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

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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

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my house are emptied and I really hate that sound, but also I think: ‘why does this happen on a Saturday morning?! Why so early as 8 am?!’. That’s the definition of noise to me”. Similarly, loud sounds in the middle of the night or late evenings were often considered noise because it disturbed participants’ expectation of quietness, or interfered with their sleep.

As aforementioned, not all sounds that are audible at night are necessarily disturbing.

The hourly church bells of the Zuiderkerk and Westertoren were considered as pleasant and a positive reminder for living in Amsterdam’s historic city centre. The sound of birds in the early mornings are often regarded as pleasant, too, and are part of a sonic environment that is considered quiet. These types of sound are deemed fitting, appropriate and natural for the urban environment, at night or early in the morning.

Similar to time of day, the time of year also influences the experience of sound. For example, many participants mentioned that Summer is often much noisier than Winter. The Amsterdam Summer is usually the season the city comes to life; full of festivals, garden parties, peak-season for tourism and busy terraces and overall more people in the city streets and parks and canals, which are all present longer and until later in the evenings and nights. Also the notorious sounds of motorcycles and mopeds increase in the Summer, whose drivers take out their two-wheeled vehicles for a ride in the sun. But the swelling of urban sound does not only decrease the public access to quietness, it also decreases the private quietness of the home environment. Namely, the aforementioned benefits of a well-isolated home with double-glazed windows often disappear in Summer, when urban residents open windows and doors let the summer breeze in, which is often accompanied by many sounds and noises. Hugo (55), who lives on Prinsengracht in the Centrum district: “In Summer there’s people on boats until late at night which is pretty rude, not just people socially drinking and chatting but making real noise, also there’s a bar next door open till 4 in the morning (…) So in Summer, we can’t sleep with our windows open”.

Sound over time

Especially according to participants that live in Amsterdam Centrum, the sound of the city has changed, noticeably and unnoticeably increasing over the years. Some talk about the last five years, some ten years and some decades in which the city has become not only much busier, but also louder.

For Herman (51), who lives on Prinsengracht, the change in urban sound was one of the reasons for him to participate in this study, as he experienced the increasing busyness and loudness of the city over the years. He compared it to the cyclists’ term ‘false flat’ (“vals plat”);

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not knowing you’re cycling slightly uphill but noticing you have to push harder and harder to keep moving forward. He said that he hardly noticed at first that it kept getting busier and noisier every year, until people started complaining about it a few years ago. “It [the busyness and noise] kept rising slowly and you accept it along the way, but then it all fell away at once (…) the silence was overwhelming”. He said he didn’t notice all the noise until it was gone due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its restrictions. Now he worries that the sounds and busyness will all come back at once when restrictions are lifted, and he wonders if he’ll be able to accept it again or will be forced to move somewhere else.

Similarly, Maaike (37) told me how she grew up in the city centre, in one of the 9-straatjes which are now a hotspot for tourists and shoppers. She remembers being able to play football in the streets, something that is hard to imagine today. She uses the analogy of the frog in increasingly hot water, not noticing it is slowly being boiled. “It keeps on getting hotter and hotter, until at one point you’re the boiled frog. That’s how it feels. And it’s the same with sound, there are increasingly more sounds. Also when looking onto the roofs here, they are only adding ventilators and exhaustion pipes and stuff, they never remove any.”

However, the experience of that noise or sound can go both ways: it seems that participants either grow accustomed to the acoustic environment, or they are increasingly annoyed by it. Especially those that are frequently hindered by noise disturbance, for example from partying crowds in the Centrum district or motorcycle racket in Nieuw West, seem to be increasingly annoyed over time. For example, Claas (72) who struggles with traffic noise daily, especially in Summer, states: “it just gets worse, I go to the park sometimes for a walk but now even there I get annoyed, maybe all loud sounds start to bother me now, children yelling, the busyness of the park. So there might be no mopeds there, luckily, (…) but it’s definitely not quiet either”.

But others mentioned a certain habituation to the sounds of the city, saying they are used to noise in their direct environments and are not easily disturbed by it due to past exposure to noise. A typical example of this is Frans (60) who has lived in Amsterdam his whole life and now lives in an apartment in Osdorp, Nieuw West. He described hearing his neighbours regularly, but it was nothing compared to the flat he grew up in: “nope, it doesn’t bother me. I grew up in a house in Bos en Lommer and if someone farted on the top floor, you could hear it at the bottom, there were walls as thin as cardboard and the flat I live now is just solid concrete so..”. And while many participants stated being used to the noisiness of the city, many have also come accustomed to the new and temporary quietness that the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it.

59 In times of crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic

Although many participants experienced the city as increasingly busy and noisy, the urban acoustic environment drastically changed in the spring of 2020, to an extreme on the other end of the sound spectrum; quietness. Many stories about urban sound and quietness were divided by participants in pre-covid, during-covid and post-covid situations, talking about the ‘before’, the ‘now’, and the hypothetical ‘after’. When the Covid-19 virus made its way around the globe, The Netherlands went into an ‘intelligent lockdown’ with the aim to minimise physical contact among people, basically shutting down urban public life. To many of the participants and especially those that live in the Centrum district, the city became almost unrecognisably quiet.

Many of them stated they walked the streets of the city centre with awe, astonished by the empty streets, closed shops, empty restaurants and terraces. And although many participants recognised the negative consequences of the pandemic, a common sentiment was the pleasantness of the quiet urban sonic environment. How lovely the quietness was, how amazing the sense of calm in the city streets and what a welcome break it was from the usual busyness, albeit somewhat surreal. Some participants explicitly mentioned they appreciated the city much more once the streets cleared, and others noted it reminded them of the Amsterdam of the 1980s, like Zeedijk resident Renske (62): “lately I’ve been thinking ‘it feels like the ‘80s’ when there just weren’t as many people on the street, It was really strange to notice, but now I’m used to it already and it doesn’t seem so strange anymore”.

That initial quietness of the first months in lockdown was most noticeable to Amsterdam residents, for it was the biggest acoustic contrast anyone had ever encountered in the city. But as the Summer came along, some of the restrictions on public life were lifted and hospitality establishments were reopening their doors, inviting back tourists and other consumers. Some participants described those Summer months as notably noisy, although realising that objectively speaking, they were probably not as noisy as before the pandemic. A recent Amsterdam newspaper article described a similar phenomenon; more complaints are filed on the busyness of streets and public transportation, while the objective busyness is much lower compared to two years ago (Kruyswijk, 2021).

Interestingly, the changes in sound during the first lockdown and the following Summer were not experienced as intensely in Nieuw West as in Centrum district. Many Nieuw West residents actually mentioned to hardly have noticed any real changes in sound at all, apart from the quietness on roads and streets at night after the implementation of the curfew.

After the Summer of 2020, following a surge in covid-19 cases both nationally and internationally, lockdown measures were re-introduced and tightened. The city, once again, fell

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quiet. And at the time of conducting interviews with participants in the Winter of 2020-2021, many participants seemed to be habituated to the ‘new normal’ urban acoustic environment and its relative quietness. To Herman (51), like Renske mentioned earlier, the strangeness of the urban quietness had also faded into normalcy, and made him wary of what might come after the pandemic is over: “I’m worried that what I experienced as liveliness before I will experience as chaotic or oppressive, if everything goes back to the way it was before the lockdown. And I think many people that live here feel the same. We just aren’t used to the noise anymore and it might shock us” .

These findings emphasise the context-dependent and transitory nature of urban sound, noise and quietness. What is regarded as pleasant or quiet at one point in time, might be experienced as a nuisance at another. To some degree, the noise we are exposed to in the city is a choice and can be interpreted as lively, but it can also feel ‘out of control’, intrusive and unwanted, or unhealthy. The sonic changes in Amsterdam during the Covid-19 pandemic have highlighted and unveiled the importance of our acoustic environments for our health, wellbeing, and happiness in the city.

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