Sounds beyond our reach.

Threshold’s Year of Sound Journal

Episode IV: Is It Noise or Sound?

As the weather turns to… well… snow, if you’ve been in or near Chicago recently, we’re reflecting on the moments we were outside with our neighbors enjoying the few festivals held this strange summer, moments when sound allowed us to still feel part of a vibrant city (at a safe six feet apart). Sound reinforces our sense of place, like that captured here in Humboldt Park, a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago. It might come across as noise to some, but within it are the cadences, accents, inflections, beats, and balances that make it a signature of its neighborhood, different from what one might hear elsewhere in the city.

On a scientific level, sound and noise are the same, though ‘noise’ tends to be a pejorative term, defined personally or culturally. Then, again… the clanging of pots and pans transforms when an entire city does it at 7pm to show support for its pandemic workers. 

Noise can be thought of as “sound out of place”, though sometimes it’s the place that changes as the sounds stay the same... Last year, #DontMuteDC took over Twitter when noise complaints came in about a corner store in the Shaw neighborhood playing Go-Go Music, a subgenre of Funk that originated in DC. For longtime residents, music from the store was the sound of the neighborhood. New high rises and a changing demographic led to such a clash about sound and noise that the Mayor stepped in, ultimately honoring Go-Go as the official music of DC and the sound of the city. The corner store plays on.

As we head inside, take a moment to appreciate the sounds around you: Kids being kids out in the street, the neighbor’s dog barking, the evening movie playing in the apartment below you. Depending on the day you’ve had, any one of them could be noise, but we’d like to invite you to instead think of them as sound, sound that reminds us that we are not alone but part of a larger community.