Places of “heat and noise”: sonorous presence and the interstitial time-spaces of everyday life in contemporary Beijing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Public parks in urban China have become places where elder and middle-aged city-dwellers join in varied group activities such as choral singing, plaza dancing, or traditional and revolutionary opera, to name but a few. While these places have been analyzed as a setting for a rich, everyday public life, the sonic dimension of park life has been relatively unexplored. Based on recent ethnographic accounts of encounters and performances in Beijing’s public parks, this article explores these practices as an intervention in the daily sonic order of the city, an active production of the textures of the everyday through “heat and noise” (re’nao). Using voices and technologies to perform in public, the display of sounds by parkgoers who experienced the Cultural Revolution echoes the loudness of those days while creating temporal assemblages of their own. Simultaneously, they reshape the patterns of co-presence and engagements among strangers, allowing for convivial interactions. Constitutive of the everyday, the tension between familiarity and strangeness, between routine and playfulness, is thus cultivated through “the sensorial production of the social” in ways that shape a pleasurable urban experience.