https://www.dukeupress.edu/atmospheric-noise

Drew Kerr: Atmospheric Noise highlights multiple sensory modes involved with negotiating airport noise. On first brush, the sonic obviously invokes hearing or listening, but the shaking of walls, rattling of glass, the pressurized movement of concrete infrastructure as an aircraft passes overhead in its flight path also make hearing something perceptibly haptic and tactile. You guide us, “[p]roprioception and thermoception are coterminous with hearing: the former a state in the inner ear, the latter a sensation produced by low frequencies.” (120). Then inscribing that noise through measurement in renderings of graphic data and noise contour maps, as well as legal files and written complaints present a material visuality to hearing. Can you talk more about this movement of energy, as you frame it, and how it came into focus for you as the atmospheric, as opposed to the legal-discursive or the activist-political, for example?

Marina Peterson: There’s a lot in this question! Several strands of thought come to bear on these issues. First, I was (and am) invested in finding ways to de-objectify sound – to treat sound as immanent and processual rather than an artifact, whether in the form of a recording or a notion of soundscape that sustains a modern distinction between sound and hearing. Approaching sound as energy helps with this. In Ohio, we had a project “Energy Soundscapes” that involved listening to sounds of energy past and present, while also exploring what it means to treat sound as energy, as an immaterial form or force that is always in motion. Some of the projects can be seen/listened to here. Brian Harnetty was part of this group, and has continued to engage with the region through listening engagements. Treating listening as coterminous with other senses, especially ones like thermoception or proprioception, destabilizes a subject/object divide expressed in the differentiation between hearing and sound. With Thermoception and proprioception, there is no difference between the thing sensed and sensing.

On the other hand, I was also captivated by the materialist turn, reading Jane Bennett and others, and considering what it means to write with and through forms of matter. I experimented with this, writing about the landscape of southeast Ohio and the invisible yet palpable presence of a history of coal mining that left hills cloaking their emptiness, which became apparent as sinkholes or acid mine drainage.

I went to Los Angeles with a project on infrastructure that connected the city to the ocean, and was in the archive (at the Huntington Library) looking at material on building storm drains and channeling the LA River. Concrete, though a fascinating material form that shifts from viscosity to solidity with the aid of water, was nonetheless hard to get to move, especially in its hardened form. I found files on airport noise and thought they might be useful for teaching (I was wary of doing a sound project, in part because of my reservations about reifying sound). The first files I read were letters from residents around LAX to County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, appealing to him to do something about the noise. He took their complaints to Washington, finding that airspace jurisdiction was an unsettled domain. This was the hook for me: noise activating air (through airspace law), both coming into being in a dynamic relationality on the move. Air came into focus as a material form that pushed back on new materialisms insofar in its immateriality. Now there is a lot of work on air and atmosphere, but at the time (2013-14) there wasn’t much, so it felt like an exciting area of investigation. Atmosphere came after air, which explains my emphasis on the aerial rather than the affective. However, what I was also interested in was a logic of air or the atmospheric – as something immaterial that is also indeterminate or difficult to pin down. Atmospheric became an expansive way of describing how noise moves and works on and with air, buildings, bodies, and the city. My approach remains rooted in the ethnographic, especially in the fact that airport noise is for the most part curtailed to airborne sound within the range of human audibility.

Drew Kerr: I originally picked up your book coming with my own questions about affective atmospheres, but in your ethnographic world of sonic atmospheres, I quickly was (productively) redirected toward “acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination,” (7) as you quote from Steven Feld’s (1996) work. The interplay of these various elements grappling with the matter of noise around the Los Angeles airport reminded me, perhaps a little afield, of Constatine Nakassis’s (2015) proposition that linguistic anthropology is not the study of “language,” per se, but language’s entanglement with other semiotic modalities, particularly intervening in understanding (or at least unpacking) indexical processes. Though you’re not directly engaging that literature, through the course of the book I was convinced of the opening, the possibilities noise provides as a medium. Can you set the scene of how “acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7) take shape with/through noise?

Marina Peterson: I tend to return to Lefebvre’s spatial triad to account for the simultaneity of what he calls representations of space, representational space, and spatial practice. Though in Atmospheric Noise I describe noise as “A material-discursive ‘monster,’ a ‘quasi object,’ an ‘unformed object’ or ‘hybrid’” (8), formulations developed especially in STS by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Michelle Murphy and Stefan Helmreich. Katie Stewart describes this as “registers” in her essay “Road Registers.” The list you offer (“acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7)) are some of the ethnographic domains in which noise emerges as an acoustic object as it were, that is given a designation as noise and made meaningful in ways that exceed it as such. In this way, even as noise is always coming into being, it also becomes a way of knowing (in Feld’s terms) – with knowing at once bodily and epistemological. I wouldn’t call noise a medium, as to me that suggests a stability that it doesn’t have; it’s not background, or something in or through which things are formed, instead, it is always emergent even as it does work.

Drew Kerr: I’m also thinking with the enmeshed relationality between metrics, machines, and bodies — the measuring devices that inscribe sonic signatures, human bodies that perceive sound and its effects, sound as that which touches, and sound that is noise, an annoyance. You suggest at a later moment in the book a “continuity across differently vibrating matter that extends from the skin of the body to that of the house and beyond” (131), which I take to poignantly describe this enmeshment. The continuity strikes me as a dense, yet porous bodily materiality (or perhaps material embodiment?), that acutely draws our attention to conversations about im/mediation. Would you say more about your methodologies to encounter this assemblage and its emergence? And, if I might selfishly extend, how might you anticipate such methods contributing to conversations around mediation (what we might frame under semiotics)? 

Marina Peterson: I’m aiming to approach the material in a nonrepresentational way, staying close to the thing itself, which might be the physicality of sound or something like semiotics. I describe this as the “viscerality of abstraction” in Chapter 2, engaging with haptic qualities of graphs and metrics. I don’t want to deny the semiotic work they do, but I approach them in a way akin to Rabinow’s assertion that “representations are social facts.” This is also a way of pushing against an understanding of such forms as mediating, which places them between one thing and another. On the other hand, I don’t want to reify experience, which centers a human subject. That said, methodologically my approach is to read documents for haptic moments, with, as you suggested, a continuity of embodiment across forms of matter, which might be bodies, buildings, sound or air, all of which is emergent and in relation. This kind of discussion comes out strongly in acoustic engineering reports, or the way acoustic engineers talk about their work. It’s what Stengers calls the “meso” – “a site of invention” that “affirms its copresence with a milieu” (https://www.inflexions.org/n3_stengershtml.html). I call this a glitch methodology, insofar as I’m drawing out something from the material – principally an attention to the physicality of sound and atmosphere – that isn’t necessarily the intended or expressed meaning.

Drew Kerr: To turn us in another direction, I’m curious to hear more about attunement. The book draws out a tension between audiovisual technologies that render specific measurements of airport noise into general soundscapes, and the individual subjective and collective experiences of noise. There are aerial attunements by microphones, people’s ears and bodies, while simultaneously there are social attunements between people talking as they’re drowned out by plane noise, new existential and legal attunements of annoyance, and commercial economic attunements by farmers navigating their chickens frightened to death. The murmurs and echoes of noise resonate quite deeply. How does attunement disperse from moments of experiencing noise into a public ear? Or perhaps to ask this differently: Can you help us grasp the scales across which attunement and the atmospheric transect in your writing and the worlds of your interlocutors?

Marina Peterson: Attunement is a minor gesture, a turning toward something, whether sound or heat or person. It is a mode of relationality that is ordinary and usually unremarkable. In my article “Sensory Attunements: Working With the Past in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds” I write that “Attunement is an orienting toward, a feeling-ness that does not necessarily have specific content and is generally nondiscursive.” Heat is an important mode of attunement, felt, and discussed in the way that weather is, just part of the ordinary. But that turning toward another to say “it’s hot” is also a moment of relationality, between people who are also experiencing atmospheric effects of coal mining, the history of that region materialized in present and future climates. I brought this sense of attunement to Atmospheric Noise, paying attention to those minor gestural moments that get registered as experience in congressional hearings, but are doing relational work between family members and neighbors, or between residents around the airport and politicians and ultimately federal legislation. This is also part of the atmospheric quality of aircraft noise, which shifts the interpersonal aspect of noise as nuisance to a more distributed or dispersed – and multiscalar – register. Making claims against aircraft noise shifts from the specific noisemaker to law, metricization, airspace jurisdiction, and so on.

Drew Kerr: A final, striking element of the book is your style of writing. Whether through the present tense, layering narratives and parallel events, your own self-reflections in the ethnography, and a curious experiment with glitching, the writing yields an account richly present and animate. This is a powerful rejoinder to the dilemma of capturing the viscerality and fleeting nature of noise often cited by your interlocutors, the court proceedings, sound engineers, and yourself. Can you recount for us the motivations and arrival to this style of writing, and especially how the idea of glitching formed into its own method for you?

Marina Peterson: Thank you for the kind words. A project of writing through things emerged from my engagement with new materialism, nonrepresentational theory, and the landscape of southeast Ohio. I wanted to really push the idea of writing theory through the world. Katie Stewart does this. Of course, we select ethnographic material that is relevant for a framing. But to make the framing intrinsic to the account of a place or thing or encounter brings another kind of intention and attention. It requires staying close to the thing rather than generalizing or skating across the surface.

Glitching is a way of reading against the grain of intended meanings. It’s partly a way of articulating how my approach to science and engineering differs from much (not all) STS. But it also foregrounds the possibility of reading against the grain of dominant (Eurocentric, modern, and so on) modes of knowledge production more broadly.