Charles Hirschkind defines the Habitus in his piece the ethics of listening: cassette-sermon audition in contemporary Egypt as a structure of the mind and emotions characterized by a set of acquired schemata sensibilities, dispositions and taste (from wiki). In his other piece Key Words in Sound. In thinking about Burlington, VT, there are four major sites that arguably, make up the Burlington experience as a whole: Christ the King Church, the epicenter of a religious controversy; the waterfront; Church street as a major tourist hub; and Cherry Street, the site where most cannot avoid when walking through downtown Burlington, and a major city transportation hub. In thinking about the connection between Hirschkind’s two pieces, they are both helpful in informing on the matter of how to listen, and the ways in which listening is an important component of daily life.

In thinking about the Burlington Vermont Waterfront, it is worth-while to think about the relationship between sound and space. By interpreting my walk using Hirschkind, I hope to show how sounds have the agency to both create and breakdown barriers, forcing people to interact with each other and the environment in unique ways that ultimately form a community.

On this walk, I heard many individual sounds such as: the creaking hinges of the swinging benches, the laughter of children, basketballs bouncing, and the tap-tap-tap of feet as joggers ran past. Thinking about these sounds, I am reminded of Hirschkind’s writings on sound making in “Religion”, particularly the agency of sound. In my opinion, sounds that are unique to human civilization are a statement that humans are present and I think that each man-made sound has a different sense of agency. For example, the sound of the horn of the Ethan Allen tells all who can hear the horn, that it is leaving. The horn blowing is a symbol of time, and this sound has agency because time cannot be controlled. So naturally, humans understand that when we hear this horn from afar, that we will no longer be able to ride the Ferry, until it is scheduled to leave again. Another example is the sounds from the construction site. The sound of heavy machinery has agency because humans have learned that construction sites can be dangerous because of heavy machinery. Therefore, we know that we should stay away from such sites in general, but even more so when machines are being actively operated. And so, the sounds of machinery set boundaries as to where and where we cannot go. A final example is the sound of the footsteps of people either walk or running by. The sounds of these footsteps, the intensity, the frequency, the volume helps you to discern whether you should move over to make room for these people to pass by or not.

These sounds provide a sense of space that allowed me to realize my place, and the space between myself and other people, especially in an area as concentrated as the bike path. According to Hirschkind the agency of sounds such as general noise making are “practices that attune human perceptual faculties and expressive repertoires in accordance with a society’s place in a divinely ordered universe (Hirschkind, 2015:169).” I think this speaks to observations such as the sound of the horn of the Ethan Allen, the construction site, and passersby on the bike path. In my opinion, these sounds make you aware that you are in a place with other human beings who can have an impact on your life, such as: a captain who is unaware that you intended to be on his ferry, the man directing heavy machinery who cannot see you, and the runner who is running too close and too fast behind you. In this way, we become attuned through the refinements of our auditory senses (Hirschkind, 2015: 168). Sounds have the power to make you react to situations such as these and in effect, depending on what you are doing in society at a particular moment, learn how to act in (an ordered) society such as run faster to the ferry, stay out of the construction site, and, clear the path for the running coming up behind you.

Thinking about the Hirschkind piece, I think there is much to learn about the Burlington community by listening to this soundscape. Despite the drone of construction noise in the background, it was not a dominant sound. The waterfront still remained a peaceful space; and this statement can be made because of the fact that many people continue to circulate the waterfront space despite on-going active construction. I think that the portion of the Burlington community that spends time at the waterfront is generally a group of people who are very active both physically and in the outdoors. This shows how the waterfront is an integral part of Burlington, as an outside-oriented location, and that it is a part of what it means to be a part of the Burlington community.

Located just off of Church Street in Burlington is the Cherry Street bus station, a hub for the city buses that travel throughout the city and beyond. The buses themselves are a dominant feature in the Burlington soundscape, contributing their own unique sounds (engine rumbling, air brakes, signals, etc.) which can be heard in many different locations all throughout the day. Where the buses come together in downtown Burlington becomes a unique feature in the city’s soundscape as well, especially with the added factors of people, construction, and surrounding physical space.

The station’s bus stops are part of a small square of tall buildings surrounding the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and its grassy courtyard. In recent months, there has been construction on the corner of St. Paul Street and Cherry Street, the sound of which is capable of dominating the small square’s soundscape. The bone-rattling drone of this construction is inescapable for many of Burlington’s residents who rely on the city bus system and for the homeless population that frequents the area, and is often intensified by loud buses and the amplifying effect of tall buildings walling in the square.

With this rather inhospitable soundscape in mind, I later took one of the buses from the Cherry Street bus station and stayed on for the entire route while taking note of the bus’s sounds, passengers, and where passengers got off. This was the Riverside/Winooski bus, which seemed to primarily serve lower-income residents and families of Burlington and Winooski with its more popular stops being the Community Health Center and various lower-income housing complexes.

Focusing on the soundscape of these areas (the bus station, the buses themselves) has continually brought my attention to socioeconomic status. It seemed to me that socioeconomic status must greatly influences one’s listening practices, specifically because of the drone of construction and buses that I noticed people relying on city buses (often because of a lower-income status) and the homeless population were subject to and must become used to. However, this thought has been given a few adjustments after reviewing Charles’ Hirschkind’s article, “The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt,” and his discussion of the ways in which his own “exploration of the disciplinary shaping of sensory experience” (Hirschkind 624) agrees and disagrees with Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to habitus.

Bourdieu’s approach to habitus is much more grounded in a focus on economics and politics, which does not satisfy Hirschkind. Bourdieu believes that “habitus disposes individuals and collectives toward historically and culturally specific patterns of behavior consonant with, and sustaining of, existing distributions of political and economic power in society” (624). Hirschkind believes that this focus on socioeconomic power ignores the ways in which habitus is shaped by a community’s established cultural practices and ways of associating with others. He argues that “[a] habitus may outlive the material conditions that gave rise to it by renewing, reinforcing, and adapting the practices of social and individual discipline that sustain and anchor it” (625). He acknowledges the ways in which traditions continually change and are “revised as they adjust to changing sets of material condition” (625), which seems to be in accord with Bourdieu’s approach to habitus. However, he places much more emphasis on the individual and the practices within their tradition that allow them to revise and renew their “culturally valued modes of perception, appraisal, and action” (625). He argues that practices like listening to cassette-sermons “inculcate dispositions and modes of sensory experience that, rather than being determined by the ‘objective conditions’ that Bourdieu privileges as the site of historical agency, impact and alter those conditions” (625). In Hirschkind’s approach to habitus, socioeconomic factors are much less relevant than practices in cultural traditions that create and shape different ways of sensing and being.

In applying this discussion to the soundscape of the Cherry Street bus station and the buses themselves, I think it is important to note that Hirschkind’s article is a case study and has specific cultural practices and modes of sense and perception in mind. Because I was unable to actually speak to people waiting at bus stops, loitering in the courtyard across from the station, and riding buses, I couldn’t put together one shared, certain way of listening or overall sensing and perceiving. Still, this discussion leads me to believe that there is a middle ground in which one’s formation of habitus is influenced by “distributions of political and economic power in society” and by cultural practices and ways of sensing and associating that are grounded in community, which may affect their experience of political and economic power. This adds balance to the idea that socioeconomic status influences one’s listening practices and accounts for the diversity of the people I encountered around the bus station and on the buses.

By taking a closer look at the Burlington Community and what it is people enjoy doing in their free time, it is difficult to ignore Church Street as one of the more popular sites for locals, tourists, or anyone just looking to shop around. Church Street is a popular location for all ages, in addition to being pet friendly, the area caters to a variety of services such as bars, restaurants, specialty shops, clothing and jewelry stores, as well as a quaint presence of street performers. When I first moved to Burlington, the first place people suggested for me to go was Church Street, everyone claimed it was a nice place to walk around and enjoy the company of friends. Seeing as I have walked up and down Church Street thirty or more times since moving into the Burlington community, I had never really stopped to listen to what makes up the soundscape of the area.

The beginning of my soundwalk was focussed in a corner of City Hall Park, making my way through the walkways of people into the decorative little alley way which connects the park to the shops of Church Street, my ears were opened to just how much is happening around us which I normally would tune out. Referencing both of Charles’ Hirschkind’s articles “Key Words In Sound”, and “The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt”, he brings up the concept of vision as a sense which provides people with a sense of closeness to an object or another person, whereas sound he describes as being “In contrast, the phenomenology of hearing emphasized a distance and discontinuity between perceiving subject and perceived object, and thus, the non presence of the one to the other” (Hirschkind 2015, 166). Noting the idea that sound is a sense which provides people with a feeling of distance from other noises, there were many points in the Burlington soundscape research in which I found this very relevant in exploring what constitutes the habitus of Burlington. A majority of the sounds I came into contact with can be described as industrialized noises; sounds claiming the evidence of a large and active community.

A sound which everyone can hear when listening closely to the downtown soundscape is the noise of traffic; cars, busses, motorcycles, any form of transportation which people use to get around. A prevalent sound I encountered on my walk was the noise of firetruck and ambulance sirens. As I made my way to the end of Church Street, approaching the building for the First Unitarian Universalist Society, the sound I was confronted with was not the ringing of church bells or a choir, but rather the ringing of sirens accompanied by the sense of urgency as they passed me one by one. Each truck with it’s individual sirens passed me by and then proceeded to fade out into the distance. In Hirschkind’s definition of Habitus, he places a large emphasis on the aspects of how “habitus disposes individuals and collectives toward historically and culturally specific patterns of behavior consonant with, and sustaining of, existing distributions of political and economic power in society” (Hirschkind, 624). Culturally, we are oriented to become alert at the sound of sirens, to note where they are coming from, to where are they going, but once we no longer hear the noise it no longer matters.

The industrialized soundscape consisting of noises stemming from transportation and construction, may represent progress in the community to some people, but overall it represents the expansion of the community as a whole. The overwhelming presence of these man made sounds are present due to the community’s desire to provide for the increasing population. On an average day, I would say Church Street experiences at least over one hundred visitors, whether it is a shopping trip, walking your dog, or grabbing a bite to eat, there is no place on Church Street where you will encounter solidarity from the public’s sounds. Another overwhelming sound I encountered on my walk was the activity of the people themselves on Church Street. Given I am referring to a walk I recorded earlier in the semester when it was warmer out, there were children running and playing, as well as people just sprawled out among the grassy patches of City Hall Park. There were various run ins with street performers, more often than not they were musical groups or single performers drawing the attention of the passing seas of people. This is a fascinating scenario to explore in relation to Hirschkind’s perspective on Habitus; as a proper adult in society, we are conditioned not to listen to conversations we are not involved in, but in cases such as Church Street where the area is so narrow, yet the crowd is so large, it has been proven very difficult to distance yourself from the interactions of other people. In the cases of most people, they are able to tune out the overwhelming chatter, and laughter of those nearby, but now being made to examine my soundscapes in relation to Hirschkind’s ideas, it is easy to see that City Hall Park, and Church Street are both locations which can be inhabited by all, typically more oriented towards people who enjoy walking around, who also have the skill of attuning themselves to their own soundscape.

When exploring the means through which the unique auditory habitus of Burlington is formed, scholars of sound and religion will be interested to apply the theories and conceptions about that culturally constructed system of socialized interactions to the case of Christ the King Church in Ward 5 and the controversy that emerged from its traditional religious soundmaking. To analyze the effects of the Burlington habitus on the responses of Ward 5 residents to the audio-recording of the carilion that evoked such strong negative reactions amongst that population, it is important to understand first what characteristics are unique to Ward 5 as opposed to those areas previously mentioned that lead to the development of this particular habitus.

Contrasting sharply to Church Street and Cherry Street, Ward 5 of Burlington is a quiet, residential neighborhood with a larger proportion of families than college students. This is important, as the methods of listening and the subsequent responses to auditory stimuli are dramatically affected by the habitat, geographically and socially, that is occupied by the listener. As Hirschkind’s habitus relies on the socialization of its subject prior to its internalization, the situations from which it evolves will determine the structure that this system of conditioned responses will assume in a manner similar to auditory habituation. Thus, if a person is acclimatized to the raucous conditions of Church or Cherry Streets, or indeed much of the downtown Burlington area, their reciprocal reaction to auditory stimuli as intrusive noise will be decreased due to an expanded tolerance or threshold for sound. The ear is trained to be discriminatory in its attentions in a manner analogous to the process by which Hirschkind details in the formation of a habitus as a construction of the mind that serves to make sense or coordinate the reactions of the self that it inhabits. Auditory habituation is not a matter of physical restructuring of the muscles of the ear, but rather a sensory socialization that mandates the degree of response to certain sounds or decibel levels, just as habitus informs the appropriate manner of listening and reacting to auditory stimuli based on the sociocultural setting from which it evolved.

The difference in the ultimate construction of the habitus among residents of Ward 5 is observable in the proportion of noise complaints to total emergency services calls relative to other wards in Burlington. Because of the sparsity of sound that exists in this neighborhood, there is a lower rate of noise complaints. Conversely, this leads to the conclusion that the threshold of intrusive noise that the population of Ward 5 is accustomed to is dramatically lower, providing a possible reasoning for the animated negative response to Christ the King’s bellringing. Rather than becoming acquainted to the myriad swirl of invasive sounds, as residents of areas near Church Street or with high density of student housing, the virgin ears of Ward 5 have a heightened sensitivity that led to their animosity towards the intrusion of a new sound onto the general soundscape of the area. A constant state of sonic immersion at a high intensity or frequency inversely affects the tolerance to outside or background noise, allowing for the formation of a radically different means of processing sound, a variance in levels of relative disturbance in response to sonic stimuli and a distinct habitus separate from those of other wards in Burlington.

Hirschkind teaches his readers how to listen by informing the reader on the matter of how to listen. In doing so, Hirschkind demonstrates how listening is an important factor of everyday life. That said, if we stop to listen, we can learn so much about our surroundings during one moment of a particular day, of that particular month, of that particular year. By listening to a slice of time, we learn what those surrounding are and what they are not, in that unique and fleeting moment.