Conclusion


 

In this article we have questioned the idea that noise is an issue only for a recent political and social agenda. Attention to the sonic dimension of Buenos Aires has long been present, however in various, sometimes contradictory, contexts. The core aim of this article was to bring these sonic phenomena together under the concept of noise within the dynamic and changing relation between the modern imaginary and the social limits of acoustic tolerance.

 

As the social body learns to associate sound with progress, a fundamental distinction between what is typical of a city and what is not becomes established. Noise becomes related to specific socially constructed practices. As a consequence, this produces a citizen in negative terms, one whose sonic practices are linked to the uncultured and the uncivil and, consequently, marked as not belonging to the modern imaginary. Both in public and private spaces an ideal of relative silence, mediated by moral and normative codes, is imposed.

 

Following Beatriz Sarlo (2003), Buenos Aires is part of a peripheral modernity, first, because it imports its model of a city and its citizens from the Western European imaginary; and second, because these parameters of Western modernity coexist in tension with what is native, generating a “culture of mixture” (Sarlo 2003: 28). City noise operates to insert Buenos Aires materially and symbolically into the broader picture of global growth, establishing its place as a principle Latin American city and attracting foreigners’ curiosity. Additionally, Buenos Aires has always engaged with the techno-scientific innovations of Europe and the United States, ensuring its status in the arena of international relations. However, as the large European cities adopted measures to battle against urban noise, this model of civilization transformed. This became the moment during which Buenos Aires’ noise started being perceived as a cultural problem related to intolerable sonic practices.Although the applied measurement systems contributed to the understanding of city sounds, they proved to be no solution to urban noise. However, people still believed that the legal and technological methods implemented within American and European cities should also be implemented in Buenos Aires. The various attempts to control sound thus became part of the colonial matrix of power embedded within modernity (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2009), allowing for the classification of the cultured and the uncultured in relation to silence and noise. 

 

As part of the modern system, sound gradually loses its ephemeral quality and becomes part of an imaginary of control. And when the objective attributes of sound are “revealed,” the boundaries of acoustic tolerance lose their subjective dimension. This promotes the incorporation of science as producer of “truths” in the analysis of urban noise, relegating people’s situated perception to a secondary position, because sensations cannot be measured. As part of this process, modern sonority reconfigures itself to turn around and attacks the sounds that had served to situate the city within the paradigm of progress, an attack focusing on impersonal noise produced by urban dynamism and not by real subjects. 

 

In future articles we will work on how historical events allow for a better understanding of the present of certain sonic practices and the different listenings that take place in urban spaces. Historical contextualization is useful in understanding how the (semantic) relationship between sound and the city has been configured in the meanings given to noise and silence. Nowadays, the most important meaning of noise is the one developed by acoustic science, inserted into medical, legal, and urban discourses. That is why, in the future, this work needs to be complemented with tools of urban noise analysis, for example noise maps.