The sounds bother me. Irritate. Annoy. The world is a shifting ground; it is difficult to cope with the changes and I need silence. I need silence to calm down, recuperate, adjust, reflect. I want to reflect. I don’t want the noise to distract me; I don’t want numbness. My house is suddenly ringing loud. The sounds that I have never noticed before are piercing my ears. How long are they showering for? How loud are they laughing? I never knew that somebody in the house is slamming the doors. They suffocate me, all these sounds. I cannot leave the house and I cannot escape its sounds. I close myself in my room, but the sounds leak through the walls, slide under the doors. They are even more irritating here. They corner me. The noise is now inside me.

You don’t want to be conscious of the sounds at home. If you are, the home has become less homely. The sounds in it are no longer accepted but heard. They draw attention to themselves. “My space starts to shrink as the enjoyment of my own environment vanishes,” [ii] writes Salome Voegelin, reflecting on the music blasting from her neighbours’ apartment, but adds that if she liked her neighbours more, she would mind their sounds less; her own apartment therefore a home and not a trap. The perception shifts depending on the mood. It is not that the sounds are shrinking my space, but that my space has already shrank and the sounds are now only a tangible thing to which I attach my frustration of being trapped in here. Sounds that once went unheard in their familiarity are now amplified. I hear them. But what irritates me is not the sound, but the fact that I am here in the first place. If one wants to escape the space, then one wants to escape its sounds too. None of the sounds would do.

Or could it be that here in the quarantine, my sound tolerance has changed? I wish to find a room to reflect, pause and calm down; but the sounds squash my space. In this need of silence even the smallest sounds are suddenly intolerable. Yes, my taste for sounds has changed but, there is more to it all. The thing is that now I am suddenly surrounded with a mesh of sounds. Work sounds. Socialising sounds. Conversations. Telephone calls. Meetings and seminars. Relaxation. Entertainment. Relationships. The entire sonic spectrum has now shifted inside of the house. The sounds that were up to recently delegated to other spaces, are now contained in what once was a place for quietude; and the house is suddenly louder than the street.

So, I leave the house to escape the sounds. I go for a stroll into the night, looking for familiarity elsewhere. But here too, all is uncanny. Unusual silence; only white noise of the night. I hear my boots on the pavement, a rhythm of my walk. Shallow sounds of TVs spreading out from the surrounding houses. I can hear the leaves rustling on the trees. The birds, the bats taking over the symphony of the night. It is strange, but somewhat not unsettling. I like it out here where the ‘silence’ is greater. Although, it does not feel exactly like ‘home’. One does not need to travel far in order to feel surprised, intrigued, bewildered. Change the sounds, and you suddenly find yourself on an adventure, in the unknown. The emotional signifiers attached to the places through sounds are suddenly gone and everything is different and new, foreign. The quarantine turned the sonic structure of my life upside down and it will take some time to feel ‘home’ again.

Is the sound at home same as the sound of home? There is a difference between ‘a home’ and ‘a house’. A house is an object, a space that can be filled with sound. Home is a feeling of a space. Only some houses become homes. If we think of home as something cosy and comforting, housing people that we love, then sounds of home should be loved too. This is not to say that they need to be continuously pleasant. Some loud, repetitive, noisy sounds are homely; not only because they are familiar but because they are attached to the sources we love. These homely sounds are sometimes unheard, sometimes enjoyed, sometimes irritating; but always negotiated. Home is a house in which people care for and respect one another; which extends to the respect of one another’s sound needs. People at home have a ‘sound understanding’ for one another. But home is never silent.

Architects and sound designers create spaces with certain acoustic properties, but house is inhabited by people who sound freely and unpredictably. The house, in other words, is not a temple or a container of controlled and calculated sounds, but an ever changing, living organism which is precisely what makes it a ‘home’. Architect Shea Michael Trahan says: “When space acts as an instrument, the space can tune you.” [iii] Some spaces are like that; some spaces regulate sounds, we sonically obey. But house that wants to be a home is a different kind of space; a space for freedom, self-expression, and tolerance. A space that must contain noise, action, flexibility, fluidity. “Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise,” wrote Attali. Silence would, therefore, be a sign of a break in social relationships; relationships that always sounds different in order to continue, to evolve.

Changes in sounds can jolt us, shock us, upset us, irritate us; but if the space is a home and not merely a house, we eventually come to love the new sounds; we adjust. Long showering, loud door slams, resonant laughter, constant chatting – all these can comfort us again; and today my house sounds like home again. I find solace in the slow showering, joyace in the resonant laughter, even the door slam is soothing. Sounds are home.

Ira Ferris, June 2020

i Quote in the title is from Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, New York, London: Continuum Books, 2010, p45.
ii Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p44
iii Cited in Lakshmi Sandhana, ‘How the sound in your home affects your mood,’ on BBC.com, published 30 July 2019, last accessed 30 June 2020, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190729-how-the-sound-in-your- office-affects-your-mood