what sound teaches me about trespassing
an introvert leaves her comfort zone
When my father-in-law was hired to be the Engineer-in-Residence at the University of Waterloo many years ago, he became very interested in learning about that #academiclife now that he was newly ushered into the ivory tower. A career bureaucrat with decades of experience in the public sector, Mike knew how the brains of public servants worked; academics, however, presented a whole new puzzle.
“You know,” he remarked to me and Patrick over dinner, “Something I noticed is that on the floors with faculty offices, the hallways are completely dead. Everyone keeps their doors closed, and no one just pops into each other’s offices during the day. Is that normal?”
Unfortunately, our answer was “yes.”
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It's safe to say that many academics really just want to be left alone to pursue their life's work, and we don't care much for doing things that actively obstruct our ability to be valuable commodities to the institution productive. As a pre-tenure faculty member, I find myself constantly torn between bowing to the inertia of academic culture (“just hunker down and mind your own business until you get tenure”) and knowing that wanting things to be different means leaving the safety of my office, figuratively and literally.
Leaving my office means confronting the world around me and figuring out what the hell to do with all of it. I decided it also means learning how to be better at trespassing: going into spaces that I don't necessarily belong and also being OK with other people coming into my space and challenging its integrity.
Perhaps because I am a musician, the concept of sound immediately came to mind while I was mulling over the idea of trespassing. More specifically, I thought of that phenomenological experience of feeling invaded when I catch music, conversation, or noises that aren't intended to be heard by me. While I could choose to leave sound's transgressive behavior as a metaphor, I'd rather write about its real, material impact on how we could relate to each other differently, particularly in the ways we delineate literal and figurative spaces. Sound makes permeable the seemingly impermeable.
When I first moved to Tallahassee, I immediately discovered that my next door neighbor liked to play music at high volume while hanging out in her backyard. Hiding indoors with the AC on, all the windows closed, and the shades drawn, I could still hear CeeLo Green belting, “I see you driving 'round town / With the girl I love and I'm like / Forget you.” The ooh, ooh, oohs echoed less sumptuously in my house, as if the conditioned air had aggressively wicked Green's voice of all its damp, rich resonance. If I wanted to hear the music better, I would have to sit on my back patio (that looks onto my neighbor's patio and vice versa). Suddenly, an invasive phenomenon has the potential to be a shared experience—contingent on my own willingness to enjoy listening to my neighbor's playlists.
Birds chirping in my backyard while I'm working? Charming. Garbage trucks blasting Für Elise? How dare they! I need a quiet space to write about noise!
The human response to sound's violating nature is what's most interesting to me because it reflects all the (mostly selfish) things we care about. Sound challenges the liberal democratic ideal of the right to be a free individual, which then comes with a slew of contradictory behaviors that attempt to protect that right. For example, there are increasingly more conversations about the racism and classism behind what people decide is or isn't noise, much of which has to do with scrubbing certain sounds from spaces within our auditory range.
I really like journalist Anne Strainchamps’s term “sonic gentrification” because it made me think immediately of the ways nimbyism manifests in not just sonic environments, but in the context of my work, musical and music institutional ones, too.
For those of you who don't know, NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard,” and the term supposedly originated in the US in 1970s initially to oppose construction of nuclear power plants. NIMBY sentiment is still about resisting large government or corporate construction projects that could affect a neighborhood's or entire town's quality of life (e.g., Amazon fulfillment warehouses, massive data centers ). However, much of NIMBY's current negative connotations stem from people who vote in ways that exacerbate social inequalities to protect their own property values quality of life. There are a lot of reasons people don't want something, whether it's denser housing developments, safe injection sites, sidewalks, or a hulking ode to Jeff Bezos. It's not because they're evil, awful individuals; usually, it's because they want something else (e.g., a safe community, expansive green spaces, a quality public school [undisturbed by overachieving Asian kids], like-minded neighbors of similar socioeconomic status). However, it's the people who aren't making the decisions that often get most caught in the crossfires, and we often forget their humanity.
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I started this newsletter to pen/pin down the loose thoughts rattling around in my brain and to practice my writing, so the ideas in these posts will not always be fully formed (editing a polished article usually takes days, if not weeks), but I might re-visit them in the future. So, I apologize for any abrupt turns, shifts, and typos. Because I'm already a week late on publishing this and am running out of writing time today, I'd like to conclude this installment with a two short reflections on trespassing.
To return to my opening anecdote, I want to think more about what “opening my door” means, especially in my professional life. At FSU, I've tried to practice that by opening my studio to non-harpists, which can be rewarding when I see their immense growth and joy in learning the harp. However, teaching beginners is a slow process, unlike working with advanced students, which is much less work. Opening my door has also meant extending myself in ways that can become exhausting: 1) part of me is still the very shy introverted child that I was and 2) the amount I get back is often a minuscule percentage of what I feel I'm putting in to these interactions. On the more difficult days, I wail to Patrick, “Who's loving me back?! 🥺” (I mean, besides him). On the good days, I'm optimistic about being an anarchist working in a conservative institution that is constantly trying to convince me to shut myself away and focus on getting mine.
What I learn from the permeability of sound is this: Hearing sounds, music, voices, and ideas that I don't like and don't want is. fucking. challenging. I do not like the fact that the I can hear students talking outside my office while I'm trying to practice, or that I can hear the wind ensemble rehearsing when I'm trying to teach, or that noise from the construction going on above my office plagued me for months. Where are my sound panels?!!! The inverse is that people in the hallways hear me practicing all the time (and sometimes it's just 20 minutes of extremely aggressive pedal buzzing effects). So, sonic trespassing brings others into my space, even when I don't see them. It reminds me that I exist in a larger community with people who think, hear, and live very differently; it is a call for a more compassionate way of being with others in the world.
In my very first article for The Collective (my first time writing something ), I wrote about objectivity and empathy in teaching, some of which was inspired a lot by Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the “face-to-face encounter.” For Levinas, the immediateness of a physical confrontation had an ethical impact; seeing someone's face was the most powerful expression of that confrontation because you cannot deny someone/thing's humanity when you look them in the eyes.
We live in a world in which a lot of shitty things are happening to people we can't see and will never be able to see face-to-face. Sound, with its ability to help you envision what you can't actually see, creates another kind of strong ethical encounter, but it's a double-edged sword. Its fluid, trespassing quality means you can't always choose when you want to confront the existence of the other, but its visual ambiguity means can decide to engage with it or to ignore/mask it (sound proofing, white noise machines, noise-canceling headphones…we've got all the solutions).
For the 10 years I have known Patrick, he has often asked why I bother thinking this much about everything. My answer is that life (at least mine) can seem very amorphous and painful and pointless if we don't think stop to think about the complex relations, intra- and inter-species alike, that both make who we are and challenge who we are. It is wrestling with difficult questions that adds more meaning to each breath inhaled. That is not to say that one cannot take an easy breath, but maybe that easy breath isn't so easy when one recognizes it comes from a shared air.
To be alive is to always already be trespassing.
Hugs and kisses (?),
noël
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This week's Corner of Wondrous and Powerful:
Listening: Tim Hecker's “Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight.” No joke—I've never experienced such emotional static.
Reading: “Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem”, Ian Bogost for The Atlantic. There are some parallels between the issues Bogost observes in computer science higher ed with music higher ed, which is that there is an increasing disconnect between computing and its broader sociocultural role and applications. In other words, computer science is becoming more of an insular, self-reenforcing field. Something eerie in my mind is replacing “computer science” with “music” in the final sentence: “Now I worry that [music schools] have a bigger problem to address: how to make [music] people care about everything else as much as they care about [music].”
Watching: Over spring break, Patrick and I finally watched The Zone of Interest, which I actually really enjoyed because it asked the viewers to engage with ethics and sound (very apropos to this post). It is not a movie for the (morally) faint-hearted, and you will have an existential crisis about the state of humanity after watching it.
Two observations from the floor below you. First, when I interviewed at FSU, I was THRILLED to hear music when I walked through the buildings. Not all academic music libraries are located close to their primary clientele, and at my (now previous) library, music students and faculty had to walk 1.5 or so blocks to use the Music/Media Library. Hearing music was a reminder of our primary clientele's presence. Of course, my office's location means I don't have to hear certain orchestral excerpts on repeat dozens of times -- unlike other music library personnel.
Second observation is that as musicians, we spend so much of our time developing our listening skills. Focusing our listening skills. Listening for what's present and what's not present, what should be present, what we expect to hear in the next nanosecond, etc. I truly struggle with unfamiliar noises, particularly if in an unfamiliar environment or a challenging interaction. Something in my brain wants to be able to categorize that sound and assess if it's friend or foe (not quite that extreme, but you get the idea). I had significant hearing loss as a child (thanks, the many ear infections), and as my hearing returned, I think I became almost hyperalert to the world around me.
So yes, sounds generated by someone or something else is a reminder that we share this world with others. Sometimes that's a comfort, and sometimes it's an annoyance (like the construction, and let me tell you about core drilling for the new internet cabling). Call me a wuss, but I'm grateful for noise-cancelling headphones and nature sounds for some focused research/reading/writing time. Gaining a smidge of control. Thanks for writing and thanks for reading my reply!
Noël, thank you for reading my unfocused response! Wait, the music administrators moved the applied faculty offices and harp rooms to the floor above... what? :)