NOISE IN SAO PAULO (1950S-1970S): BETWEEN THE CITY-MACHINE AND THE CITY-ORGANISM.

• Author: Cardoso, Leonardo
• Position: The Sao Paulo Experiment - Brazil

I want to die in Brazil, in the city of Sao Paulo, on a very hot morning. [...] With the smell of gasoline, with factory smoke, with the noise of trams, the noise of cars, wagons, and automobiles, with the noise of voices, with the smell of people, with barks, songs, tweets, and whistles, with the sound of phonograph, with the sound of radio, bells, horns, the smell of fairs, the smell of greengrocers, all the smells and noises of life, Sao Paulo will fill the silence of death.

--Antonio de Alcantara Machado, Pathe-Baby (1926)

In 1958, the Brazilian National Standards Organization ranked Rio de Janeiro the noisiest city in the world. (1) Less than two decades later, in 1974, a group of audiologists attending the 1st Hearing Impairment Seminar in Rio stated that, out of the sixteen Latin American cities included in their survey, Sao Paulo was the noisiest. (2) Throughout the twentieth century, interest in determining Brazil's "noisiest" city informed a new way of describing and experiencing the modern metropolis. For paulistanos like Antonio de Alcantara Machado (quoted at the beginning of this article), noise was a sign of their city's commercial, industrial, and cultural vitality (3) The sounds of factory whistles, weaving looms, warehouses, automobiles, tramcars, radio devices, gramophones, Italian shoemakers, and newspaper hawkers were perceived as the sensorial (one could say visceral) manifestations of Sao Paulo's cosmopolitanism--of its unique status within Brazilian and Latin American modernity. (4) As Nelson Aprobato Filho has shown in his fascinating study of what he calls Sao Paulo's "kaleidophonic" soundscapes at the turn of the twentieth century, (5) noise embodied the idea of the modern metropolis as both stage and protagonist of novelty and excitement. It is telling that the Sao Paulo modernists named their art magazine after a typically novel, urban, and piercing sonic device. (6) Noise was at once ubiquitous and ephemeral--symbolic and concrete.

Shortly after that initial fascination with mechanical noise, some paulistanos started to suggest it would be necessary to control the din. If too little noise meant social apathy, too much of it could threaten the rest and work of city residents. This article draws on the close analysis of official documents and newspaper archives (7) to examine noise debates in Sao Paulo between the 1950s and the 1970s. I argue that three significant shifts took place during that period. First, paulistanos shifted the discussion from noise as a behavioral and localized issue to noise as an infrastructural problem. That shift was articulated mostly by a new community of engineers and acousticians and culminated with the passing of Sao Paulo's first citywide noise ordinance in 1955.

The second transformation, which starts in the 1960s, is the perception that infrastructural noise was not just a nuisance but also environmental pollution. In establishing a dystopian narrative of Sao Paulo's urban agglomeration, this period put into sharp relief two conceptions of the city: the "city-machine" praised by the moderns and the "city-organism" defended by the environmentalists on the other. The third shift relates to the steps taken by the administration's response to the public demands for environmental regulations that promoted quality of life rather than the unrestrained urban growth spurred by the city's powerful real estate market. In the 1970s, Sao Paulo implemented a more comprehensive urban planning approach, including zoning laws and noise limits.

These auditory shifts in experiencing and conceiving the city revolved around three main explanatory approaches. The first is a lack of civility. According to this view, the poor, the immigrants, the nonwhites, and the youth are not civilized enough to understand the implicit (let alone the legal) rules of urban sociality. This motive is particularly discernible in the early twentieth century when the new mechanical sounds of car honks, radio devices, and gramophones (in the streets, stores, and households) introduced new possibilities for injecting personalized sonic markers into the public space. To the chagrin of the anti-noise campaigners invested in making Sao Paulo Latin America's most modern metropolis, such a seizure of the acoustic public sphere pushed the city toward the "barbaric" rather than "civilized" end of the spectrum.

The second motive is governmental leniency. Residents continuously fail to behave in a civilized manner partly because the state continually fails to discipline them, creating a mutually reinforcing circle. The notion of impunity is apparent in different forms, including nonexistent or badly designed legislation, inefficient law enforcement, a corrupted judiciary, and a lack of staff and technology investment. One can find this reasoning back in 1934: "In poorly policed cities, the sacred rest of one's neighbor is not respected" (8); in 1955: "The lack of law enforcement generates abuses" (9); in 1976: the city is unable to handle noise complaints "due to a lack of technicians [and] the necessary amount of sound-measuring devices" (10); in 1999: "Are public services (authorized by the city) to be completed with a jackhammer working in the middle of the night, or can we treat the taxpayer with a minimum of seriousness and respect?" (11); and in 2008: "It takes [the city administration] ten minutes to answer the phone; they ask several questions, say they're going to measure [the noise level], and nothing happens after that." (12)

The third motive is infrastructural deficiencies. The noise of streetcar rails installed over irregular paving stones, faulty asphalt, bumpy streets, ungreased subway rails, traffic jams, inadequate bus and airplane routes, and ineffective urban planning all seem to contribute to Sao Paulo's cacophony. As I show below, campaigns against Sao Paulo's airport and elevated expressway have become quests for better assessment and regulation of urban infrastructure. Unlike the first two explanations, which were more accessible to the average citizen, discussions about infrastructure deficiencies are a territory in which sound specialists reign supreme. It gives them leverage to steer public officials' interest in technical solutions that require a specialized workforce--themselves.

My approach resonates with more recent efforts in sound studies to investigate auditory cultures in the Global South. If I focus almost exclusively on Sao Paulo, it is not due to indifference to other cities (such as Rio de Janeiro) but to the lack of similar studies in those places." Additionally, following this special issue's central theme, my goal is not to provide a comparative analysis to either confirm or debunk the notion of Sao Paulo as "exceptional" in the Brazilian (or the Global South) context. Instead, I am interested in how noise enabled public and private actors to experience (and experiment with) Sao Paulo according to certain forms of urbanity and citizenship.

FROM LOCALIZED NUISANCE TO INFRASTRUCTURAL PHENOMENON

In the first half of the twentieth century, paulistanos perceived urban noise as a behavioral rather than an infrastructural problem. For them, Sao Paulo was noisy not because of its administrators' laissez-faire attitude toward municipal space regulation, but thanks to the lack of civility of certain types of urbanites. Unwanted sounds were the consequence of unwanted behavior. Street vendors (many of them Afro-Brazilians and Italians), bar patrons, music store customers, and radio and gramophone listeners represented the obnoxious evidence of the city's backwardness. This moral hearing can be observed, for instance, in a 1915 newspaper quote from former councilor Jose Manuel de Azevedo Marques:

As opposed to London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Lucerne, Geneva, [...], where everything happens calmly and in relative silence, where one can have a conversation in the streets, cafes, vehicles, and offices, here the norm is to yell and kill. Only the insensitive, the ruffians (pandegos), the morons (endurecidos), and the idiots, for whom physiological functions prevail over moral ones, remain unshaken by this hubbub. (14) Intellectuals such as Azevedo Marques saw themselves at the midpoint of a civilizing process by idealizing two extremes: on the one hand, the "idiotic" residents (mostly poor and nonwhite), whose everyday noise was heard and criticized as a lower form of humanity; on the other hand, the Europeans and their silent cities, where people acted in private and public spaces with a clear sense of purpose and moral attentiveness to their surroundings. As is typical of noise complaints, the issue was not confined to the public space only. For example, a 1928 story condemned the "torturing" sounds of the radio, "which had the virtue of exacerbating the problems of its distant and archaic relative: the gramophone." The main issue for the author was not the device itself, but its "vulgar" use in music stores, "filling the city with the unbearable rumble from their loudspeaker horns." One commentator explained that wide access to radio devices, made possible thanks to new credit opportunities, put the radio "within reach of all types of people, including rude people of savage ears who enjoy music that is a racket." (15)

Residents heard traffic noise as a matter of civility as well. Between 1909 and 1920, virtually all noise-related ordinances and executive orders issued by the city were related to vehicles' acoustic signals. In response to the shift from the carriage to the automobile, the city prohibited the use of sirens (except for fire trucks and police cars), (16) high-pitched and "melodic" car honks (only those with low-pitched and monotonic sounds were allowed), and vehicles with open exhausts. (17) Middle-class paulistanos considered disturbing not only the sound of the honks but also their overuse: drivers who honked to alert pedestrians or other...