Review: Annoying Music in Everyday Life, by Felipe Trotta

Abstract

Annoying Music in Everyday Life is an engaging, interdisciplinary contribution to the growing body of scholarship centered on music and/as violence. Using the concept of irritating music as a jumping-off point, Felipe Trotta’s investigation encompasses questions of public and private space, value formation, taste, power, control, and otherness. Foundational sound studies texts have homed in on music’s harmful attributes and effects within specific traumatic circumstances such as torture and warfare; Trotta builds on this work and pivots toward the commonplace. He is still concerned with the power dynamics at play within musical experiences, but focuses instead on the quotidian ways in which music becomes a tool for control. Drawing from philosophy, sound studies, and qualitative ethnography, Trotta delves into the idea of “annoying music” as a synecdoche for broader social and interpersonal relationships. He adopts a wide-ranging approach to annoying music, querying its social, moral, and legal dimensions in both private and public settings. Trotta sometimes neglects to fully examine the racialized (and specifically anti-Black) components of the power discrepancies he describes, especially in his discussions of public authorities and policing. However, ultimately his multi-pronged analysis of everyday listening hierarchies is effective and convincing.Trotta’s primary intervention is his focus on “forced listening,” which emphasizes the role of the listener rather than the soundmaker. He is particularly interested in shifting vectors of agency and control intrinsic to “forced undesired music” and the power imbalance it creates (3). His exploration of undesired music brings up questions regarding not only power and control but also constructions and negotiations of taste, value judgments, and tolerance. Trotta writes that “changing the focus to the listening process allows us to unveil how music takes part in our interpersonal and collective experiences” (4). The book endeavors to untangle some of the disparate threads within the collective—yet fractured—experience of undesired music. Mapping the heterogeneity of unpleasant listening processes requires side excursions through contingent factors such as location, age, class, race, and so on. The throughline connecting these variables is, somewhat ironically, the fact that one’s relationship to undesired music is ever-evolving, neither fixed nor static. Although Trotta occasionally resorts to a victim/perpetrator binary, for the most part he adheres to his central (and crucial) argument: “The dynamic process of listening leads us to the idea that annoying music is not a static object but a relation” (4).Trotta’s inquiry into annoying music was undertaken through an interdisciplinary framework that is grounded in musicology but that integrates approaches from sociology, cultural studies, urban studies, and sound studies. A qualitative ethnographic study complements and enriches his philosophical study, which is influenced by Tia DeNora (whose Music in Everyday Life Trotta describes as his initial inspiration); Pierre Bourdieu; and formative sound studies texts by Judith Becker, Georgina Born, and others. One of the most valuable elements of Trotta’s theoretical framework is his versatility in incorporating work outside a standard English-language bibliography. He draws from Portuguese- and Spanish-language sources in his efforts at “a more diversified approach to the studies on music and sound nuisance in contemporary cities” (8). His line of thought is therefore inflected by non-Western scholars and non-anglophone sources, such as work by Ana Lidia Domínguez Ruiz and Simone Pereira de Sá. The inclusion of these sources is beyond necessary in the field of sound studies, which, despite its potential for interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, is still overwhelmingly dominated by white voices.Before embarking on his ethnographic and philosophical observations on sonic violence, Trotta elucidates his perspective on the “slippery concepts” of music, sound, and noise. Trotta is clear that he is first and foremost concerned with music and less so with sound or noise, yet he disentangles the three concepts via a Bourdieusian inquiry into value judgments and auditorial disposition. The language we use to describe certain types of music—for instance, subconsciously referring to certain genres as “noise”—is shaped by sociocultural constructions of taste. While scrutinizing these three slippery concepts, Trotta cites several of the usual suspects (Jacques Attali, Michael Heller, J. Martin Daughtry) but, refreshingly, pushes past these initial obligatory engagements. He cites Simone Pereira de Sá, whose critique of Michael Bull problematizes Bull’s concept of the “acoustic bubble” by bringing in a Latin American viewpoint. Trotta is concerned not only with delineations between music and sound but also with everyday public spaces—particularly in urban areas—and how people operate within these aural spheres.Undesired listening messies borders. The lines between the public and private spheres are inherently blurred within Trotta’s examination of undesired music in these contrasting realms. In his chapter “Private Individuals and the Music from Elsewhere,” Trotta describes the invasion of the domiciliary aural space by its nonprivate surroundings: noisy upstairs neighbors, noisy next-door neighbors, noisy neighborhood streets. In the following chapter, he touches on the sonic aspects of domestic disputes and their reverberations within both public and private places. In his discussion of private spaces being “invaded” by music from elsewhere, Trotta is informed by Georgina Born’s writing on the permeability of music, self, and space. He provides excerpts from his dozens of interviews with individuals in Brazil and Scotland; these anecdotes illustrate “the provisional construction of individuality and privacy” and the befuddlement of these constructions through music’s sublimation of boundaries (43). He and his interlocutors use language of warfare—noise as an “invasion” or “occupation” of space; music feeling like “torture” or “suffering”; sound as a “threat” to one’s personal space and even to one’s “safety”—as he probes the permeable membranes of forced listening.Trotta’s interlocutors reveal the fluidity of what constitutes “annoying music,” not only in terms of hierarchical materializations of identity and taste but also as pertaining to more immediate spatiotemporal variables. Because we exist differently in public than we do in private, Trotta argues that undesired listening can psychologically warp conceptions of the self. The rupturing of private aural space results in an invasion of individual domiciliary routine that conflates one’s interiorized existence with a broader collective. These strands of inquiry are thought provoking; Trotta’s exploration of public space is slightly reductive by comparison. In contrast to his interviewees’ scenes from domestic life, Trotta writes that “public spaces are, by definition, spaces that can be occupied by everyone” (74). This sort of sweeping declaration neglects the ableism, racism, sexism, and classism that prevents many bodies from appearing (or hearing) in public space. Overgeneralizations notwithstanding, sound studies scholarship will surely benefit from Trotta’s interrogation of listening as a site of convergence between self and other, and between private and public.Ironically, Trotta gets so bogged down in ethnographic work that he occasionally loses sight of the bigger picture. Although the interview excerpts are illuminating and frequently entertaining, I wish that the author had devoted more time to an examination of broader political assemblages. Particularly considering the transnational reach of Trotta’s study, the book lacks a thoroughly established link between hegemonic structures, agency, and perceptions of annoying music. For example, when Trotta’s interlocutor Marina complains about transgender sex workers singing karaoke outside her window at night, the transphobia, racism, and misogyny at play implicate so much more than Habermasian expressions of individual taste. These instances of “annoying music” can in fact be used to indicate the inner workings of ever-present political apparatuses. What are the overarching cultural formations that shape Marina’s negative judgment of these sounds? What is the role of the state in normalizing harsher disciplinary measures for certain bodies, such as those of the sex workers? How are these sex workers’ voices policed as a sonic extension of their “troublesome” bodies? There is so much yet to be written about the governance and regulation of sound. Although he does delve deeper into these issues in his final chapter on “otherness,” there were missed opportunities in Trotta’s presentation of qualitative research findings.The author is just as concerned with the experience of music as violence as he is with any violence that music might incur. He builds on J. Martin Daughtry’s assertion that “music territorializes space” by exploring conceptions of intentionality, taste formation, and civilization—namely, which communities are heard as “civilized” and which are heard as “uncivilized.” Trotta writes that “facing someone else’s music is never a mere confrontation between two human beings in search of their respective and contrasting rights, but a social encounter located in a very complex environment, informed and influenced by hierarchies, violence, behavioral values and feelings” (121). Sometimes he is more concerned with the construction of behavioral values than he is with dynamics of structural violence that might inform them. He often seems to be operating under the assumption that those who have “chosen” the musical ambiance are in possession of more power than those who are subjected to these sounds. Yet several of his interviewees reside in favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which Trotta describes as an “unstable terrain” rife with funk music, gunshots, and loud conflicts between police and citizens. These favelas indicate the multivalent nature of the occupation and regulation of sonic territories.Here again I come back to Trotta’s somewhat myopic view of the possible intersecting vectors of power involved in “forced musical experience.” He sometimes seems so focused on the victims of annoying music that he neglects to consider how the performance of victimhood can itself enact violence against marginalized populations, particularly people of color. He states that “music events may instigate physical violence…and even killings” (103). I wished that he had spent some time unpacking the racial motivations present in specific instances of these murders—for instance, Trotta does not allude to the killing of Jordan Davis, a Black teen who was killed at a gas station for playing loud music that his white murderer described as “rap crap.” (In fact, many of Trotta’s interlocutors talk about popular music in ways that can be construed as classist and/or racist.) Trotta describes the police as “a state force that can be trusted” in many Western countries, yet he doesn’t mention that this is a perspective held only by a privileged set of individuals (130). Despite this shortsightedness, the chapter “Sound, Music and Violence” is crucial in its expansion of the parameters of musical violence to include everyday contexts.The final chapter more fully addresses questions of otherness and the cultural distance that forms through music as an always-changing, never-static relation. Trotta zooms out from his ethnographic research, expanding his scope toward more abstract concepts like law and citizenship. Writing on culturally and legally sanctioned manifestations of “belonging” in public space, Trotta writes that “citizenship is an idea performed in daily acts that reinforce one’s belonging to a given territory and its culture, at the same time (supposedly) protected by its legal system” (174). Hierarchies of musical taste, then, inform which sounds, and therefore which voices and bodies, are accepted in the public sphere. Although Trotta’s treatment of Jürgen Habermas is enlightening, the more surprising innovation is his integration of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, and particularly her conception of distance. It is through and across distance that we delineate the self from the other. Sontag’s primary concern in Regarding the Pain of Others is the impassivity afforded by visual distance; Trotta complements and complicates Sontag’s theories by bringing in the sonic element. Again, the im/permeability of boundaries is critical when considering music as a relational index for social territories, borders, tolerance, and norms.The ideas presented in this text will surely be significant as sound studies gradually breaks free from its tethers to figures such as R. Murray Schafer and Jacques Attali. Although the book at times can feel unfocused and scattered in its scope, ultimately it serves as a much appreciated departure from white Western disciplinary conventions. Some of the weaker passages—namely those on genre, value, and taste—are balanced out by thoughtful, multidimensional sections on space, power, and violence. Trotta makes it clear that everyday undesired music is just as exemplative of overarching power relations as are Daughtry’s belliphonic sonic territories. Trotta’s refusal to cling to fixed, static arguments is generative and necessary, and his accessible prose is refreshing. Scholars across disciplines such as communication studies, urban studies, and ethno/musicology will all find relevant and prescient passages within the book’s pages. Annoying Music in Everyday Life is a compelling contribution to the field of sound studies, and useful for anyone researching negative ramifications of sound or music.