A Sonic Grammar? Listening for Persistence at a Havana Intersection

Talk by Pablo D. Herrera Veitia (Venice, IT), Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies.

Abstract

This presentation explores the possibility of outlining structures or patterns akin to a sonic grammar in urban traffic, taking as its site a specific Havana intersection in the route along which former and current Cuban post-1959 presidents travel to and from the Plaza of the Revolution. Through samples of audio recordings of traffic, it asks: What patterns might emerge in the sonic textures of a society in transformation?

The work situates itself at a critical juncture in Caribbean anthropology. As Charles Carnegie suggests, ethnographic practice has shifted from classical concerns with kinship toward what David Scott calls "the problem of the social," positioning the discipline as a tool in mending societies shaped by the plantation and slavery's aftermath. Attending to the field with our ears offers one way into this problem.

Sound studies developed adjacent frameworks, Rowland Atkinson's "sonic order," Jean-Paul Thibaud's "ambiance," Steven Feld's "acoustemology," yet none fully theorizes everyday urban sound as grammar. Vincent Battesti and Nicolas Puig's Cairo research shows that listeners orient to situations and atmospheres rather than segmenting sound into discrete units. This suggests sonic grammar may be precisely what resists formalization.

Doing anthropology at home raises a question: what should we listen for? Alejo Carpentier's Havana seen by a Cuban tourist offers one mode of estranged attention. Jacob Eriksen's prepositional listening, listening with, for, against, offers another. As an initial attempt to break through habituation, the paper presents a computational framework that tokenizes audio, testing whether discrete patterns emerge.

Yet the framework reveals elusiveness as much as pattern. The extended sonic events of motorcycles and American cars with their grafted, jury-rigged motors dominate the intersection, a texture resonating across Caribbean cities from Santiago de Cuba to Kingston to Santo Domingo. Cuba exists in a post-critical moment: everything sayable in critique of the revolution has been said. But traffic suggests something harder to articulate, not freedom, not contestation, but persistence. Life goes on, noisily, regardless. Tim Ingold writes the weather as the medium we inhabit rather than observe. Perhaps sonic persistence operates similarly, incommensurable with political frames. Whether it can be parsed into grammar remains open.