In a neighbourhood just outside the Périphérique of Paris a group of neighbours had organised to protest vibrations. How is that possible, I wondered as I saw their notices. Can you protest against vibrations?
I met them. They told me about these harmful vibrations. Vibrations emitted from passing trucks and buses that shook their neighbourhood. They told me they were like earthquakes, little earthquakes, but constant. They couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t work. They were worried about the “micro-stress” that these “micro-noises” emitted, about its effects on their bodies, and their houses. They were also concerned because there were no standards or regulations to articulate these concerns. They were difficult to communicate, and they often relied upon analogies or other sensory registers – but those did not quite correspond to what they felt. It was difficult to put them into words, to make them common, to sensitize others to them. Their neighbours or family members didn’t understand either. Why did they sleep in other rooms to escape vibrations from the street? Why were they tired all the time?
Were they really there?
I too lived on the street for a time. I could see and hear the trucks passing by. But I didn’t feel the earthquakes. I couldn’t experience this micro-world of vibrations.
I decided to use a contact microphone, a mic whose “piezoelectric” capabilities is sensitive to the little vibrations and oscillations, that could potentially transduce them into another sensory register: sound. The contact microphone is like a tunnel through which phenomena can be converted from one register to the other; a modulating portal from the vibratory to the audible. I taped the microphone to a window facing the street and connected it to my Zoom H1N1 recorder and waited eagerly. Sssswhoooosh. Shwooooosh. Trucks passed. Every minute, almost. Each time a truck passed, there was an indication on the display of the Zoom recorder that something had been registered. There was movement. I left it recording for 15 minutes.
But when I uploaded the recording onto my laptop to listen to the sounds of the vibrations (as they had been transduced through the microphone): nothing. But what did those registered events on the Zoom recorder mean? Was something there? Was the contact mic sensitive enough? Are we not sensitive enough? (BM)
