Sonic Relations
Placing a stool next to their bed is a specific example of how Anders and Almira have altered a particular pattern of Almira’s movement in order to avoid producing a sound they expect Claudia would experience as disturbing.
Claudia never communicates directly with Almira, but complains to Anders through text messages, emails, knocking on the door, or even hammering with a broom on her ceiling. Almira has only recently discovered that the primary source of the noise Claudia refers to in this communication is actually her footsteps. Almira is annoyed that Claudia does not communicate with her directly and considers the demands that she should move differently in her own home unreasonable. Nevertheless, she notices changes in her behavior: she is actually adapting to Claudia’s needs. In spite of herself, Almira is making a constant effort to avoid moving in ways that she imagines Claudia will find noisy:
Even though I rebelled against them, because I felt that they were unfair, I think that I have changed my behavior.
As the introductory quote of this article suggests, Almira notices that she moves differently and more freely when she is outside the apartment or in the homes of others. Although Almira and Claudia do not have a relationship that involves direct verbal communication, the potential transmission of sound through their shared floor and ceiling inevitably connects them; they cannot not relate, to paraphrase Gregory Bateson (cited in Strathern 2020: 13).
Through their shared floor and ceiling, Almira is acoustically present in Claudia’s life, while Claudia is present in Almira’s as someone she reluctantly, yet constantly, considers. Their accounts testifies to the particular ways in which sounds passing from one home to another, connect neighbors to each other: a sonic relation that consists of both concrete physical sounds and also of social, emotional, and deeply personal inclinations and histories.
I use the notion of sonic relation to allude to the sonic aspect of any social relation that connects human beings in both distanced and intimate ways. I conceive of sonic relations as sensory phenomena and physical and psychological presences that have concrete effects on the lives of the people they connect. Sound is one aspect of a social relation, which can also consist of many other facets. Dividing complex relationships into disparate aspects in order to specifically analyze their sonic qualities is interesting only insofar as we acknowledge that all the other facets remain, intertwined. Put another way, sonic relations are auditory, but the auditory is infused with associations and personal experiences that shape its perception, as when Almira’s footsteps make Claudia relive Philip’s late-night parties and the intense conflict surrounding them. Barry Truax (1996) describes how sounds can attract particular attention, either because they are unfamiliar or because they are familiar and associated with something specific. When Almira climbs from her bed onto a stool instead of jumping directly onto the floor, a number of reasons are folded into that action. She does it to avoid transmitting sound into Claudia’s home, to forestall Claudia’s complaints to Anders, and probably also because of the knowledge and expectations she has picked up in Sweden about how the private sphere of one Scandinavian home should be kept separate from the private sphere of another. These different facets are all simultaneously present in Almira’s concrete actions and her sonic relation to Claudia.
Focusing on the sonic aspect of a relation allows for an approach to its sensorial and nonverbal aspects, which are likely to be grounded in bodily reactions and ways of relating. In the case of Almira and Claudia, the auditory is at the core of their relationship, and entails specific sets of behaviors and reactions for each of them. It plays out mostly along the floor-ceiling separating them and always when their domestic-personal spheres accidentally converge with one another. In the next section, I explore how the sonic qualities of the relationship between the two women produce particular kinds of interferences.