Figure 11: “Free way!” This advertisement highlights the value of horns with a penetrating sound. It is one of the many publications that offer horns with various intensities and tones. This shows a contradiction with the municipal norms establishing the sonic characteristics a horn must have, and its use as final resort (image from a “Bosch” advertisement 1936). 


The public agenda thus focuses on the incorrect uses of this acoustic warning device. In 1939, an ordinance stipulates that between 1am and 7am, honking must be replaced by flashing headlights (anon. 1939b). Even though this provokes resistance from the A.C.A., which suggests restraining the use of horns to only when strictly necessary, the ordinance is effectively implemented and evokes a change of habits which nowadays goes largely unnoticed. In 1942, with ordinance 20820, the time frame is extended up to 10pm (anon. 1942). In 1943 a regulation which forbids the use of horns downtown and on avenues is announced (anon. 1943a). This regulation was doubtlessly aimed to make street activities less dominated by the arbitrary use of horns as well as to encourage speed reduction. However, the A.C.A. objects to Traffic Management, saying that, before banning horns, an education program for pedestrians must be implemented to prevent accidents (anon. 1943b). In the end, the regulation had no real effect (anon. 1944).

 

In this section, we have presented a series of legal efforts by the state in its fight against annoying noises. As we have shown, annoyance arises from the perceived uselessness of these sounds. Various norms and their implementation through police regulation aimed to remove specific practices rooted in the street habitus (Wright, Moreira and Soich 2007). In other words, socially learnt patterns are ascribed to a general lack of culture. As a result, official campaigns emerged as an encouragement to subvert the imaginary of what is possible within the confluence of the sonic, the technological, and street life in the search for bringing together a new moral code and a new model of the ideal citizen. Nonetheless, noise continued to be a cultural problem, and the legal system remained abstract, without practical application. Consequently, even though there are still pretensions to regulate each and every type of sound that affects the individual and social body, street noise has constituted itself increasingly as the main issue of conflict in civic coexistence.

We have summarized the period 1880-1920 during which sonic contact achieved the potentiality of immediacy through various technologies at a global level. This establishes the modernness of Buenos Aires, which was always looking up to the United States and Europe. These innovations were the material and technological basis for controlling sonic phenomena, which could now be transmitted live to multiple receivers or stored, shared, and reproduced (at a lower or higher volume) according to each one’s interests. In everyday life, sonic sources multiplied, and moral codes established correct and incorrect ways of employing radios and audio players, both in public and private spheres. With these new possibilities of using sonic phenomena, the time-space became, increasingly, a focus of civil disputes.

 

In her book about the relationship between technology, sound, and acoustic science in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century, Emily Thompson highlighted the modern desire to control sonic phenomena. Commercialization of recording and audio reproduction tools gave place to new listening experiences that soon became part of daily life. Additionally, these tools generated a new relation to sound: in the scientific field, the same resources became the technological foundation to study noise:

 

The problem of noise was further amplified in the 1920s by the actions of acoustical experts. Like the musicians, these men constructed new means for defining and dealing with noise in the modern world. For the first time, scientists and engineers were able to measure noise with electro-acoustical instruments, and with this ability to measure came a powerful sense of mastery and control. Acousticians were eager to step into the public realm, to display their tools, and to demonstrate their expertise as they battled the wayward sounds. Their unprecedented ability to quantify the noise of the modern city further heightened public awareness of the problem as well as expectation of its solution. (Thompson 2002: 119)

 

This sets the precedent that will install the decibel as an internationally accepted unit of measurement, shared for a homologous diagnosis of noise. Thus objectified, noise is no longer treated only in subjective terms in other words, in socio-historically constituted listening regimes but analyzed on the basis of its intrinsic properties. Acoustic science – linked to physics, mathematics, and engineering – established itself as part of a strong academic tradition that provided the tools to articulate objective dimensions of noise. This will be the sense of noise that will prevail in medicine, legislation, and urban models. Boundaries of tolerance are determined by sonic values – represented in decibels – that establish the level of damage to the inner ear in relation to the time of exposure. In 1930, this new possibility of measuring sound is mentioned in Caras y Caretas through a review of a prototype for quantifying noise in relation to power and frequency created by Churcher and King. This measuring system created a world-system of sonic hygiene that became widely accepted in Buenos Aires since the 1970s.

 

Social sciences were gradually relegated to a secondary place in the search for an explicative model of urban noise. The annoyance parameter emains valid, as one of the definitions of noise is unwanted sound. However, when it comes to diagnosis and measures, subjective perception takes a secondary role, and noise will be defined as sound emitted beyond the limits of the law. The aim is to identify the sonic values measured during a period of time and their fluctuations over time in relation to urban transformations. It will not be so much an issue of annoyance anymore; the focus of the analysis will be on noise as variable data, generated by fixed and mobile sources.

The Captive Sounds


 

The multiple possibilities of manipulating sound is a social phenomenon that often goes unnoticed in everyday life. Turning volume up and down, recording and playing, communicating with each other over long distances – these are activities that become possible in a schizophonic situation. We have already considered some relationships between a modern imaginary and the meaning ascribed to growth, movement, speed, culture, silence, and noise. The correct articulation of these factors is perceived as the insertion of the city and the country into the perspective of international relations. The possibility of new sonic uses – arising from the techno-scientific innovations of Europe and the United States – brings an awareness of simultaneity to the world at the end of the nineteenth century.

 

Mario Tesler carried out historical research into telephony in Argentina. Based on written sources from the end of the nineteenth century, he argues that even though there was social resistance to the incorporation of the telephone, five years after the spreading of Graham Bell’s invention in 1876 there were already four companies of commercial service working: an Argentinian, a Belgian, an American, and an English one. The Argentinian one, Cayol-Newman, was owned by Carlos Cayol and Fernando Newman, builders of telegraphic devices. In 1878 they created the first local telephone in Buenos Aires, assembled by following the instructions that came with the newspapers. On 17 February the first public telephonic test took place between the office of the Telégrafo del Estado and the editorial department of the newspaper La Prensa:

 

- Sir Newman, Director of the Piedad Station.

- Present, Sir.

- La Prensa’s editorial department solemnly declares open the first public conversation maintained through telephone in the Argentine Republic. Communicate it to the attendants of the Piedad station [...]

- I have already communicated it. 

(19 February 1878, “El primer ensayo público del teléfono”, La Prensa 2317, in Tesler 1999: 37)

 

This communication is followed by a series of institutional greetings, conversations between individuals, music, and the singing of a verse and chorus of the national anthem. The telephone was introduced and made available for remote communication in 1881, when telephone services started being available for the population. This marks a first contradiction with the nature of sound: “Once telephones, phonographs, and radios populated our world, sound had lost a little of its ephemeral character” (Sterne 2003: 1). Due to the desire for international, technological innovations, phonographs and gramophones, which allow for reproducing sounds, stored in cylindrical and disc-shaped formats, begin to show up in Buenos Aires’ markets. The “captive sounds” in these mobile formats transformed the sonic into a commodity in a surprising way, as it is expressed in an advertisement of a listening room at 220 Florida street in 1900: “Who would have imagined that sounds would become interchangeable articles just like any other merchandise!”

 

Jonathan Sterne argues that the recording and reproduction systems that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century did not, themselves, produce a totally new epistemology of listening. The “audile techniques” that allowed the listener to decode and give sense to what was heard were already prepared for this technological innovation since the auscultation in medicine and the telegraph systems developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Sterne 2003: 90). During this period hearing had become a way of gaining knowledge independent from the other senses, and the ability to listen was connected to reason.


The classification of sound as an interchangeable good leads to a reconfiguration of the acoustic space. The ear needs to readapt and re-educate itself, as what was previously produced by a multiplicity of sonic sources now emerges as if it were a single voice through a speaker. Houses and public spaces become alternative sites for musical listening, until then a monopoly held by auditoriums and theaters. The technological dispute will thus become centered on the progressive removal of noise from the devices’ functioning so as to support an increasing fidelity in the reproduction of music. Pierre Schaeffer notes that the focus given to fidelity has made us lose awareness on the transformation that this “substitution of a sonic field for another one” (Schaeffer 2003: 47) implies. Listeners not only perceive one source coming out of the speaker, they discern different instruments as if an orchestra is transmitted through the disc. Advertisements will capitalize on this innovation making music available for consumers, shortening distances, and moving toward a potentially never-ending source of entertainment.

Figures 6 and 7: Advertisements highlight the relative absence of noise in reproductions and the possibility of listening to music from around the world in any time and place. Monarch gramophone, the “unbeatable booster of the human voice,” allows one to enjoy “the theater at home,” whereas the Concertola erases the distance between city and countryside (“There in the heart of the Pampa just as in the city”).

Figure 6: (“Monarch” advertisement 1903)

Figure 7: (“Concertola” advertisement 1923)

Another kind of sound that needed to be abolished was the parasite noise of radiotelephony communications, the interference produced by electronic devices in radial transmission. The first Argentinian radiophonic communication was the public broadcasting of an opera by a group of medical students from the Coliseo Theater’s terrace. This happened in 1920, marking the beginning of the possibility of hearing voices transmitted over a wide range (at first up to 20 kilometers). Within a decade, portable radios and receivers for cars became available.

Figure 8: “Travel by car with music.” Listening to sounds produced in another space and/or time became a possibility that was rapidly included in everyday life and formed a highly valued aspect for advertisements (“Radio Colonial” advertisement 1935).