Campaign to Win Back Acoustic Space

We have become a society of noise. Slowly and steadily, our environment, which is so strongly dominated by images and visual stimuli, has gotten loud. The rich biodiversity of site-specific sounds, voices and noises has given way to the monotonous background din of vehicular traffic that is everywhere the same. Public acoustic space is a battlefield upon which a wide variety of private and private sector interests are being pursued.
Enterprises have long since begun using audio branding as a means of staking their acoustic claims as well to public spaces, and the operation of the appliances of daily use that surround us have long been producing custom-engineered sounds. More than a third of the music industry’s revenues are generated by retailing ringtones for the cellphones that, thanks to the inherent absence of the interlocutor, have endowed the private conversation in a public space with the appearance of a monolog.
In the shopping centers, stores, restaurants and waiting rooms acoustically plastered with more or less inconspicuous musical wallpaper, audio tracks attuned to the time of day and the target audience’s demographics tweak the emotional guidance systems of those present in that space. In the car, on the job, in the offices of our service society, format radio with its totalitarian mix of music, news and extended commercial breaks has achieved airwave superiority.
The iPod as the Walkman’s more potent successor allows its owner to move freely about the public sphere while barricaded in a tonal universe of his/her own choosing.
Peace and quite have become a value-enhancing feature of real estate, vacations and leisure-time experiences for which a tidy surcharge is due. Among the walls cordoning off rich from poor is a sound barrier.
Whoever is poor lives amidst noise.
Acoustic environmental pollution is perhaps the last major unrecognized environmental problem, and one that is so ubiquitous that not even the environmental protection organizations are conscious of it.
Linz09 is working on a campaign
- for a public acoustic space that is democratic and fit for human habitation
- for the (human) right to acoustic self-determination
- for a critical acoustic consciousness
- against being involuntarily subjected to ambient sounds
- against the abuse, destruction and impoverishment of the acoustic sphere.