19 December 2012
Noise
One thing we’ve
noticed about Manila is that people here have a very different sense of sonic
boundaries than in the U.S. In other words, it’s ok to be noisy.
The place where
we realize this most is in our apartment. In the U.S., it seems as though when
you are indoors, there is a clear separation between the public outside and the
private inside, especially in terms of sound. If you’re lucky, when you close
your doors and windows it’s quiet inside. Going inside is a way for you to stop
participating in the public space. There are obvious exceptions, though, when
sound is meant to penetrate these private walls, such as tornado sirens and ice
cream truck jingles.
In the
Philippines, this sense of sonic privacy seems to be different. There are many
gated communities, of course, that are just as private and quiet as in the
U.S., but these seem removed from Manila itself. Our neighborhood, on the other
hand, feels quite different. I think there are two related things that are at
work here: 1) architecture, and 2) culture.
1) Architecture: Because
of the topical climate here, most buildings in Manila do not have, nor need,
insulation. The walls of our apartment are merely cinder blocks with some
plaster over them. The windows and doors are also quite thin and some of our
windows aren’t even sealed around the edges. This means that our room is far
from soundproof. Unless we turn on our air conditioner, we can hear pretty much
everything going on outside.
In that sense, we’re experiencing a bit of what it used to
be like living here in the Philippines. Older buildings were built without
glass in their windows and had lots of open spaces for breezes to help regulate
temperature. Many older buildings in effect did not even have walls, but were more
like roofs placed on a series of columns, like covered picnic areas at State
Parks. In structures such as these, there’s no real sonic difference between
inside and outside.
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2) Culture: There
also seems to be a different sensibility here both about when, where, and what
type of noise is appropriate to make, and also about the sonic protection of
apartment walls, doors, and windows. For example, there has long been a
tradition of serenading in the Philippines. This practice, in which someone
outside calls into someone inside, breaking through their walls/doors with
noise, could be understood as invasion of privacy in some ways, especially if
someone is trying to sleep. Back in the early 1900s, dozens of American
teachers were sent out to teach in various villages throughout the Philippines.
In the various journals and reports they wrote about their experiences, many of
them complain about the numerous times they were awoken in the middle of the
night by a brass band or a group of singers outside their nipa hut. This still
goes on today. Our friend doing research down in a rural area on the island of
Siquijor has complained about groups of her friends singing to her outside her
hut at 3:00am.
Street vendors
share this notion of calling to the (private) individual inside their homes.
This is obviously a wide-spread practice throughout the world, but the many
vendors walking throughout the alleys shouting out their wares, “taho,” “daing,”
etc., are effectively going through the boundaries of walls and doors to reach
listeners inside.
Along with these
practices that explicitly disrupt any notion of sonic privacy, there is also
just lots of noise in general. During our Christmas party, for example, when
someone tried to explain the rules to a game or make a speech, others would
continue talking over/under the speaker. At movie theaters, people regularly
answer their cell phones and talk while the movie is playing. There's plenty of people playing radios or other sound systems outside. Singers and groups rehearse with their windows open. In our
neighborhood all the little children act like little children, but they also
have firecrackers, toy whistles, and other noisemakers that echo throughout the
streets and alleys. Furthermore, since the sun rises around 5:00 each morning
and the day gets hotter from there, lots of people are out and about at that
time. Fortunately, we are early risers but some of our other friends have
complained about all the dance music, parades, etc. that start as early as
5:00am.
We’ve thought
quite a lot about this topic since we are often woken up in the night by
different things. Here’s a partial list of things that have woken us up:
-children playing plastic slide whistles (party favor from
a birthday. All the kids in the neighborhood suddenly had them one day and play
them all the time).
-dogs barking (our neighbors Chihuahua is a special sort
of terror and often has long fits of barking. You can hear a few barks here).
-cats screaming/fighting
-roosters
-people shouting (this is rare)
-garbage collection at 5:00 (rings a big bell to let people
know they’re outside)
-two different parades with drummers and small marchingbands that began before 6:30am
-5:00am firework show in downtown Marikina
-vendors selling things on the street
-early morning church services (We’re next door to a big
church without walls so we can normally hear what’s going on. Lately, they’ve
been having 4:00am mass in the days leading up to Christmas, a tradition called
Simbang Gabi).
The interesting
thing about this list is that none of our local neighbors seem the slightest
bit disturbed by all this noise and many of them have even thinner walls than
we do. I’ll try to investigate this further to see if I can figure out what the
local opinions are about noise and privacy here.
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