Page - 49 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Patricia Jäggi | Cosmopolitan Noises 49 signals produced something which attracted me. Through listening I was able to imagine other peoples who lived far away. There was a sense of participation and connectedness, despite the felt distance. Listening produced a cosmopolitan feeling that I was initially not able to name. After the reenactment of the listening experience, I started to select what I felt were the most interesting sounds I had recorded. From the six hours of recording, I produced a 9-minute demo-track that would give others an impression of my journey through the shortwave ether. Furthermore, I used the demo-track for a listening experiment with media and music scholars, in which they were asked to describe the eleven snippets on the Demo-Track (Soundfile 1: Demo-Track: https://soundcloud.com/user-976228230/sets/demo-track). In their descriptions of the sounds they often referred to contemporary musical effects such as distorted e-guitars, vocoder effects on voices, or compositions of electronic noise music such as those of Merzbow. In the discussion after the experiment, one scholar highlighted his astonishment about the heterogeneity of the sounds generated by the medium itself (“Eigenklang”, Papenburg 2011, 14). Some participants seemed to be as fascinated as I had been during my recording and listening sessions. Noise as an atmosphere of cosmopolitanism This second experience was able to show me that the non-human noises of the shortwave trans- mission process added a value to the listening experience of international radio. Usually, in the context of media communication, noise is seen as unwanted interruption. According to Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, noise is an external source that disturbs the transmission process and changes the informational content in an undesirable way. Noise is unwanted infor- mation because the sent message should ideally be the same as the received message (which is measured in the signal-to-noise ratio; Shannon/Weaver 1964). Through a technical lense, noise is a problem. Through the sensory perspective I applied, there was much more to that noise. Jacques Attali is one of the early figures who started to reconfigure noise. As an economist, he adds value to ‘noise’. Similarly to Shannon/Weaver, he argues that noise carries ‘new infor- mation’. But noise, for Attali, is also able to become meaningful (Attali 2006 [1977], 33): [...] noise does in fact create a meaning: first, the interruption of a message signifies the inter- diction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity: and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The repeated verb ‘signify’ here actually refers to ‘spreading an atmosphere’ as it is not an index- ical relation like the linguistic one between the word tree that signifies a tree. The interruption of a message which is perceived in noise radiates an atmosphere of interdiction, censorship, and rarity. Not only the gap that is produced by the loss of the message, but also the interrupting noise may be a factor in freeing the listener’s imagination. Building upon Attali’s valorisation of noise and thinking back to Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, noises and noise in the context of my study could be described as a human and non-human ‘atmospherisation’ of everyday experiences. Finally, looking at the connection between noise and atmosphere frees noise from its role and negative image as unwanted sound.