Engineering normality

Expectation complicates threshold judgements somewhat. There is evidence that people simply avoid sound contexts they dislike, without consciously processing this as a sound- scape rationale. This is most extreme with actively religious participants. Laura identies as quite religious, goes to church at least once a week, participates in a church choir, and dislikes pubs and clubs partly for reasons of faith. She prefers quieter, socially balanced soundscapes, and spends a lot of time alone. Are these factors linked? It seems credible the relative quiet of a church environment as a primary social context engenders a preference for these kind of public, quiet, large and open spaces, and links strongly with the experience of listeners from quieter environments moving to Manchester.

While Laura seems on rst inspection to be a high-threshold listener, another interpreta- tion is that she simply avoids any environments that she dislikes, and is capable of doing this as her social group doesn't tend to habituate noisier environments, and her home is relatively quiet. Therefore expectation is a key threshold factor. If she is expecting no undesirable noises, and structures her life so as to avoid them, then is this due to unconscious soundscape eects or merely the result of other socialisation?

There are many strategies to engineer normality, deliberately modifying participants' experiences of soundscapes. Here are some mentioned by participants in my study there may well be a lot more.

Selecting environments based on the task at hand

As mentioned in Work (Subsection 5.2.1 on page 145), people select dierent environments for dierent tasks, with reading and writing seen as distinct tasks with their own sonic requirements and desired environments.

Moving places in an environment

Sometimes people nd comfort in specic areas within places, for example a favourite seat on the bus or in a lecture hall. This is sometimes actively noticed as an acoustic eect.

INT: Lectures are too echo-y?

Hugh: There's the new lecture theatre [. . . ], after being there and sitting in various locations, you do understand where to sit almost, but I think you get standing rays if you kind of in the middle, it's very loud. If you sit in certain places the noise sort of cancels itself out. Um, and I don't think it's actually helped by sitting at the front or anything like that, you sort of just nd your little areas that you like to listen. And and I mean, I know there's a limit to where people can go sit but if you nd it particularly dicult hearing in a certain place, then are people aware enough to go somewhere else and try somewhere else, or do people think it's going to sound the same everywhere?

One person at least then was aware of lecture acoustics, and specically moved around to nd good places to hear. This in turn changes their overall impression of listening in that environment, even if 95% of the locations have undesirable acoustic properties.

Going places at certain times of the day

Many people strongly disliked crowds while shopping, especially supermarkets or shopping in the city centre. Laura prefers a quieter area of town to shop, Gloria goes out of her way to avoid places like Ikea at the weekend. Quentin is very vocal in his dislike of busyness.

Quentin: But any time you go in Primark it's busy and it's horrible. I don't enjoy it at all, I'm not a big fan of shopping, and it's the same sort of thing it's that enclosed environments with loud sounds and everyone's in a rush and everyone wants to get stu done quickly, and if you slow down you're in people's way. And if you speed up you kind of you feel more rushed and you feel more pressure to get things done quickly and it's just not, I don't nd it a nice environment, and um particularly shops like that where it is very kind of focused and lots of trying to get as many people through as possible so trying to make it as busy as possible, whereas you go to a more expensive shop you can maybe take a bit more time and do things but you've got to be able to aord to do that.

As a result, Quentin aims to go to shops at the least-busy times possible. It's interesting to note here that he associates quiet and a more relaxing experience with expensive shops and directly associates cost with busyness, seeing it as an almost inevitable connection.

Furniture sounds and walkmen

The nal method of manipulating normality is the use of furniture music and walkmen: overlaying environments with recorded sounds. These are covered in detail in Section 5.6 on page 199.

5.3.3 Dishearkening

Once a context of normality is established, certain soundscape elements cease to be actively noticed elements, and become part of the `normal' fabric of the location. This subsection is an analysis of when aspects of the soundscape overcome the threshold of normality of a sound environment, and to what extent dishearkening happens in dierent auditory contexts.

Semantically, there is a simple process at work here the listener simply discards in- formation which is not useful. How does the listener decide what is not important, or discard unwanted information though? In common with other aspects of this thesis, nding elements that are not normally noticed is somewhat problematic. This is one area the sound diary eldwork actively helped though experiences like this one became much more noticeable to participants.

Gloria: And, this is where [a workmate] is waing for a bit in the background, I realised how much I fade out [my workmate]. He's a piercer, he works at the piercing studio. I do like him but he does talk a lot of crap. He drinks a lot of coee, so he's quite intense! [laughs]

INT: So he talks really loudly?

Gloria: Really loud, really fast, and a lot of crap. I don't have any problem with [workmate], you know but, you have to be able to lter [him] out. INT: Do you notice that happening or do you notice eventually you don't hear him any more?

Gloria: I think recording this helped me realise I do it actually.

Without the sound diary as a threshold-lowering factor, Gloria wouldn't have noticed her workmate. However, because of it, she did and it's clear that even though the workmate is very loud, and talks non-stop, it's perfectly possible to lter him out completely. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, it would seem that people are capable of ltering an endless variety of sounds. Some of these can be extremely loud and annoying but with enough repetition, blend into the fabric of a location. The range of competency in dishearkening was very large however.

A common example of this eect that people are more consciously aware of is where there is a noise annoyance that they used to notice, and now don't. Andrew for instance has two sounds in his at that visitors nd annoying.

Andrew: The radiator now would not distract me from work, yet it was once really irritating and now it's just completely ne.

INT: This is your morning. [reading from logbook] `Automatic air freshener squirt'?

Andrew: It goes `tsss' though it's not working properly at the moment. It does it every 38 minutes, it just happened I think when we were recording. Yeah it's really funny cos when it works properly it's really fucking loud, it's like whenever people are in here and they don't know what it, is a big ring, it's like [shouts] `What's that?!'

In both cases, Andrew no longer notices these sounds, even though he did when he moved in, but guests commonly nd them highly annoying until they get used to them as well. Listeners can therefore actively notice their dishearkening, then.