Noise Pollution and Ethnography: A proposal for inventive methods

In this presentation, I discussed the possible methods that can be utilised in an ethnographic study on noise pollution as invisible harm, an environmental issue in urban areas. Qualitative approaches to invisible crimes and social harms have focused mainly on the visual. To overcome this ocularcentrism and to underline the seriousness of noise as pollutant as it is experienced in everyday life prompt us to consider the ontological vitality of sound on the one hand, and the hyper-circulation of noise in the city, on the other. Inspired by a set of ‘sound effects’ defined by Augoyard and Torgue in grasping the experience of the sound environment, I suggested that interdisciplinary methods (including but not limited to field recordings, sonic elicitation, and sound walking) tailored to the contemporary conceptualisation of noise capture well the different dimensions of the problem: from criminological to affective and aesthetic.