“It is the delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” Jacques Ranciere, The Distribution of the Sensible (13).

Ranciere discusses aesthetics and politics in terms of “legibility”. Interestingly, he specifically calls out the distinction between speech and noise. He is not referencing this with a careful and specific understanding of the auditory or acoustic properties differentiating these things, but this distinction, particularly when considered in a social and spatial sense, is worth some consideration. “Noise”, after all, is fundamentally about a lack of differentiation, both in the temporal and spectral domain. What makes something “unintelligible” is not its low volume, but its lack of differentiation, its lack of identifiability as a distinct entity, as something that is recognizably separate from its context.

This can be seen in the spectrograms shown here. The first is of “white noise”, which is a specifically constructed audio signal in which all frequencies are present at equal power, and this constancy is maintained over time. Looking at the other spectrograms, different kinds of auditory objects are shown. What is useful to note is the ways in which patterning emerges, and the degree to which a hard boundary with context is established. In the example of the “beeping” sounds, the contrast between the sound object and its context is very clear, there is not much ambiguity, and this is true equally in the spectral and temporal domain. Considering that these are sounds which are designed to capture attention, and that these are contrived, mechanized pulses of energy, this is not surprising. When looking at more “organic” sounds, those incidental to the combination of speech and movement sounds, it becomes harder to pick out how different areas of energy are related – although the harmonic overtones of speech are fairly clear.

In the example of the crowd sounds, things become more complicated. Rhythmic patterning can be identified (which makes sense given that this is a demonstration), but also quite a bit of variation. These are not hard and fast entities with decisive boundaries; rather, they are tendencies or convergences. This is true both in the temporal and spectral domains. Returning to Ranciere’s offhand distinction between “speech” and “noise”, this is interesting to consider in terms of its ambiguity. There is a continuum between the individual and the collective, obviously, but also between the voice as understood to be a conveyer of language, and the voice as “noise”. Even in terms of this “noise” itself, clearly, there are gradations.

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