Noise from the Slums

"R. Murray Schafer writes that the perception, which heightens in the nineteenth century, is that' the street had now become the home of non-music, where it mixed with other kinds of sound-swill and sewage.'"

The class elements of noise that Hegarty brings up are interesting on their own, but I was mostly drawn to this passage from a personal experience I had being categorized as "noise." My buddy and I were (and still are) in a progressive rock band together back in high school (as prog-rock as you can be in high school) and practiced in his garage in the suburbs. One day in early spring was particularly nice, so we decided to play with the garage door open. While we were playing (some inoffensive, classic-rock-esque noodling at a restrained volume) a middle aged woman we did not know approached the door with an incredulous look on her face, regarding the inside of our humble abode as though she were coming to grips with The Twilight Zone. We stopped and asked if we could help her with something, at which point she started a tirade against us for playing with the door open, which began with the horrified query: "Are you from the SLUMS?"

"Is this what you people do there? This is a neighborhood," she continued. Caught off guard by her reaction (we typically either received a curt but polite "please stop," or just a visit from the police who would give the same) we allowed her to finish, apologized, and shut the door behind her.

I find it interesting that this woman's reaction hinged so heavily on the ideas of class and "other." The way she said the word "slums" with horror and disgust, or the dichotomy she raised between where people "do this," and here, where "we don't do this," are so loaded in their condescension that they can't help but call upon the political divides between her middle-class suburban lifestyle and the "other" she perceived us as. It was interesting to see how this horror she felt (it may read hyperbolic to say horror, but she seemed to be legitimately shaken to her core) was a well established cultural reading of "noise" as a political idea, that it could work its way into the mind of a woman who (I can only assume) had no formal education in culture of this nature. While not the most interesting evaluation of "noise" Hegarty gets into, the visceral quality that I've seen his thoughts on "noise" and class presented with is evidence enough to show their merit.