Listening to interruptions: sonic dominance and sonic norms

ABSTRACT Interruption is a simple, recognisable, and affectively charged phenomenon. Interruption also has complex, patterned implications. In the aftermath of ethnographic investigations into music’s uses for violence, this essay seeks general principles according to which interruption does help and harm. An account of sonic normativity results, based on the principle that sound is difficult to escape. While epistemically useful, susceptibility to sound is also a vulnerability that social frames variously exploit – or protect by cultivating resilience. “Sonic interruptivity” – the propensity of sound to interrupt – gives dramatic import to styles of performing, recording, and audiencing, and provides a point of interdisciplinary convergence around which schools of thought from theatre performance praxis, culture critique, music theory, and soundscape ecology possess shared insight. Anticipating crises of interruption with rituals of interruption, performing extremes of immunity to interruption, or dominating discourses, invading niches, and projecting styles through frequent interruption, creative practitioners engage interruption as a widely understood communicative device whose very insensitivity constitutes part of its meaning. If this essay takes a normative stance, it is that students of sound should not neglect sonic interruptivity – from subtle elision to aggressive blare, the very uncouthness of interruption signals the attention it deserves.