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 2 Introducing the city and its sounds Freetown sounds As I sit on my flight back to Sierra Leone from a visit to Ghana, a Nigerian trader sitting next to me starts cursing about Freetown. “This place is such a noise! When I come to Freetown I cannot hear my own thoughts.” As I tell him that I am doing a study on popular music in Freetown, he laughs at me: “So, you are studying noise.” Asking him whether the megalopolis Lagos was not much louder and noisier, he denies emphatically: “No, Lagos is different. In Lagos the noise is making sense. It is a very big city, so it has to be loud. Freetown is small, but it is so noisy.” The opinion the Nigerian trader had about the sounds of Freetown was not an exception. Most expatriates and visitors I talked to share similar perceptions. They perceive Freetown as loud and noisy. In their opinion, music is not making much a difference in Freetown’s sonic environment. Rather, music is considered to be noise itself, to add noise to the noise. A young Chinese merchant whom I visited at times in his electronics shop downtown once burst out raging: “Their music is no music. Loud tam-tam”, after which he started to simulate what he perceived to be “their music”, droning unmelodiously “bum-bum-bum-bumbum ”. In a conversation about Freetown’s music scene I had with a musically inclined Canadian NGO-worker, she connected the city’s noise to the sparse use of playing with the volume in the music she heard around town. “People here don’t know how to play with timbre and dynamics. No crescendo-decrescendocrescendo , it is just always loud. Fortissimo forever. Just like the city.” Similarly, a Frenchman, employed on a short-termed and lucrative contract by a human rights organization, remarked to me, “The music here is all just noise.” Noise is the sound of the Other, as a German saying, ascribed to Kurt Tucholsky, goes. Noise is a difficult concept to define. And as difficult a concept it is, as telling it is about the relationships of humans to the world, and to its DISCOnnections 10 sounds. In the broadest sense, the “sounds of the world” can be categorized along three lines: pleasant and wanted sounds such as music or intimate voices, unpleasant and unwanted sounds such as noise or hostile voices, and potentially neutral sounds. Besides being a counterpart to silence, noise can be understood as a sonic antipode to music. The lines of demarcation, however, are most flexible, relative and, to a decisive extent, socially- and culturally-defined. Different cultures have different ways of dealing with sounds and with the respective meanings sounds are ascribed. These differences are conveyed in, for example, the sonic components of religious rites and their respective handling of silence, sounds and, at times, noise. According to the respective religious and cultural codes of procedure, moments of silence and moments of sounds and noise can mark the difference between the sacred and the profane or between different religions as such. The liturgical practices of European Roman Catholics, for example, are structured along alternating moments of unified praying, solemn singing and devout silence. During the services of various expressions of African Christianity, on the other hand, loud music, often played on electrified instruments , is alternated with ecstatic praying and singing, as for example in Nigerian Aladura churches or in independent spiritual churches across West Africa. Sounds bring about identity, sympathy, confidence or hostility. In the search for pleasant sounds and the attempt to avoid unpleasant sounds, and in the underlying processes that define what a pleasant sound is and what an unpleasant sound is, different cultures of sound emerged. The dichotomizing and reciprocally excluding categories of music and noise, and the understanding of what music is and what noise is, of what our (non-noisy) music is and what other’s (noisy) music is, “speak” of these socio-cultural negotiations of the meanings of sound. Before delving into Freetonians’ (emic) understandings and negotiations of the meanings of (musical) sounds – whose various dimensions form the centrepiece of this book – I will first continue exploring the intriguing nature of music’s alleged counterpart: noise. The main difficulty in defining noise in a generally applicable way follows from the subjective character of its perception. What one person may perceive as noise at one moment, another person may perceive as music or pleasurable sound, while the respective perceptions may...

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