A distinguishing feature of the landline telephone is that, in contrast to most phones in use today, it belongs first and foremost to a place. Following the last thirty years of scholarly interest in the wide-ranging implications of mobile telephony, what would happen if we were to pay similar attention to the significance of living with “place-dependent” sound technologies such as the home telephone? In this article, I draw on concepts from the fields of sound studies and science and technology studies (STS) to present the twentieth-century landline telephone as a place-dependent sound technology based on qualitative interviews with Danish landline telephone users. I emphasize several consequences of “place-dependency”: First, that the home becomes an “auditory territory” (LaBelle 2010) where zones of telephonic silence and noise are fixed but also call for continuous negotiations. The notion of territory points us towards the second consequence – that negotiations of ownership become complicated through the landline telephone’s attachment to a household rather than an individual. Third, I consider the implications of the landline telephone’s irreducibility from its surroundings, where it exists as less a solitary technology than an assemblage of the home. Here, I also pay attention to the way immobility for the landline telephone is not a stable concept but is continuously re-negotiated by its users and its own assembled materiality.
For this special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies, we invited authors to consider sound at home from a range of perspectives: sound at home as the hum of appliances, the babble of water pipes, the chatter of media, and the creaking of a wooden floor; sounds that seep in from other homes and from the world outside – traffic, music, shouting, disconcerting sounds that stand out, and sounds that go unheard in their familiarity.
This is the second special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies on the topic Sound at Home. In the original call for papers, we asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to engage with home sounds – everyday sounds such as the hum of appliances, the babble of water piping, the chatter of media or the creaking of a wooden floor; sounds that seep in from other homes and from the world outside (traffic, music, shouting, etc.); disconcerting, unfamiliar sounds of places that have become a temporary home; or sounds that go unheard in their familiarity – using a wide range of approaches and methods.