Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good by William Cheng

Author:William Cheng
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Over the course of a few weeks, students found situations that included noisy dormmates, ruckus in the library, a disruptive passenger on a bus, and the music of Phi Delta Alpha, a Dartmouth frat house notorious for the way it blasts songs every evening using outward-facing loudspeakers. Two of the ten students chose action: one simply asked a dormmate to turn down his music (took all of three seconds), while the other met with a friend from Phi Delta Alpha for a half-hour debate over why the frat members insist on dominating the sonic airspace of Webster Avenue night after night. Other students shied away from direct confrontation and resorted to throwing dirty glances, sighing audibly, putting on headphones, and venting on social media.

One student wrote about a time when she was the source of noise. She and her marching band had gone around campus giving a late-night tour to prospective Dartmouth students. Although the band members didn’t think they were bothering anyone, they decided to consult Yik Yak, an app that lets users post and view anonymous messages (sortable by up-votes) within a ten-mile radius.34 “We checked Yik Yak,” the student noted, “and saw such Yaks as ‘not saying that I wanted to sleep, but if I Page 88 →did, it’d be great if the band would shut up’ and ‘The marching band needs to get the f**k off gold coast lawn.’ We gained an insight to the true thoughts and feelings of our fellow students. . . . We laughed at the fact that people thought we were on the Gold Coast lawn, which is half way across campus, but also realized how far our sound traveled, and how many people we were disturbing.”35

In the following class, all students read their papers out loud and together worked through their motives for action or inaction. Consensus formed around factors such as anxiety about confrontation, concerns of shaming or being shamed, and fear of developing a reputation as a whiner. In simple terms, complaining about noise isn’t cool, least of all for college students. Doing so hurts their hip image and can make them come across as curmudgeons who gripe about damn kids and their music. For what it’s worth, musicologists aren’t supposed to rant about noise either. Scholars are presumably meant to exemplify open-mindedness, to recuperate noise as art, and to study soundscapes without moral judgment.36

Little inactions add up. But for all the paranoia that can inflect our relations to noise, reparative orientations are possible. A request or gesture to quell a disturbance, a brief reflection on sound’s infractions and inevitabilities—little victories add up too. In the romantic chaos of consequence, the flutter of an insect’s wings makes a sound, vibrations beget vibrations, and difference is made. Call it what you will: the butterfly effect, grassroots activism, bottom-up democracy, affective citizenship, or minority influence.37 If these models sound like optimism for suckers, we could recall how, even as children, we were taught that change begins with a single person, that every recycled bottle matters, and that only we can prevent forest fires.

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