Chris Nagel
Philosophy Department
CSU - Stanislaus
I am sitting in my living room, listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue playing on my stereo. It’s a record I know well, one I’ve played hundreds of times. As I listen, sitting cross-legged in a chair, I bob my crossed leg in rhythm. I’m aware of occasional cars driving down the street making a Doppler effect, growing louder before dropping their pitch as they move past. They can almost sound like drums played with fans (as Jimmy Cobb does on the record). While not contributing to the music’s aesthetic integrity or beauty, the quiet rush of the cars is there with the music, in the night. I listen on, anticipating the music, listening forward into John Coltrane’s rising solo in “Blue in Green,” picking up from Wyn Kelly’s brief, quiet interlude of block chords.
The music is ripped to shreds in an instant as my neighbor kick-starts his Harley-Davidson. The violent roar of the engine and the thudding crack of the hollowed-out muffler make everything louder for me for a split-second and I hear an utterly unfamiliar version of Trane’s beautiful melody – a version made horrible and painful, distorted into stabs of sound in concert with the Hog outside. The sound actually hurts my ears, until then focused on and opening into the music, and somehow more sensitive as a result. As we say in English, it’s “ear-splitting.”
But the physiological and psychical effects go beyond the impact of such sounds on the ears. My immediate responses were to curse my neighbor, hunch my shoulders and back, clutch the armrests of the chair, clench my jaw, and stop bobbing my leg. I became a little nauseated and very slightly dizzy. I felt disoriented, ungrounded, and somehow too lightweight. I noticed too, that I stopped listening to the music. My aural attention became “blurred,” and it was some time before I could focus my hearing enough to make cognitive sense of what I was hearing.
This description, of what I expect is similar to experiences of most people living in the industrialized world, presents an ordinary or mundane characterization of noise. Most noticeable is the stark difference between background and obtrusive noise. Background noise is more or less undemanding of conscious attention; it more or less blends in or fades away into sounds that are the focus of attention. A moment’s reflection on any and every sound-situation will reveal a background of such noise, as well as the involuntary openness of the sense of hearing to its sound-milieu. I cannot listen without opening my hearing to noise, that is, without opening my hearing to the possibility of my listening being overwhelmed by noise that invades my embodied hearing. Obtrusive noise feels like a violation and an assault.
In the most general mundane sense, noise is “unwanted sound.” Examples of noise understood this way are innumerable: a large truck rumbling down the street, a piercing train whistle, an infant screaming, or a crow cawing can all be unwanted and disturbing sounds. But the character of being unwanted or disturbing obviously depends upon the context and the preferences and attitude of the person hearing the sound.
Two basic natural scientific strategies are employed to lend some specificity to the vague term noise. Sound engineers studying the problem of noise abatement adopt a quantitative and statistical concept of noise, defining it in terms of decibel level and wave frequency. This concept serves as a benchmark for measuring environmental noise, permitting statistical analysis of correlations of noise level and quantifiable physical impacts in, for instance, medical studies. Strong correlations between quantitatively measured noise and deleterious health effects have led the US EPA to use such standards almost exclusively in regulation of noise in workplaces and residential areas surrounding airports or other noise-producing establishments.
Psychologists and cognitive scientists, while making some use of the quantitative measure of noise, focus more on qualitative or subjective characteristics, chief among them “annoyance.” Correlations of the feeling of “annoyance” and other reported feelings (“stress,” etc.) are sought, in hopes of producing empirically repeatable results and thus draw conclusions about the impact of noise. A recurring theme in psychological studies is the strong correlation between “annoyance” and the self-reported feeling that one has “no control” over the noise. An intriguing study of the impact of noise on aesthetic appreciation of natural environments found a correlation between noise and survey participants’ impressions of the visual quality of a landscape, both at low (40db) and high (80db) noise levels (Mace 1999, 236).
Several findings of scientific inquiries are puzzling to researchers in the trans-disciplinary study of “audiology.” I will note two. First, contrary to the expectations and assumptions underlying EPA noise regulation and subsequent alteration of US East Coast flight paths, a reduced measured intensity of sound can nonetheless be experienced as an increase in noise level. The cognitive and affective impacts of noise cannot be accounted for in strictly quantitative-causal ways. One explanation offered is that the context of hearing the sound (either the inability to control the sound or its “meaning”) contributes a great deal to the psychological impact of noise, and should be considered as perhaps equal to objective sound intensity in importance as a factor in experienced noise. How it should be factored in, other than by noting differences in context, is not clear. Second, although numerous field studies of noise in workplaces have found strong correlations between noise level and hearing loss, increased blood pressure, increased stress level, and psychological impacts like “annoyance,” many studies have also indicated that those subjected to noise over an extended period “adapt” to the environment, leading to lower physiological and psychological impacts. To date there is no satisfactory explanation of adaptation, and it is not connected to hearing loss. On the other hand, for some persons exposed to long-term noise, annoyance increased over time, suggesting an inability to adapt. It appears that the entire field of audiology points to one ineluctable conclusion: noise is subjectively determined, and what is background noise to one may be obtrusive to another. For the positivistic “objective” sciences, this conclusion is at best a barrier to further causal explanation, and at worst anathema. Yet this subjective lived meaning of noise underlies and founds the entire inquiry. What needs to be clarified is noise as meaningful, conscious, lived experience.
The puzzling results of scientific inquiries bring the distinction of obtrusive and background noise into question. Certainly we do make such a distinction in mundane experience, and I do not mean to call it into doubt as such. What is brought into question is exactly how that distinction comes to be experienced.
In conducting this inquiry, I will mainly follow methodological steps drawn from three works by Edmund Husserl: Ideas I, Ideas II, and the Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis and Active Synthesis. The reasons I have for spreading so wide a methodological net are directly related to the phenomena. To account for the puzzles presented in natural-scientific research, it will not be enough to account for the subjective experience in an egological fashion. After all, noise is an objective, if vague, concept: we know it when we hear it, and we tend to agree as a matter of social construction of reality that there is this thing called “noise.” A full phenomenological account would carry the egological account of noise forward to clarify it further.
As an Act, consciousness is always intentionally directed toward an Object, the “something” of which it is conscious; intentionality takes place as a “seizing upon” or “heeding” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 76) of the Object. Perception of physical things, Husserl notes briefly, have “a halo of background-intuitions” which is “also a ‘mental process of consciousness’” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 70). This offers an initial way to distinguish phenomenologically between ‘obtrusive’ and ‘background’ noise: ‘obtrusive noise’ stands as an Object for consciousness, as that seized-upon, while ‘background noise’ is there as a halo. But the status of these background-intuitions is left ambiguous, and Husserl’s focus remains on intentional directedness toward Objects.
‘Obtrusive noise,’ noise in the auditory foreground, thus presents no particular problem for eidetic analysis. In this experience, ‘noise’ is the intentional Object of consciousness, whose unity and essence are presented by perceptual moments or hyletic “Data of sensations.” With regard to the perception of an Object, Husserl says, “the Data are animated by ‘construings’ within the concrete unity of the perception and in the animation exercise the ‘presentive function…’” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 88). That is, the Data function as “the really inherent components making up the perception” of an Object, joined together and “grounded in the essence of those construings, to make up a unity of construing…” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 88). ‘Obtrusive noise’ is a sound-Object presented by really inherent sound-Data grounded in such a unity of construing. It is important to note that Husserl makes the appearance of Data to consciousness dependent on the intentional Object’s unity; the Data are immanent to consciousness only as the presentive Data of an intentional Object.[1]
This eidetic analysis would force us to conclude that inasmuch as we are ever conscious of ‘background noise,’ it must be a sound-Object – that is, an intentional Object, having an essence, heeded as just such an essence and perceived through sound-Data animated by construings of the concrete unity of ‘background noise.’ In the case of listening to a piece of music in the context of various background noises, we would have to say that there are (at least) two intentional Objects heeded at once.
I contend that such an interpretation misses an important aspect of the experience of background noise. For although surely there are those experiences in which I simultaneously attend to both music and the background noise, for the most part the advertence of my attention to the music sets the background noise further from intentional focus. Background noise occurs along with foreground music more in the manner described in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the Gestalt feature of the perceptual field – as an interlacing of background and foreground with neither moment standing out as the necessary or absolute foundation of the other (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1986 [1945], 102f).
Furthermore, accounting for ‘background noise’ eidetically necessarily presumes that ‘background noise’ has an essential unity or synthesis of identification. Reflecting on my own experience, I cannot agree that it does; in fact, a certain sort of experience of ‘background noise’ confounds synthesis. To account for this non-unitary ‘background noise,’ I make a further distinction, between background noise and ambient noise. Background noise refers to noise-as-Object, the identified, coherent, but not centrally focal sounds, as secondary intentional Objects, of secondary noetic acts – e.g., ‘the car driving down the street’ that now accompanies ‘Miles Davis, John Coltrane, et. al.’ Ambient noise refers to non-Objective, non identified, non-coherent sounds, mere hyletic Data, with the modification that they are not as such animated by a presentive function – e.g., a generalized hum or buzz, not heeded as an Object but merely there. Ambient noise is not the Object of a secondary noetic act; its presence in consciousness is in and through a noetic act (otherwise it would be ‘unconscious’) but ambient noise itself is ‘inert.’[2]
Eidetic phenomenology does not account sufficiently for the active unifying necessary for Objects to appear as such, nor does it account for ambient noise. The phenomenology of constitution undertaken in Ideas II shifts trajectory toward an analysis of the construction of an Object for consciousness and to explicate the “series of perceptions connecting up together in a continuous way, in which the perceived object is one and the same…” (Husserl 1990 [1952], 37). Perception is taken here not as an act in which a unified Object presents itself, but as a series of continuous acts constructing the unified Object. Working from “perceptual sense” and “its meant, just as it is meant,” will clarify the appearance of ambient noise and its relation to the constitution of sound-Objects.
What has to be explained constitutionally regarding noise is (a) the experienced distinction of obtrusive from background noise, (b) the experience of background noise as such, and (c) if possible, the distinction just posited between background and ambient noise. If noise can be experienced without being an intentional Object, and if noise can be experienced as non-intentional but really immanent content of consciousness, how is this possible and how can it be accounted for phenomenologically?
The eidetic analysis above can be restated in the language of horizon. In listening, the sound-Object attended to or heeded is the Object of an infinite set of possible perceptual acts from infinitely many perspectives. This basic structure of Objects of perception is one sense of the horizon of perception, which I’ll call the internal horizon. It is internal in that the horizon of perspectives on the Object are internally related to the Object’s presentation in consciousness. These infinite possible perspectival perceptions form the horizon proper to the Object.
From every perspective, the Object is presented against a background, which I’ll call the external horizon. It is external in the sense that the background horizon is not intrinsic to the Object, but only to the Object as presented. In other words, the external horizon is a horizon of infinite, indefinite and undefined possible perceptual situations. In Ideas II, Husserl alludes to such an external horizon of perceptual acts as their “complements of parallel apperceptions of other strata, which constitute a ‘co-givenness’ (not an actual givenness) making possible a subsequent fulfilling in actual perception” (Husserl 1990 [1952], 43).
Background noise can be present as an element of either of these horizons. In my initial description of listening to Kind of Blue, I noted that at times the background noise of cars could seem part of the heeded Object of attentive listening. (In fact, such slightly audible background noise can come to be a quite pleasant part of the intended sound-Object, “blending in,” as I stated before.) In this case, the background noise becomes an element of the internal horizon of the Object, intrinsically related and unified with the Object-as-presented in ongoing perceptual acts. On the other hand, background noise can utterly fade away, or attentive listening can be so focused or projected as to block out low-intensity background noise. That noise nevertheless subsists, even without functioning to present the Object, as the external horizon or indefinite milieu of the act of listening. To a point, the external horizon is irrelevant to the perceptual act, inasmuch as it has no presentive function. Yet, as Husserl explains, all sensory schema are indefinite capacities extending more broadly and inclusively than their focal cores. Such an understanding of external horizon would describe peripheral vision as well as the peripheral hearing involved in what I have termed ambient noise: In my living room there is an electric wall clock which ticks with each passing second; when I listen to Kind of Blue that clock ticking continues, but for the most part I am unaware of it even as background noise. As a part of the external horizon of ambient noise, it strikes my sense of hearing as a merely co-given sensory stratum.
Husserl describes the unity of the perceptual Object as ongoing, continuous concordances of perceptual presentations. A constituted perceptual Object is a special case and constructed product of the more general sensuous schema. In Husserl’s terms,
the universal
type of the constitutive thing-construction in the sphere of intuition … in its
remarkable stratification… is only a sort of continuation of an other, though
analogous, stratification … in which the sensuous schema, the lowest level of
the formation of unity now considered by us, is already constituted, for its
part, as a unity (Husserl 1990 [1952], 56).
The constitution of a unified Object of perception is founded upon an “already constituted” unity of a sensuous schema or capacity: unless one has the sensuous capacity in question, one cannot experience unified perceptual Objects through that sense. Moreover, this sensuous capacity is already a unity.
Husserl calls the continued fulfillment of potential perceptions “concordance.” There are three possibilities with respect to the unifying concordance of the “progression of ongoing experiences”: “thoroughly concordant experiences,” “partly concordant, partly discordant, experiences,” and “irreconcilable discrepancies” (Husserl 1990 [1952], 48). Thoroughly concordant experiences, as it were, continuously ratify the Object of experience. An irreconcilably discordant perception frustrates or destroys the unity of the perceptual Object and cancels out the series of horizonally related perceptual acts. Partly concordant, partly discordant experiences, or, we might say, relative discordances, present partial fulfillments and partial frustrations of the unity of the Object.
I propose that these characterizations of constitution account for the three types of noise I have distinguished so far. The “normal” sound-Object is a “thoroughly concordant experience” of the Object, in which there is no noise at all; it is an ideal or optimum condition, posited for the sake of clarifying constitution. That is, there is always a horizon of sensuous strata co-given with the data contributing to the perceptual unity of the Object. But the co-given data, always present in perception, could be experienced as mere empty horizons of sensuous strata, or as a sort of secondary unity within experience. As ambient noise, the co-given data go unnoticed, yet there can be no doubt that such data are real. As background noise, co-given data are partly concordant, partly discordant with respect to the constituted sound-Object: however pleasant or unpleasant the cars experienced as background noise may be, they are not concordant with the sound-Object ‘Kind of Blue.’ The progression of experiences continues despite the discord, at least, until some noise becomes “irreconcilable” with ‘Kind of Blue,’ such as the ‘din of my neighbor’s motorcycle.’ Thoroughly discordant experience obliterates the unity of the prior perceptual Object, giving rise to the obtrusive noise described above.
This analysis clarifies how it happens that previously unnoticed ambient noise (the ticking clock, the traffic, the whir of the motor in the ceiling fan) can become background or even obtrusive noise: as such noises come to be experienced more and more as discordant, they more and more threaten the ongoing experienced unity of the Object of perception. This clarification implies that the condition of possibility of perceiving sound-Objects is sensuous openness or susceptibility to sound as a stratum. The attentive, ongoing, progressively unifying experience of a sound-Object, or listening, is a mode of the general capacity of the sense of hearing.
The tendency of phenomenologists (especially Husserl) to focus on Objective perception, even while acknowledging non-Objective co-given data or milieu of perceptual acts, introduces difficulties for a phenomenological account of lived experience. There are two intertwined problems for phenomenology understood in this limited way: focus on Objective perception distorts by omitting from consideration the entire situation of the lived flow of experience; the Objective focus also distorts that lived flow in reflecting upon it as though it were essentially Objective.[3]
Consider again the active unifying Objective perception of ‘Kind of Blue.’ Always co-given with the music is a background (in a Gestalt sense) of noise of which I am more or less aware. Consciousness of background noise as such ranges from not-quite-obtrusive down to just-barely-noticed. Still further, I recognize reflectively that even unnoticed ambient noise is also necessarily co-given, since if there were no ambient noise no consciousness of noise could emerge.[4] The unity of Objects of perception takes place through the unity of sensuous schema. An account of the unity of non-Objective schema beyond the focal core of attention will give a final clarification to ambient noise and the emergence of background and obtrusive noise founded upon it. To make this account, I turn to Husserl’s analysis of passive synthesis.
While in active synthesis Objects are “given,” in passive synthesis there are “pregiven” “objectlike formations” (Steinbock 2001, xli). The synthesis of the realm of passivity is accounted for in terms of the motivation of sensuous strata themselves, the “allure” of certain sensuous intuitions, and affection and association of series of sensuous intuitions for what I term a hearing-Body.
The ongoing flow of sensation has a unity by way of the ongoing passive affection and association taking place as the sense of hearing. In other words, the sense of hearing is an ongoing passive affection and association, a projection of sound-receptivity, into a realm of perception. That projection is an “empty intention” anticipating “fulfillment” in subsequent perception. Similarly to the ecological notion of affordances, passive receptivity maintains a constant anticipatory openness to the horizon of a particular stratum. Ambient noise is just this horizon of sound-receptivity: a field projected by receptivity’s anticipation. Ambient noise is pre-given (but not given) in hearing as an objectlike formation of association and affection.
In contrast, background noise is available to active consciousness as a possible intentional Object, but is not necessarily taken up in that way. Background noise can be ignored. It can also be absorbed into an intentional sound-Object on the basis of its presentation of the open sound-horizon of background noise – in which case I am actively synthesizing background noise with a focal sound-Object (such as the hissing cars taken up as part of the experience ‘listening to Kind of Blue’). Noise has shifted from the stratum of passive receptivity into the stratum of “spontaneous activity of the ego” (Husserl 2001, 105) or ego-directed intentionality. Yet background noise is not attended to as a noise-Object; it is not obtrusive. Since background noise can be ignored or absorbed into an intended sound-Object, the background noise per se is not an intentional Object.
To borrow Merleau-Ponty’s terms, absorbing background noise into or blocking it out of acts of attentive listening is a “habit,” that is, a “sedimented” modulation of passive receptivity, developed through the history of one’s own experiences. It is by means of habituation that an attunement develops and gives rise to experiences of the harmonious and the discordant. The very affectivity of hearing, the very anticipatory empty intending of sound-receptivity has been modulated.
Obtrusive noise is presented to consciousness quite differently. As discussed above, the motivational synthesis of sound-receptivity projects a protentional horizon that arises along with sound-data. Every ongoing sound-reception anticipates fulfillment. When those anticipations are annulled, sense-data begin to appear “in a muddle,” and sound-reception’s “motivations would lose their force” (Husserl 2001, 152). Obtrusiveness, as rupturing, frustrating, confusing, annulling, is the definitive characteristic of “unwanted sound,” and clarifies the issue of the subjectivity of noise that bedevils audiological inquiry. Of course we find noise more obtrusive when it is “uncontrollable,” since obtrusive noise takes place as the frustration of affectively and associatively motivated anticipations of hearing. Obtrusive noise is precisely unfitting and not “right” as experienced in passive receptivity. Of course noise has non-auditory impacts, since the receptivity of hearing through which noise strikes us is an embodied, kinaesthetic orientation and projection. No hearing Body hears otherwise than as the Body it is – susceptible to and sustained by noise.
On the basis of this phenomenological interpretation of noise experience, the urgency of the environmental problem of noise can be understood in a new way. The audiological definitions of noise as a particular quantity or as “unwanted sound” fail to distinguish modes of noise experience and their significance. Obtrusive noise is the rupture of the passive synthesis of hearing, the cancellation of protentive fulfillments that give rise to sound-sense for the active ego, and an assault on the hearing-Body. As an adaptive, transcending body-subject whose experiences are sedimented in modulations or habituations of receptivity, the hearing-Body does not seem capable of absolutely or willfully preventing these habituations. The conditions of susceptibility and sustenance of the hearing-Body are already ethically significant at the level of passive synthesis; noise may be reflectively and cognitively “annoying,” but the assault of noise can never be undone. How will hearing-Bodies be sustained? How will hearing-Bodies’ susceptibility be altered? How will we choose to sustain and subject the other hearing-Bodies around us? How will all the hearing-Bodies reorient in an increasingly noisy environment? Has the environmental balance been tipped irrevocably from harmony to discord?
Works Cited
Bernet, Rudolf, et. al. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U. Press, 1993.
Evans, Gary and Elyse
Kantrowitz. “Socioeconomic Status and Health: The Potential Role of
Environmental Risk Exposure.” Annual Review of Public Health, May 2002, Vol.
23: Page 303. Available online:
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.23.112001.112349
Hartmann, William M. Signals, Sound, and Sensation. New York: Springer Verlag, 1998.
Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis and Active Synthesis. Trans. by Anthony Steinbock. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2001.
---. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Trans. by Fred Kersten. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1982.
---. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Trans. by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1990.
Lingis, Alphonso. “Sensations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 42,2 (December 1981): 160-170.
Mace, Britton, et. al. “Aesthetic, Affective, and Cognitive Effects of Noise on Natural Landscape Assessment.” Society and Natural Resources 12 (1999): 225-242.
Mangan, Bruce. “Sensation’s Ghost: The Non-Sensory ‘Fringe’ of Consciousness” Psyche 7,18 (October 2001). Available online: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v7/psyche-7-18-mangan.html
Melnick, William. “Temporary and Permanent Threshold Shift.” In Lipscomb, David M., ed. Noise and Audiology. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978: 83-108
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1986.
Serres, Michel . Genesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995.
Sokolowski, Robert. Husserlian Meditations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
Staples, Susan L. “Human Response to Environmental Noise: Psychological Research and Public Policy.” American Psychologist. 51,2 (February 1996): 143-150. online:http://gateway1.ovid.com/
Steinbock, Anthony. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis and Active Synthesis. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2001: xv-lxv.
Warren, Rik. “The Ecological Nature of Perceptual Systems,” in Carterette, Edward C. and Morton P. Friedman, Handbook of Perception. NY: Academic Press, 1978.
[1] Later in Ideas I, Husserl leaves open the possibilities of “formless stuffs and stuffless forms” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 204), but maintains that “Sensuous Data present themselves as stuffs for intentive formings, or sense-bestowings, belonging to different levels, for simple formings and formings which are founded in a peculiar manner” (Husserl 1982 [1913], 204). Furthermore, he claims hyletic data are really inherent moments of consciousness (Husserl 1982 [1913], 236f), which also suggests that hyletic Data always function presentively in intentional consciousness. How “formless stuffs” should be understood is left unexamined. (See also Bernet, Kern, and Marbach 1993, 90ff.)
[2] In eidetic phenomenological reflection on the structure of any act of hearing or listening, background noise as part of the content of that act is describable as having an essence: to wit, precisely the essence of ‘background noise as part of the content of a hearing or listening act.’ My objection is not that this eidetic analysis of background noise is impossible, but that it is incomplete, since it does not account for how it is that background noise comes to be experienced as such.
[3] The criticism suggested by Michel Serres, as noted above, is another representative example.
[4] Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the incompleteness of perceptual closure during sleep. Just as Merleau-Ponty claims complete perceptual closure would make it impossible for an alarm clock to wake anyone, a sense of hearing not always open in general to ambient noise could never experience the perceptual intrusion of noise into consciousness – the “susceptibility” and “wounding” Lingis mentions.