Up until now, I never really listened to my home. Although, in hind sight, I now clearly remember the affective power that sound held throughout my childhood. I remember when I was younger, I would awake to a sudden noise in the middle of the night, or rather I had woken up because of a nightmare, only then soon to be followed by a sudden sound that lead my imagination in the darkness of the night to sore to unimaginable places. It is said that, ‘the scariest thing is one’s own imagination.’ Sounds that were in reality simply the expansion and contraction of wooden floor panels or closet doors or a neighbors footsteps, it would be these sounds that lead me too lye still with my eyes wide open in pitch darkness of my room in fear of my own imagination until I would fall asleep. It would be these sounds that would paralyze me, afraid to move, in fear of being killed or kidnapped. The house is clearly breathing and alive.
The fragility of the North American suburban architecture creates an interesting soundscape. The toothpick-like four-by-four framework and thin drywall walls, make the suburban townhouse aurally porous. Even though the visual and cultural discourse of suburbia points to the notion of extremely privatized and isolating space, the pockets of town-homes and semi-detached houses in suburbia on the contrary can also be seen, or “heard,” as a very human and communal space. The profitability of these suburban developments leads to the low cost materials used to build the rapid suburban sprawl in order to maximize profit. As a result, the thin materials become permeable to sound. The suburban landscape derives from the trend of real estate house flipping and upgrading. It is a place to quickly and safely turn a profit and climb the social class ladder. As a result, these spaces engage in and foster racialized thinking, as people flee from places considered “poor,” “bad,” and “uncivilized” to places that are understood as “rich,” “pleasant,” and “civilized.” Although the suburban landscape in visual discourse is understood as a space of racialized thinking, there are fruitful paradoxes and ironies that exist, which suggest room for hope in such urban places lake Richmond Hill or Mississauga. “Richmond Hill is a sprawling suburb where immigrants go to get away from other immigrants, but of course they end up living with all the other immigrants running away from themselves” (What We All Long For by Dionne Brand). This paradox is reverberated in the aural landscape of the suburbs. As suburban dwellers move into new “private” townhomes and semi-detached homes, life does not entirely become solitary and private. In moments of seeming silence and isolated peace, a neighbour’s life intrudes through sound. Sometimes blatant and irritating, but most of the time it can be “invisible” and become a part of the “private” soundscape, learning to ignore them.
Sound can also be identified as a socioeconomic marker, as my parents fled from loud Hip-Hop filled parking lots of an earlier neighbourhood to the now automated stereo Islamic prayers that vibrate through the bedroom walls every morning at 5am, and now again seeking new refuge from these “unpleasant” sounds. Who knows what the next sound will be.
However, there is something poetically beautiful about suburban lives bleeding through shared walls, lives traveling through sound beyond the boarders of one’s home. Sound is subversively teaching us to become more tolerant. Even though the standard of drywall and plywood are arguably weaker to our European counterparts’ standards, it may in fact be a good thing that thin walls are the standard.
