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a day in the life: interference, disturbance, and intersensoriality in a domestic cooking space

I have always been sensitive to sound. One of my earliest memories is from when I was two years old, learning my shapes from my mother. She would take my pointed finger and draw in the air with it: A circle – “OOooooo-WOOP!” (/u˥˩wup˩˥/: a falling pitch on the first syllable, and a rising pitch on the second as I closed the imaginary loop). A square: “EEEE-aaah, EEEE-aaah.” (/˥iː˧ãː˥iː˧ãː/: A high tone on “EEEE” and a mid tone on “aaah”). A triangle: “eeek! eeek! eeek!” (/˥ḭk ˦ḭk ˥ḭk/: All high in tone and creaky-voiced).

I still learn things from my mother’s sounds, and from the sounds of the house. I learned over the years what angry sounds like: stomping footsteps that resonate through our doorless house above and below, slamming cabinets and syllables lobbed like projectiles with velocity and sharpness. I have learned what sleep sounds like: heavy snores muffled behind thick blankets and a thin door, obscured by the screams of foxes and the howls of coyotes outside that pierce me like moonlight. Sometimes there’s a sharp crack in the house, disrupting none but me or my cat, and I walk into the kitchen to absorb the tense silence.

This project is a final for a semester-long course, yes, but it is also the naming of years of sounds I never had words for, and the affects that traversed me whenever I heard them. It’s a collection of specimens from a sonic ecosystem that I’ve only just begun to make sense of.

The comforts and anxieties of a small household are stories best told through sound, scent, and texture. My mother and I are large personalities with rigid and brittle needs. The intensities we generate are marked both by extreme sensory presence and by absence; at times it’s impossible to escape each other, and at times our home is incredibly lonely. I find comfort in my soft cat, the murmur and laughter of Dungeons & Dragons podcasts, and concentration on my artistic and academic pursuits that fill my head with thoughts that buzz like insects or transport me to a soundless moon of creativity and promise. The common thread that links all these states is the anxiety I feel when the soundscape becomes unpredictable – that is, when it becomes noisy. “Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore… Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape” (Schafer, 2012).

The sounds and noises I tried to parse out for this project fell into two broad categories: anthropogenic, which I defined loosely as created directly by a human person (e.g. footsteps, tapping a spoon on a skillet) and non-anthropogenic, which I defined as all other environmental sounds (e.g. the house settling, foxes crying outside, the radio). These categories helped me sort the noise of my kitchen into cycles of hi-fi and lo-fi sound environments that changed in predictable ways depending on the time of day. A hi-fi sound environment is a soundscape in which individual sounds are completely intelligible and can be traced to their source; there is a high signal-to-noise ratio and, in my kitchen’s case, no sound I would describe as painfully loud. A lo-fi sound environment is the converse of this: a low signal-to-noise ratio, individual sounds blend together into a background murmur and it’s difficult to hear a sound in its entirety or trace it to its source, and occasionally there are sounds which are painful to me.

As I mentioned, my needs are rather rigid, and this extends to my expectations for a sonic environment. I am irritated by noise, especially in the bustling mornings. Now that I have done this project, I notice that I am attuned to the purposes and origins of the noises that used to irritate me, and there is now less irritation. I am now irritated by lack of noise, or I am paranoid of the noises for which I cannot discern a purpose. I feel tension in silences, and connection and networking through the noises that bring me comfort. This hints at Kassabian’s networked subjectivity: “Like Star Trek’s Borg, we are uncomfortable being unhooked from the background sound of ubiquitous subjectivity, so we turn radios on in empty rooms and put speakers under our pillows… We prefer to be connected, need to listen to our connections, can’t breathe without them” (Kassabian, 2001). Sounds in my kitchen can be organized by time of day, creating non-linear subjectivities like those described by Kassabian’s ubiquitous listening and ubiquitous subjectivities. In this case, the subjectivities experienced in the kitchen are more cyclical than ubiquitous. I insert myself into the space for different purposes and different affects traverse me at different times of day, but these purposes and affects are predictable.

How is the kitchen placed in the soundscape – or, how does the soundscape of my house center around the kitchen? “Sounds emerge from and are perceptually centred in place, not to mention sung with, to, and about places” (Feld, 1994). The sounds of the radio are not bound to the kitchen but are associated with the kitchen; the radio is a “kitcheny” instrument that cannot be played without evoking some sense of “kitcheniness.” The sound of cooking is bound to the kitchen and produces an acoustic centering of comfort, creation, and bodily function in that space. The lack of these sounds, or the presence of exterior sounds from other rooms or from outside the house, makes the kitchen feel strange; they mark a sudden lack of kitcheniness even in the only space that can take on that exclusive role.

I used to find myself trying to listen to music through these kitchen noises as if it were a battle: I strained through the cooking sounds and the running water and the conversation to hear every sonic detail. Then I read Brian Eno’s account of being unable to hear a record of harp music over a rainstorm: “It was raining hard outside, and I could hardly hear the music above the rain-just the loudest notes, like little crystals, sonic icebergs rising out of the storm” (Eno, 1996). When I try listening to music through noise interference now, I think of this passage and try to incorporate the “interference” into the performance. In my recording, I wanted to capture the ways the radio and I constructively and destructively interfered in the soundscape of the kitchen.

Because it’s the kitchen, sound is certainly not the only non-visual sense bound up in these affects. In this ethnography, I tried to prioritize aromas as well. “The association of hearing with feeling rather than cognition probably comes from our modern sense that feelings happen to us rather than being willed or subject to conscious direction” (Connor, 2001). Intersensoriality is related to new modes of attending presence in the world; the association of hearing with feeling rather than cognition is related to the association of scenting with sensing rather than cognition. It is an older sense, a chemical one, and deeply intertwined and implanted into memory formation and recall. These relationships between senses create powerful place-images, place-affects, and place-memories, such as the confusing irritation-anxiety-comfort-cooking-noise-smell that takes place in the mornings in the kitchen vs. the quiet-tense-hifi-natural-noiseless-absence that takes place in the afternoons and nights in the kitchen.

Attending to any ecosystem is all about observing and managing relationships across many different scales. The affects I named as sources of “comfort,” “tension,” “business,” “irritation” – they are all interrelated and their sources are interrelated. They disturb and jostle each other, seeking attention and creating excess with their forces. I didn’t expect such strong correlations between anthropogenic sounds and comfort, or between near-silent hi-fi environments and tension. But to discover this, I had to attend to a phenomenon of assemblage that Anna Tsing – appropriately enough for this paper – compares to polyphonic music: “[T]o appreciate polyphony one must listen both to the separate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony or dissonance… to appreciate the assemblage, one must attend to its separate ways of being at the same time as watching how they come together in sporadic but consequential coordinations” (Tsing, 2015).

Homes are more fickle than many realize. In a home where I’ve been threatened with placelessness, non-belonging, and eviction countless times, I’ve internalized a sense that uncertainty is an enemy to be monitored. This project has helped me approach the soundscape of my home in a different way: it’s an ecology that exists neither in harmony nor in conflict with itself, much like the pine trees, pine sawyer beetles, pine wilt nematodes and matsutake mushrooms that Anna Tsing writes about in Mushroom at the End of the World. It cycles between different types of comfort and discomfort, and I belong to it in intimate and inscrutable ways. My eventual, more permanent absence will be a different sort of disturbance to this soundscape, and taking this perspective has eased some of my uncertainty for now.

Works Cited

Connor, S. (2001). Edison's Teeth: Touching Hearing. Hearing Culture. Morelia, Mexico.

Eno, B. (1996). Ambient Music. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, 94-97.

Feld, S. (1994, June). From Ethnomusicology to Echo-muse-ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest. The Soundscape Newsletter.

Kassabian, A. (2001). Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity. ECHO: a music-centered journal.

Schafer, R. M. (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. In J. Sterne, The Tuning of the World (pp. 95-103).

Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World.

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