A common element of annoyance is its repetitive nature even though some people are sensitive to the noise of a passing tractor, a lawn-mower or a chain-saw. “People have learned to identify particular properties in sounds which fuel their annoyance by making connections between different types of sounds and different occurrences. It is precisely the spread of phenomena in time, their repetition, which makes it possible to highlight the difference between them. But the perceptive properties of sound do not define it completely, the context of perception is also important on several levels. Individuals are more sensitive to noise at night, for example. There is also the wider context that a noise is placed in and where its amplitude can vary from an interpersonal level to creating societal challenges. For example, several people encountered during the study directly associate the noise from aircraft and tensions between communities in Belgium (in the case of Brussels- National Airport)”, explains Paul Louis Colon.

A persistent and painful noise

By identifying this noise and feeling disturbed by it, the person then experiences real suffering. As highlighted by a woman who was questioned by the author: “It is pain but it is not acute pain, it is silent and continuous. It is not even pain, it is a kind of annoyance, something that irks you and that you have to live with like a kind of arthrosis, rheumatism or something of the sort which you can’t get rid of ”. This is even more true because as Paul-Louis Colon points out, “when confronted by noise, people find themselves in the position of being more and more affected by it without being able to act”. Confronted by noise disturbance, some people use defense techniques such as listening to music, generally louder than the noise thus creating a kind of “mask effect” which attenuates the source of the noise or strategies of avoidance consisting in organizing their activities and their occupation of domestic spaces according to the different ways the noises appear. In addition to the negative consequences that these annoyances produce on the emotional state and health of the people who experience them, we also notice that they suffer from what the author calls “the difficulty of being heard”. Firstly, because they have difficulty expressing in words the annoyance that they are feeling; secondly, because they notice that their problem is often treated from the perspective of acoustic levels. Although the levels that are measured are those which respond to the norms being applied, the problem is minimized or even denied. “These levels do not take account of many situations of annoyance”. The interest of an ethnographic approach, in contrast with meticulous surveys by means of questionnaires, for example, is that it makes it possible to go beyond the identification of factors which influence annoyance, showing how these combine in the noise situation, and how this situation can develop in the long term. From this perspective, the determinism of the different factors no longer appears unequivocal. Their respective influences can vary over time and their significance can be reinterpreted. The individual being disturbed is not passive in relation to their disturbance: they try to understand it, to keep it at a distance, get around it and in this way regain a certain mastery of their environment.