Deterring Vagrants

In traditional societies and settings, sound can take on a sacred quality—the ringing of bells, chanting, blowing of horns are all meant to invoke the gods’ passions and attentions. At the turn of the last century when the mechanical revolution turned aviators and broadcasters into secular gods, the hum and roar of industrial machinery took on this sacred aspect of noise. Power is displayed through displays of noise; sound is a conduit for whatever a culture or individuals hold as the divine.

What we can call urban white noise may not be taken as sacred, but it is held up as a fact of life to be guarded, a basic human right. When state- or city-sanctioned brash displays of noise (parades for example) occur, the intrusion in the sonic landscape is meant to draw the populace out of their safe indoor enclosures and into the streets for approved gatherings. As Jonathan Sterne wrote in Open, Muzak was developed a few decades ago in order to mimic this urban white noise, and create boundaries between the inside and outside. Now, store owners broadcast their Muzak into parking lots to claim that territory (which once was a space perfectly balanced between the public and private) as “inside.” As he states, “it takes a space that lies ambiguously between public and private and renders it as a private space.”

The main motive, he finds, was always to drive away unwanted customers and loiterers—particularly those “dangerously” aimless teenagers. He continues:

Soon after the success of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Edmonton [Canada], other downtown businesses joined together to blast Muzak in a city park to drive away ‘drug dealers and their clients. Police say drug activity has dropped dramatically.’ By the end of the year, the New York Times hailed this new use of programmed music as one of the major events of 1990. Following trial runs in western Canada, the Pacific Northwest and Los Angeles suburbs, in 1990 and 1991 Southland Corporation installed Muzak speakers in the parking lots of its 7-Eleven stores all over Canada and the United States. Soon after, the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal began using programmed music to deter loitering. By 1992, it had become a familiar tactic: A group of Cincinnati merchants is among the newest clients piping Muzak into the streets to repel teenagers and vagrants. ‘We’re trying to cut the crowds of young kids’, says Robert Howard, president of the Corryville Community Council.

Today, we can see how the evolution of this intrusion into environments that were previously sacredly quiet: a TD Canada Trust ATM at Front Street East and Jarvis Street in Toronto has committed the ultimate social and sonic violation. As reported by the CBC, what is being called “a vagrant deterrent system” was set up that would broadcast a piercing, screeching sound all through the night to keep the homeless and vagrants from using the then-unused ATM booth as a shelter. It has been sounding off for the past month, and, as the article says, “repeated attempts to nix the noise have fallen on deaf ears.”

Besides invading the private spaces of the neighbors, the “vagrant deterrent system” offends the social system by using noise to keep spaces enclosed. When once sound was used to pull people together, why are we constantly using it to keep what are thought to be “outsiders” outside?