December 2008. Babo, one of my friends and interlocutors in Dițești, asks me to produce a digital copy of videos he recorded over the course of the year with his cell phone. At very low resolutions (352 x 288 pixels), these videos feature a variety of domestic situations: games with his grandchildren, babies’ naps, family meals, parties with friends and godparents... Relatively short, around one minute - except for one exceptionally long of five minutes - these small sequences are visual haikus around filial love, flirting and the celebration of brotherhood. Surprisingly, almost all of these images have a musical background, played at different levels of loudness by loudspeakers.
Babo’s videos document the genesis of personal video practices in the Roma neighbourhood. Between 2007 and 2010, few people filmed or owned a camera. The few MiniDV cameras that circulated in the Roma streets of Dițești were mostly exchanged or recovered. They malfunctioned or were rarely used because of all the equipment they required (cassettes, cables, computers, DVD player), and the first smartphones were just appearing. Without proper storage media, these images disappeared most often after a few months. Today, Babo’s videos are probably the only ones that have survived equipment changes and the various computer breakdowns that have affected homes in the neighbourhood. These images are also valuable because they indicate the existence of another affective cartography drawn by the background noise of the loudspeakers. Although I had access to some of the situations filmed by Babo since 2007 (I am present in several videos), I was rarely asked to film these more informal celebrations around a barbecue, a family meal or a dance party improvised by teenagers on the street. I was more solicited for the parties that were the subject of “On demand home movies” (Aasman 1995, 105) – for which I was paid according to custom, exactly like the musicians (see <Anonymized>). The image of these home speakers is thus rather sparse in my archive.
Intermingled with ground noise, associated with handling errors or limitations of the recording devices, appreciated for their interference or provocations addressed to neighbours, the sound of these loudspeakers had almost everything to remain a rubbish in the frame of an ethnographic inquiry… no matter how multimodal it may be.
The “politics of the background” engaged with this research thus led me to adopt first a media archaeological approach, attentive to the technical conditions of production of this audio-visual archive, before ‘returning’ to an ethnographic approach, sensitive to the lived experiences of the listeners (whether they chose to listen or not). It was less a question of choosing between one or the other approach, than of combining them in order to transform this background noise into the main object of analysis and creation. Relying on my fieldnotes, the sound of loudspeakers could finally be unfolded as sonic cartographies, somewhat in the manner of the seminal work of anthropologist Steven Feld (1996) in his extensive ethnography of the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea.
Following the meanders of video and sound rubbish, to account for the blind spots of my research and the various methodological and technical obstacles, this text does not present chronologically the evolution of the sonic ecology of țigănie. It paves the way for a broader history of the loudspeaker soundscape both in Dițești and in Romania.
Summer 2007. I begin my ethnography in the village of Dițești, 80 kilometres north of Bucharest (Romania). Friends of my host approach me to film their wedding and the baptism of their children. From then on, my doctoral research on the ecology of images and sounds of this Roma neighbourhood in Romania – my interlocutors speak more easily of a ‘Gypsy Hood’ (țigănie) – was essentially done camera in hand. With these celebrations filmed on-demand, the errors, failure, and limitations of the shooting device become components of my research (<Anonymized>). Structured around three videos, this article focuses on the artifacts produced by the combine muzicale (loudspeakers, amplifier, CD reader or smartphones), in these streets inhabited by Roma people. I attempt to make audible the ways in which amplified sound configures affective cartographies within the community describing how the uses of these loudspeakers are related to rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, familism, and attest to a conception of a territoriality obsessed by the demarcation of communal identities.
By exhuming these visual and sound rubbish from my personal archives, or archives entrusted by my interlocutors, this multimodal research engages a “politics of the background” (Bonamy 2013, 151; Citton 2013). It brings to the forefront the background of my videographic data, which was left out of the analysis as well as the editing of my documentary films, notably because of sound distortion. In doing so, I voluntarily inverted the relationship between figure and background, placing at the centre of my analysis the phenomena of interference and the diffuse elements constituting a musical and acoustic atmosphere.
The ethnography and history of the amplified sound of these Roma streets reveals two kinds of background noise. A first one is made of the atmosphere of the streets of the țigănie, frequently overwhelmed by the sound of loudspeakers, when the second consists of the compression of video sound “in terms of both its dynamic range and frequency range.” (Birtwistle 2010, 100) The recovery of these audiovisual archives also shows the different uses and imaginaries of loudspeakers prevailing in the social space of the village. They vary greatly over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, but above all are the object of diverse material and emotional investments according to the musicians, who form part of the community, the young men who have been committing large sums of money to the purchase of these loudspeakers since the beginning of the 2010s, and the families in their domestic use. Each of these groups let me hear what they considered to be a ‘good’ (bun) or ‘bad’ (prost) sound – pointing out at what might be a successful or failed recording. The exhumation of these different rubbish makes manifest the contrasting, sometimes even opposing or contradictory, acoustic atmosphere and affective cartography that constitute the territory of Dițești. Each of this relation to sound and noise is presented by a video. In order to convey the depth of this background noise, the videos are not subtitled.
Arriving for the first time in Dițești my perception of the soundscape was based on my host's listening. An accordionist and a pianist, Lucian quickly introduced me to his musician friends and to the small world of the lăutări – the term used in Romania to refer to traditional musicians, most of them being Roma and male. My perception of the acoustic environment of Dițești was actually in sync with the tune of this small ‘world of musicians’ (lăutărie), which consists of ‘good families’ (familie bune) who conceive themselves as a social elite. These musicians strive to distinguish themselves from the pauperization and ethnicization of poverty characteristic of the țigănie, without shirking the moral obligations of solidarity, shared within the community. In this first video, Tina, my client and the father of the young boy whose birthday is being celebrated, commissioned famous (Roma) musicians and singers from Bucharest.
Tina and his wife decided to bring the lăutari to the yard of the young boy’s maternal grandmother, rather than to their home, because of its location on the most inhabited street of the neighbourhood. This way they are sure to attract more easily the onlookers who come to observe the hosting family and the musicians. They installed the massive sound system in the small space between the street and the stoop. A crowd quickly gathered, standing at the entrance of the courtyard and on the side of the road, to the point of occupying a large part of the roadway. Like the village bells, the volume of the loudspeakers fulfilled the function of announcement, and of gathering.
Unaware of the fame of the band and the lead singer (Costel Biju), and just beginning to make my first video recordings in the field, the whole sequence is a relative failure in the eyes and ears of both the musicians and Tina.
Impressed by the contrast between the mute, compact, motionless crowd and the energy deployed by Tina's family – as the volume of the speakers is pushed to the limit of distortion – I start to pan slowly. A person appears in my back, the musicians signal me to immediately move the camera and film Tina who is giving an important ‘tip’ (bacşiş) to the singer. The latter lists the numerous banknotes while shouting into the microphone the dedications (dedicație) addressed by Tina to his relatives and guests. I quickly understand from the bewildered and reproving looks of the lăutari that what matters and must be filmed is less the social situation as a whole than the interaction between Tina's family and them. The audience is a backdrop that does not need to be dwelt upon. Like the lăutari I am paid to make up my client’s appearance and follow his directions.
The failure of the recording of this sequence is also technical. Equipped with an omnidirectional microphone, but without activating the bass cut and the 10db reduction, the sound of my first sequence recorded this day is completely distorted. My client and especially his musician friends in the village express their disappointment at the poor sound quality, blaming me for not being ‘in the business’ (din meserie). I will eventually correct this later, opting for other microphone settings and a portable recorder.
For my clients as well as for the musicians, a loud and clear sound is valued in the situation – and thus in the recording. At the party the volume is associated with the fame of both the lăutari and the family, which often leads the person in charge of the sound system to push the sound volume to the limit of feedback. The sound recording, however, is evaluated differently. For the musicians, not hearing the ‘din’ (gălăgie) from the hall or the street is crucial to their own promotion or even to copying and studying the style of a renowned musician. From my second stay in Dițești, in the spring of 2008, I inflected my research and creative interests to adapt to this sound aesthetic...without, however, bowing to the injunctions of the lăutari who wanted me to record the ‘cleanest sound possible’ (cel mai curat sunet), plugging directly my portable recorder to the mixer. This listening would then have been too far from the experience and demand of my clients and interlocutors, who literally need to hear themselves when viewing and analyzing jokes, shouts, and speaking at particularly crucial moments of the evening, particularly the ones involving money. This is especially true for the announcement of gifts offered by the guests (darul), which is usually done without a microphone.
Considered a rubbish by my musician friends, and too distorted and noisy to be used in my documentary films, I never reused this footage. Fifteen years after producing a DVD for Tina, in accordance with our agreement, I am listening to this footage again in a different way. The distortion and feedback recorded by the shooting device make particularly sensitive both the fame claimed by the volume of the loudspeakers and the measured attention of the crowd, each one observing with scrutiny but not allowing himself to dance, so as not to contribute to the prestige of Tina’s family. Except for the young children, and a few notorious alcoholics, no one in the audience spontaneously starts dancing, ‘shouting’ (strigături), or even singing.
Therefore, if the view from one garden to another is sometimes prevented by a blind wall, on the other hand, this configuration of the architecture makes disputes, gossip and rumours perfectly audible. Loudspeakers have been used – and effectively – to mitigate this. In a social space, saturated with debts, family and sibling solidarities, but also intimate enmities, loudspeakers were also used to ‘provoke the intimate enemies’ (a face necaz la dușmani), even if the latter are never named. These markings of enmity between neighbours are all the more frequent because the reasons for unpleasantness are common. I have already witnessed such brawls. In 2010, offended by Cristi’s comments, during a reception in her garden, Lucian's mother-in-law had retaliated the next morning, by turning on the hi-fi system very early, deliberately directing the speakers in his direction. In Dițești, music and background noise are both considered as a “relational force.” (Thompson 2017)
But loudspeakers are also used as a show of strength. Drawing on the inherent characteristics of the musical genres listened to, which make immoderate use of delay and reverberation – with the sense of space it can effectively suggest (Stoichiță 2013) – several young people from families, deemed to be ‘more deprived’ (mai amărâti), and whose property is narrow, literally invade the space adjacent to their house for hours. If the reverb plays an important role, there is not always a particular attachment of the owners of these loudspeakers to the sonic content. All musical genres are worth listening to. The music and preaching of evangelical Christians can be played by young people, married or unmarried, who do not even attend (or no longer attend) the local Pentecostal church. These practices can cope with all kind of noise (clipping, feedback, distortion), the music being already conceived as a parasite.
All this would not be possible without a certain tolerance among the inhabitants of the Roma streets. The first explanation is a perceptual one. The diffusion of low frequencies over long distances sometimes makes it difficult to locate the source of the music in a neighborhood with such a high density of dwellings. In addition to this acousmatic quality of the loudspeakers, this relative tolerance is also explained by the agreed limits of this ‘intimate enmity’. If it can give rise to rumors and insults, it very rarely goes further, and it is inconceivable to call in the police to solve a problem between ‘We, Our Gyspies’ (Noi, Țigani noștri) – the emic expression used by my interlocutors to mark the boundaries of the community.
While not identical in intensity to the context of loudspeaker-mediated “religious and ethnic contest” in Nigeria, Dițești’s soundscape is also made up of uses that are “both oppositional and intensely conflictual, while being broadly accepted at the same time.” (Larkin 2014, 998 & 1006) The sound of the loudspeakers thus draws an affective cartography judged by the Gadje as a vast brouhaha - a rubbish sound - whereas for the locals it is an integral part of creating a territory where being interconnected is the community’s obsession.
New Year's Eve 2019, twelve years later. Loudspeakers are no longer the exclusive property of musicians, and are no longer limited to social events like weddings, christening or birthdays. As I met and wandered through the streets of the village, my interlocutors made me sensitive to what constitutes the specificity of the soundscape of the Roma streets, in comparison with the acoustic atmosphere of the streets inhabited by the Gadje (non-Roma), a neighbourhood closer to the centre of the municipality, Filipeștii de Pădure. When the Gadje/Romanian houses are characterised by high fences, closed gates, and barking of guard dogs, the ‘Gypsy Hood’ is marked by the presence of families with small children on the side of the road, accompanied, in several places by powerful loudspeakers. And if several Roma families are now settled in the streets of the Gadje, they keep, at least, one of these two distinctive features. This acoustic atmosphere contributes to feeding an imaginary of the țigănie, as a territory apart, an imaginary that my interlocutors know how to instrumentalise in order to intimidate, manipulate or challenge their Gadje interlocutors – even if, like any reverse stigma, discriminatory uses are still prevalent in administrative or authoritative structures. In the same way as the bell towers of French villages, whose history was studied by Alain Corbin, these loudspeakers are territorial and social markers.
New Year’s Eve is of course an exceptional time, but both the loudness and the multiple sonic content in the middle of the night reaches here a level that had suddenly piqued my attention, encouraging me to record these few images from my mother-in-law’s lot – I got married in the community in 2012 (see <Anonymized>). This New Year's Eve took these loudspeakers from the background to the main object of my listening. It was the real trigger for this research.
While since the mid-2010s, several young men have acquired sound systems similar to those of musicians, my perspective was essentially that of the families in which I lived, considering these practices as interference. Indeed, for part of the neighborhood, hearing and feeling the loudness of these music and sonic content is a problem. Worse, the loudspeakers, installed on the stoop, facing the street, without anyone in the household dancing or seeming to listen – and thus outside of occasions like family celebrations that gave rise to a displacement of the curious to watch the bride or listen to the musicians (as in the first video) – seemed to be a matter of defiance and ‘intimate enmity’ (dușmănie).
While the increased loudness of these loudspeakers in the 2010s affects a growing number of people, and fuels a growing number of conversations, in reality, this practice of listening out of defiance is part of a continuing history of amplified music in țigănie. Similar uses in the 1990s were reported to me by my interlocutors, and I have been able to observe them in situation since 2007. Usually associated with all family celebrations, amplified music is not only a sign of conviviality, it could be a background noise. On several occasions Lucian and his cousin, Cristi used a set of speakers, that he also uses as a musician, to hide their conversation from their neighbours. The effectiveness of the use of music as an interference or even a parasite, allowing to cover the conversational content, is explained in part by the morphology of the land and houses. Divided between the different heirs over the generations, the plots became narrower and narrower, to the point that the walls of the neighbouring houses are only a few meters apart.
In Babo’s videos, the background is constantly occupied by music played by speakers. Even if their presence is not as pronounced in the soundscape of the țigănie, my notes and the images shot on a daily basis attest to a strong presence of these loudspeakers. This ambient music is often mentioned in my ethnographic notes as a problem. By its capacity to transform the atmosphere of a scene, it connoted the situation of daily work (wood cutting, household chores, construction), which was then my main research concerns. At the beginning of my fieldwork, this sometimes caused misunderstandings with some of my interlocutors. This was the case with Ciucă, Babo’s son, who wanted to turn up the volume of the hi-fi system at all costs during a barbecue at his sister's house, whereas my short gun microphone was too sensitive to the volume of the loudspeakers pushed to their maximum.
If music is so present in these short sequences, it is probably because the people listening to it engage the same affects as Babo when he presses the button on his phone. Loudspeakers and the recording device are essentially used in the filmed situations to create an atmosphere of hugs, kisses, toasts, and all forms of shared affect within extended families. A saxophonist, and renowned lăutar, Babo is both an “emotion maker” (Stoichiță 2008) and an expert in producing atmosphere. In these various situations, he somewhat uses his phone as a musical instrument… or a loudspeaker. Based on the history of home movies, it would be possible to say that in Dițești, just as the camera, loudspeakers [...] “encourage the family to display its familialism.” (Aasman 1995, 108) Somewhat erased today, by the provocations or desires for parasitism associated with large loudspeakers, the elaboration of these familial and convivial atmospheres remain in the background of Dițești’s soundscape, however.
In the summer of 2019, expressing to Babo my wish to work on his videos, his reaction was scathing (as usual): ‘I don’t know, it’s your problem, you can do what you want with it’. There are probably two reasons for his reaction. Babo has been thinking about writing his memoirs for several years now – and he is more interested in the help I can give him than in returning to his images. Complementarily, this confirms the reversal of perspective between the intensity of the experience of the filmed situation and the memorial practice elaborated a posteriori around these first ‘digital’ home movies. In Dițești, affects were much more strongly engaged in the production of these images – as they participated to the scenography and the elaboration of an atmosphere (Böhme 2008) –, than in the viewing of these images. The gap was such that home movies can be recorded for what they did in situation without ever being viewed.
However, this is not the only reason why these videos were considered for me as digital debris. With the low definition of the recorded videos, the background noise constituted by this amplified music seems to merge into the “ground noise, the term used to refer to any undesirable noise inherent in reproduced sound” (Birtwistle 2010, 85). On several occasions the phone's microphone is clipping during the recording, making certain sequences difficult (and painful) to hear.
A first reworking of these images was considered very early on with a digital artist, <Anonymized> -, with whom I formed the Collective <Anonymized> in 2015. Very quickly, a tactic to manually upscale the resolution of the images is put in place. Starting in 2017, I project the sequences recorded by Babo onto a white wall in order to re-photograph several dozen images per video with reversible film stock. What is at stake is not to increase the visibility of certain details lost in the pixels of the video, but to disturb the hierarchies that legitimize visual documents, caught between the high resolution of official archives, and the low resolution of digital video images of the 2000s (Steyerl 2021 [2003]).
The audio signal poses a completely different problem, because unlike images, it seems unrecoverable. I try, at first, to replace the soundtrack of the videos by different recordings of the noises produced by the Kodak Carousel, using contact microphones and a portable recorder. The objective was to transform the videos into a slide-show, by making disappear the domestic soundscape of the loudspeakers. A second line of inquiry consisted for a time in mixing the soundtracks of the videos shot by Babo with the location recordings made by a musician and sound engineer, <Anonymized>, who had accompanied me during my first fieldwork in Dițești in 2007. The idea was then to elaborate a multimedia work in the vein of Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s (2013) and Mark Vernon’s (2020) avant-garde compositions, who mixed collected used tapes with their own location recordings.
On the occasion of the Lab organized with <Anonymized>, revisiting my fieldnotes allowed me to understand how these background noises could sketch affective cartographies of the țigănie and at the same time compose with the numerous artifacts induced by the compression of the audio signal. The editing work for this third video thus consisted in highlighting sequences where the background sound of the loudspeakers merge with the digital sound of these ‘poor images’ (Steyerl 2009). The sequence that intermingles the volume of the loudspeakers with the saturation of the audio signal due to the resumption of the lyrics in chorus by the men, reveals for a short moment both the musical expression of brotherhood, shared by all in țigănie, and the sonic materiality of a lost intimate soundscape that has been totally transformed by cars, sound systems and better video technologies (like smartphones).
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References
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Böhme, Gernot, 2008. “Un paradigme pour une esthétique des ambiances: l'art de la scénographie” Faire une ambiance/Creating an atmosphere. Actes du Colloque International, edited by Jean-François Augoyard. Éditions À La Croisée, 221-228.
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, 2013. Eye Contact with the City. Elegy for Bangalore. Gruenrekorder, CD.
Chion, Michel, 2004. The Thin Red Line. London: British Film Institute/BFI Modern Classics.
Corbin, Alain, 1994. Les Cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle. Flammarion.
Citton, Yves, 2013. “Politiques de fonds”, La Revue des Livres 13, 18-27.
Feld, Steven, 1996. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea”, Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith Basso. School of American Research Press, 91‑135.
<Anonymized>
<Anonymized>
Larkin, Brian, 2014. “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria”, Anthropological Quarterly 87 (4), 989-1016.
Schaeffer, Pierre. 2017 [1966]. Treatise on Musical Objects. An Essay across Disciplines. Translated by Christine North and John Dack. University of California Press.
Steyerl, Hito, 2021 [2003]. “Les relations d’indétermination dans le documentaire. Qu’est-ce que le documentarisme ?”, Formations en mouvement. Textes choisis. Translated by Nicole Viaud and Christophe Jouanlanne. Spector Books / Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 15-28.
Steyerl, Hito, 2009. ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal 10, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
Stoichiță, Victor A., 2008. Fabricants d’émotion: musique et malice dans un village tsigane de Roumanie. Société d’Ethnologie.
Stoichiță, Victor A., 2013. “Enchanting Spaces. Echo and Reverberation at Romanian Popular Parties”, Etnográfica, 17 (3), 581–603. Url: https://journals.openedition.org/etnografica/3281
Thompson, Marie, 2017. “The parasite and its milieu: Noise, materiality, affectivity”, Beyond Unwanted Sound. Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. Bloomsbury, 41-85.
Vernon, Mark, 2020. Call Back Carousel: Voyages en Grèce. A Sound composition – an audio-time travelogue – First broadcast on Freie Radio Berlin, 18th August, 2020. Url: https://soundcloud.com/markvernon/call-back-carousel-voyages-en-grece
“Le clocher impose un espace sonore qui correspond à une certaine conception de la territorialité, obsédée par l’interconnaissance”
(Corbin 1994, 98)
“But it is true that I can only ever become aware of the backdrop of sound indirectly, by reflection or memory”
(Schaeffer 2017 [1966], 76)
