our apartment. Inside the apartment I set up my Zoom H6 field recorder on a tripod, and using a stereo shotgun mic capsule attachment, recorded the comings and goings of that equipment.

Figure 1. A hand drawn map of our apartment with sonic markers

While I had mentioned earlier that this apartment was by far the newest space I had lived in, it also differs substantially in its layout. It is relatively long and rectangular, with sightlines (and therefore soundlines) all the way from the master bedroom to the street-facing window. There are fewer walls and corners to trap and reflect sound. Sounds both within and without the apartment travel relatively freely through the space. After the snow had cleared I set out into the surrounding neighbourhood with the same recording set-up and tried to track down the sources of some of these sounds. These included the sounds of birds chirping in the trees and bushes around the house, the nearby trains whose horns would make their presence known, the buses, the screams of children playing in parks, traffic, and construction, among others. A far more detailed bank of sounds featured in the composition is included towards the end of this document.

As I walked I found myself attuned to the texture of the sounds that I was hearing and creating. I know there are those that may scoff at the idea of sound as textured, reserving that descriptor for tactile experiences. But I believe it to be apt. Music, and by extension sound, is inherently tactile, particularly in its creation. A “G” chord feels very different in any of its positions on a guitar’s neck when compared to the many ways it can be played on a piano’s keyboard. Even a theremin – the only instrument played without touch – requires specific movements to create certain notes and tones. In this sense the boundary between hearing and touching is blurred. I’m not proposing that music making is totally synaesthetic, only that the relations between these senses, and therefore how they are described, are interchangeable.

As I moved through the neighbourhood I also found myself attempting to listen for different rhythms of life. The rhythms of the work day. The comings and goings of the people around me. The patterns and presence of sounds throughout the day – what Lefebvre might refer to as “polyrhythmia” (1992: 77). In the process of editing I attempted to juxtapose the rhythms and routines of my personal life with that of the outside world. In listening closely to my small corner of Montreal there is a certain verticality of sound, as people walk up and down the wrought iron stairs to their apartment, as they move up and down the mountain on their commute or pass into tunnels. A city built on an island can only grow so much before you have to start planning up instead of out.

What can this composition teach us, anthropologically, about how we hear? On its own, probably not all that much. It only documents my movements of hearing around my neighbourhood. It’s one example of one act of ‘hearing’ or ‘listening.’ But as a talking point – as something that provokes conversation about what works, what doesn’t, what was taken for granted by the researcher and what was taken for granted by the listener – this is where it might prove most useful. And how we hear has implications outside the bounds of our respective homes. For those of us who are housed, we can employ strategies to quiet or alter our sonic spaces. We can close windows, move to different rooms, play music, or wear headphones. As Michael Bull articulates in a study of Walkman users and headphones, “the urban consumer might be seen, not so much as protecting the site of experience from others, but as creating, albeit ambiguously, a utopian space of habitation” (2005: 188). Headphones create a sonic barrier between wanted and unwanted sounds, just as closed doors and windows quiet our private spaces. But this also points to privilege and recalls a number of questions for future study. How might we listen more empathetically? How might we consider the needs of those that are unhoused or sleeping rough who can’t manipulate their sonic environments?

As Boudreault-Fournier suggests, “we often take sounds for granted” (2017: 94). The Montreal I hear is different from how my partner hears it or, for that matter, the Montreal that you, the listener, hear. And with that in mind, how might we begin to create better approaches to sound and hearing that work for more than just those of privilege, who have the time to play with the sounds around them as I have?

Craig is a student in the Social and Cultural Analysis Phd program in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. His research interests include ethnographies of sound, sonic justice, and combining his research and musical practices.