Sound and the Social: the Lively City

52

and shrill sounds, and the constant sound of people driving past. I mean, people drive past here as well, but in Centrum that is just constantly happening”.

In contrast Centrum residents seemed more forgiving towards the noise of the city. A recurring sentiment towards sound in Amsterdam is that noise is simply a part of living in a city, something people should expect to encounter and live with, especially in the city centre.

Varieties of the phrase “het hoort erbij” (“it’s part of it”, “it’s a fact of life”), were very common in the interviews with Centrum residents, seemingly illustrating a high level of acceptance of urban sound and noise, although reluctantly in some cases and more appreciative in others.

These participants often mentioned they realised the city could be noisy before they moved there, but chose to live their anyway. Overall, these Centrum residents focussed more on the lively sounds of the city, and took into account that the busyness of the city centre was typically urban and contributed to a thriving economy and overall success of many businesses and cultural institutions, such as shops, restaurants, clubs or museums. This can also partly be explained by the fact that residents of Centrum, in contrast to those living in Nieuw West, experience the relatively quiet moments in the city too. Residents might have access to quiet back gardens or balconies might experience the Centrum at quieter times, such as early mornings and nights. These quiet moments in combination with an appreciation of the city’s amenities, help appreciate the overall acoustic environments.

Overall these findings show the importance of place. Not only does the physical space in which we experience sound influence our appreciation of it, also the imagined space, or our mental representations of that space matter in the evaluation of sound and the city.

53

experienced positively. Overall, stories and statements by participants show that when sounds evoke positive social associations, the sound itself is also regarded as pleasant.

For example, some participants described some urban sounds as ‘noisy’ and ‘rackety’, or ‘chaotic’ and others as ‘commotion’ or ‘urban buzz’ (“reuring”), where the former signalled a negative evaluation, the latter was always more positive. Asked what the difference between nuisance and commotion (“reuring”) was, Annabelle (50) explains: “commotion means that there are many little social interventions, that you can have pleasant contact with others, that you have social contact, and that’s really the norm here”. In contrast, nuisance was caused by unexpected and inappropriate sounds. So not only does this statement show the link between sound and the social, but also to the spatial context of experience; the social sounds, according to Annabelle, are typical and thus appropriate for her neighbourhood in the Jordaan. For others, the ‘gezellige’ sounds were also typical for the ‘gezellige’ image of the city as a whole. Hugo and Jorge (55) explain that sociable sounds are so pleasant because they remind them of their motivation for living in the centre of the city, the desire to “live in a lively and vibrant environment”.

Many more participants, from both city districts, described social sounds as pleasant, even when they did not themselves engage directly in the social interaction. The mere presence of sounds from other people chatting, laughing, causally conversing, installed in them a pleasant sense of ease, comfort or familiarity, feelings that could increase the sense of ‘feeling at home’

as Duyvendak described it (2011, p. 38). Tom (22), who lives in the Slotermeer neighbourhood of Nieuw West, describes the pleasant sounds of his direct living environment: “I really like the sounds of bickering moms, it’s just a pleasant sign of life in the neighbourhood. When I cycle home and see and hear them talking from balcony to balcony, it feels very familiar, the feeling that we all live here together”. Specifically in Tom’s case, but in other participants’

statements too, this acoustic sense of familiarity is connected to a certain sense of safety. He explains that the Slotermeer neighbourhood is one of the most ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods of the city due to its high crime rates, but because he is firmly socially imbedded and knows many other residents, hearing those familiar voices makes him feel safe, rather than unsafe. From another angle, this sense of safety in relation to social connections and sound, Maud (52) explains that she feels relatively safe on her street next to Leidseplein, “despite the fact that I live in a place that is so touristy”, because she knows “who really belongs here and who doesn’t”. This statement shows the importance of social embeddedness and familiarity for the sense of safety and that, conversely, the unfamiliar presence and sounds of people that ‘do not belong’, threaten or decrease that safety.

54

Negative social connotations: antisocial behaviour and nuisance

The statements made by Maud (52) above, touch upon a recurring sentiment towards tourism in Amsterdam. Many participants, especially those that live in the Centrum district, felt that the city had become too busy, too overrun by the “wrong kind of tourists” before the covid-19 pandemic hit. Far from being only an acoustic issue, tourism was felt to decrease the liveability of the city by causing many different forms of ecological pollution and nuisances, homogenising the city’s amenities such as shops and restaurants, inflating housing prices and making it simply uncomfortable or even unsafe to visit certain tourist-trodden areas in the city’s centre. And all these different negative connotations surrounding tourism seem to influence the way ‘their’ sound is experienced. For example, the sound of trolley cases rolling over the streets’ cobblestones were named multiple times as highly annoying not only for their loudness, but because they signal the presence of (unwanted, negatively evaluated) tourists. And as Maud (52) implied above, the presence of tourists also decreased her sense of safety. Tourist represent a certain unfamiliarity because they ‘do not belong’ and are expected to be unaccustomed to

‘our’ way of life, or lack a sense of social responsibility towards the city and its residents.

Similarly, noise caused by traffic and in particular mopeds and motorcycles, was not just considered unpleasant because of the sheer volume or type of sound they produce. These sounds signal to the perceiver certain information about the persons behind the sound; the driver. It was previously mentioned that the sound of traffic could install a sense of danger, especially if the perceiver thought the motorcycle or moped was going too fast. These sounds then signal ‘antisocial behaviour’ by the driver, who is often thought to be reckless and doesn’t care about safety or the environment. Interestingly, this finding concurs with result of a study on the objective and subjective experience of moped noise by Devilee & van Kamp (2013, p.

35). These negative social connotations became particularly clear in the conversation with Claas (72), who suffers from daily noise nuisance coming from a busy road nearby: “I think those drivers are completely antisocial and by now I’ve harboured a deep hatred towards motorcycles (…) but it’s really that [antisocial] behaviour, the noise in combination with that behaviour of ‘I don’t care’, it’s really antisocial”.

Another type of sound source that evokes negative connotations in the perceiver, is loitering youths. Similarly to tourism or the sound of mopeds, sounds created by loitering youths were often considered a nuisance. Often hanging around at night and in groups, these youngsters were said to give off a sense of threat, or hostility towards other people. Bram (30) explained that before the curfew - which started at nine p.m. and was installed as a measure to combat Covid-19 - groups of young people with mopeds and music speakers gathered around

55

some benches near his house, which caused him some disturbance. However, he wasn’t likely to go over there and complain, feeling too uncomfortable and unsafe to do so. The sounds these people produced, such as laughter and loud conversations, could be said to be social, lively sounds that could also be experienced as pleasant. But he explains why that is not the case:

“there is some sort of lack of control about the source of the sound, I don’t really feel a connection to them, but if for example my downstairs neighbours are having a barbecue with music and stuff, I know better what to expect sound-wise”. Again, beside the importance of feeling positively connected to the sound source, the level of control over the acoustic environment or sound sovereignty, clearly influences the perception of sound and can mean the difference between nice and noise. This brings us to the following examples of sound in relation to the social: our connections to our neighbours and the importance of social control.

Love thy neighbours & social control

A recurring finding from the interviews is that the way sound of neighbours is experienced, relies in part on the quality of social ties between residents. Knowing neighbours well, or liking them, makes it easier to endure or even enjoy their sounds.

Petra (38) lives on a quiet street in Centrum district, but in a very noisy apartment. She can hear her neighbours loud and clear, for example when they move chairs or turn on the heating. Although she can be bothered by the sounds and vibrations caused by her neighbours’

activities, she manages to endure it. She explains that the social relations with her neighbours are really solid and that if things were different and she couldn’t stand her neighbours, she would be much more irritated by those sounds. So it seems that a positively valuated social relationship influences the sound experience in a positive way. This was certainly the case for Maaike (37), who is sometimes annoyed by the sound of some students living next door: “yes it really matters whether you like someone or not. Look, I don’t know those students and I find it super annoying when they chat about nothing [important/interesting] with each other. (…) But if it would have been my mother, or two of my friends it would have been different, or my sister that would’ve sat there with a friend, that makes a difference”.

It seems that not only liking, but knowing one’s neighbours is also important for a sense of control over the acoustic environment, thus for a sense of sound sovereignty. For example, Maud (52) makes an effort to get to know new neighbours so they know her and she knows them. So whenever any noise disturbance comes up, she knows who to address. She hopes that new neighbours will be more considerate of her sonic space, if they know who she is.

56

Similarly, Renske (62) worried about her neighbours’ licence to install a patio behind her appartement, on the ‘quiet side’ of her home. As she complained at the municipality, a civil servant advised her to put up a partition between her window and the patio. But her theory is that if she doesn’t put up the partition and remains visible to the possible users of the patio, they will know she’s there and can hear everything that’s going on, thus creating some sort of social control over the situation. “The moment I’ll be out of sight, they’ll stop being considerate”

(Renske, 62). Therefore, social connections to other residents creates a form of social control that includes sound sovereignty; a heightened perception of control over the acoustic environment.

To conclude, it is actually an oversimplification to state that the sound of ‘other people’

is pleasant (Guastavino, 2006), because it matters who those people are in relation to the perceiver. It matters whether we feel connected to those people, whether we like or dislike them and whether or not those people are deemed to ‘belong’ in our cities. Sound perception, then, could also fruitfully be used to study the quality of urban social relations, and could function as an indicator for both social conflict and harmony.

6.3.3 Timing is Everything: Urban sound, Quietness and the context of Time