Graduate Colloquium Talk: Anatomy of a Noise Complaint
May 30th 2023 / 5.15 - 6.30pm / Denis Arnold Hall and Online (Zoom)
Paper Abstract: The management of noise in an urban context has been the subject of extensive scholarship. Overwhelmingly, the literature has focused on how ‘mitigation’, ‘avoidance’ and ‘reduction’ of unwanted or offensive noise protects default liberties; the ‘peaceful enjoyment’ of our home and environment, and our physical and mental well-being. Within the UK, built environment professions use numerical standards and formats developed through expert knowledge to objectively assess healthy or ‘appropriate’ environmental noise levels. Accordingly, the local governance of noise is underpinned by global regulatory frameworks, international standards, building regulations and codes, planning and licensing policies. However, the everyday experience of ‘unwanted’ or offensive noise in the built environment–where sounds or sonic vibrations are perceived by the subject as crossing party boundaries–is dealt with by local authorities via noise complaint systems, and ultimately by the British Courts under nuisance law.
Contrary to what the data driven urban soundscape suggests, and as Cooper (2002), Valverde (2012) have convincingly shown, the intersubjectivity of noise nuisance and its underlying values cannot be ‘written out’ of apparently objective legal or regulatory systems. Through and analysis of the noise complaint, and noise complaint processes in the UK, this paper focuses on how legal forms and conceptualizations of noise nuisance and urban acoustic regulatory regimes are mutually constitutive. Drawing from recent fieldwork in Brixton, I demonstrate how the noise complaint is mobilised as a bridging tool between intersubjective noise nuisance and centralized urban acoustic planning protocols. Bringing together different quantitative and qualitative perspectives of noise, in different acoustic and socio-legal urban contexts, as an ‘anatomy’ of built and systemic architectures of sound in the city that converge at the site of the body.
This presentation is FREE, open to all and is followed by a discussion and drinks reception. If you would like more information, please email Chuyu Zhang.
Image: The ear: section showing the external structure. Colour lithography by F. Foedisch, ca. 1875.