Happy New Year!

1 January 2013

Manigong Bagong Taon!

[Note to listeners: to get the intended effect please play all recordings with volume turned up as much as possible]

I should have waited a few weeks longer before I made my post about noise. Last night was the craziest sonic event I’ve ever experienced. First, though, let me back up a bit:

December 30 is Rizal Day in the Philippines. It celebrates (or mourns) the execution of Jose Rizal at the hands of the Spanish in 1896. Rizal is a quasi-religious national saint/martyr here. There weren’t really any celebrations during the day in our part of Manila but there was a big crowd down at his execution site in the Luneta in old Manila (now called Rizal Park). Later that night, though, we were awoken at 11:00pm and midnight by the sounds of firework shows comparable to a standard 4^th of July show in the U.S. When we woke up in the morning we commented on how loud all the fireworks were. What little we knew then…

All of our Filipino friends warned us about New Year’s Eve. Each year, 400 to 500 people get seriously injured by firecrackers (including many amputations) and stray bullets shot by policemen and security guards at midnight (more here, and here). Last year, the smoke from firecrackers was so much that they had to shut down the Manila international airport until the air cleared. There were several news stories leading into New Year’s Eve warning of the hazards of firecrackers and that a new crackdown was going to be in place to arrest people caught with illegal fireworks. 

Our friends warned us to secure ourselves in our apartment by 8:00pm and not to go outside after that. We went for a long evening walk through Ateneo’s campus that got us back to our apartment around 6:00pm. During our walk, we could hear intermittent explosions and firecrackers in the distance so we knew things were heating up.

            When we got back to our apartment, the festivities on our street were just beginning. Many of the neighborhood’s hundreds of small children had airhorns and mini-vuvuzelas that they played non-stop. I wondered how long they could keep going. Turns out they kept at it for over 6 hours. Anyway…fireworks were also starting in the distance. [For the remainder of this post all the recordings were taken inside our apartment with our doors and windows shut and our AC running]

            By 8:00, the horns were still going strong and the explosions were happening more and more frequently. Even though we cranked our AC to high we couldn't begin to drown out the noise. (A word about fireworks here: firecrackers seem more popular than actual fireworks. In other words, the items that people were setting off in the street were built for maximum noise, not for crazy displays of color. The explosions were so loud and powerful that I expected to see chunks of the street blown apart in the morning. Years ago we found old firecrackers up on the St. Lawrence that were now illegal because they were too big. We blew them up to see what they were like. Those fireworks were puny compared to what we heard last night).

            We somehow managed to fall asleep soon after this but were awoken by a much more intense barrage of noise. Cars were honking non-stop and now we could also hear three to four stereos blaring music. This had to be midnight, we thought. Nope, it was only 10:00pm.

            My microphone can’t capture the 360-degree barrage of noise we experienced but it begins to give you some idea (also, I didn't capture the revelry when midnight actually rolled around). At one point, we heard “Call Me Maybe” from the right and “Gangnam Style” on the left, a fitting serenade to the end of the year. One of the other songs that was played several times this evening was Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Last night, though, there were also the appropriate sound-effects to go along with the lyrics. The craziness continued until after midnight: over 6 hours of honking, explosions, and blasting music. Strangely, though, no karaoke.

Since all the buildings in Ateneo have been closed since Dec. 21, I’ve moved my office to a coffee shop on Katipunan, the busy street that is on the opposite side of campus from our apartment. When I left this morning at 8:00am to do the 25-minute walk over I saw tons of firework remains strewn throughout the streets (I forgot to bring my camera to document it). Of course, when I arrived at the coffee shop I saw that it was closed, even though when we asked yesterday they said they would be open their normal hours. So it goes.