Background

With the commercialization and popularization of active noise canceling (ANC) headphones, noise canceling technology and experience has become increasingly accessible nowadays. In urban spaces, we see pedestrians and coffee shop customers putting on noise cancelling headphones to enjoy their personal "auditory bubbles" (Bull, 2005) --- a concept coined by Michael Bull in the wake of the iPod era in early 2000s, describing a personalized, movable sound experience, which is now strengthened by the cutting edge technology of noise cancelling.

Accordingly, it is now crucial for urban sound studies to take the role of noise cancelling experiences into its analysis framework. However, as we will later explore, ambiguity in the interpretation of noise cancelling still exists in terms of its role in shaping the acoustic experience.

In this essay, I propose the concept of "negative soundscaping" as a novel angle to approach the active role of noise cancelling technology in mediating human sound experience. After reviewing the epistemological foothold for the study, and the present state of soundscape research, I will provide support for the concept by analyzing the socio-technical intentionality of noise cancelling headphones, as well as drawing insights from past empirical studies to evidence the ways in which we can actually "hear" the negative soundscape through the multi-sensory experience of walking in the city. Finally, I will discuss the aesthetic, political, and the phenomenological implications and opportunities that can be drawn from the recognition of negative soundscaping.

Mediated Geography

The humanistic geography trend in the mid-20th century is a movement that attempts to put human and human experience back to its place in the study (Cresswell, 2012). Although humanistic geography is informed by multiple philosophical and epistemological roots such as existentialism and social interactionism, phenomenology, in particular, acted as an important "rallying call" for the development of humanistic geography studies (Ash & Simpson, 2016).

Geographers informed by phenomenology investigates the geography as experienced by human, by exploring concepts such as the lifeworld (Buttimer, 1976). As such, it embraces empiricism and embodied experiences, and produces geographic knowledge that is grounded in the world of experience (Entrikin, 1976).

It is worth noting that phenomenology, in itself, is formed by complex series of debates, critiques and refutals. Critiques on the phenomenological view on geography often involved its overly subject-centered way of analysis, "relegating animals and objects to the status of mere objects" (Cresswell, 2012), and its inability to attend to the power relationships in the human-environment dynamics (Ash & Simpson, 2016). One particular shortcoming of classical phenomenology and a large part of humanistic geography is their "anti-technology" narrative, which is especially evident in interpreting the modern world increasingly embedded in environment-altering artifacts. They view science and technology as a "alienating force" for human, creating homogenized experiences and "placelessness" (Relph, 1976).

In recent years, there is a trend of reinterpreting the phenomenological ideas and practices in geography, aiming to address its problems by expanding the definition of what a experimental subject is (the "human"), as well as what counts as an empirical field (the "world") (Lea, 2009). Philosopher of science and technology Don Ihde first coined the term of postphenomenology, which moves from the subject/object model, and towards a pragmatist, interrelational phenomenology. By recognizing and positioning technology into the human-environment relational ontology, Ihde's work of Technology and the Lifeworld (Ihde, 1990) demonstrated the value of postphenomenology in explaining human experience of the environment as mediated by technology.

Informed by Ihde's works as well as poststructuralist ideology, postphenomenological geographers embraces more-than-human factors in intentionality and experience (Cresswell, 2012). They aim to understand how the perceiving subject and the perceived environment comes about through the mediation of factors such as social relationships and technological conditions (Ash & Simpson, 2016). Postphenomenological geographers also has a more romanticized view on technology interventions compared to that of classical phenomenologists. They are interested in the affective phenomenon created by the present of such interventions, instead of criticizing them for creating "inauthentic" experience of the world (Trigg, 2012).

As such, postphenomenological geography enables us to analyze the politics and aesthetics in technology mediation of environments from a more neutral manner. In this essay, we will leverage the strength of this postphenomenological perspective to discuss the active mediating role of noise cancelling headphones.

Soundscaping and Noise Control

The term soundscape was first coined by Michael Southworth, a city planner in Boston, in his 1969 paper "The Sonic Environment of Cities", where he used the term to describe how city sounds influence residents' perceptions of urban spaces and activities (Southworth, 1969). Canadian composer Murray Schafer played a pivotal role in popularizing and expanding the concept through his work in the 1970s, particularly with the World Soundscape Project and his influential book "The Tuning of the World" (Schafer, 1993).

The conceptual framework of soundscape was standardized with ISO 12913-1:2014, which defines soundscape as "acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context" (International Organization for Standardization, 2014). The standard also identifies different stages in the process of experiencing soundscapes, which includes auditory sensation, interpretation of auditory sensation, and emotional or behavioral responses. This emphasis on human experience and comprehension of sound is in contrast with acoustic environment, which represents the objective collection of all sounds at the receiver (International Organization for Standardization, 2014).

Accordingly, the practice of soundscaping is the intentional modification of acoustic environment with the aim of creating sonic experience that is functional and pleasant for people. Soundscaping goes beyond the traditional approach of noise control, which aims to suppress the absolute noise level by the decibels. Instead, it often utilizes active creation of sounds in addition to noise reduction, in order to create an acoustic environment that make functional or aesthetic sense with the other aspects of the environment. As such, soundscaping approaches adapts to different urban settings, such as creating an eventful city center, or preserving "quiet areas" for residential districts (Nusselder, 2021).

Key here is the intentionality that soundscaping exhibits through the intentional designing and engineering of acoustic environment. The act of soundscaping is often aesthetic-driven, as evidenced in the subjective "pleasantness" axis frequently used in soundscape analysis (Nusselder, 2021). At the same time, soundscaping is always value-laden, which leads to debates such as "what counts as hi-fi and lo-fi sounds?" (McCartney, 2016). These assessments is essential for our construction for the concept of negative soundscape, as created by noise cancelling technology.

Noise Cancelling Headphones as Negative Soundscaping

Ever since the emergence of personal portable listening devices like Walkmans and iPods, geographers have been examining the impact of such technology on the urban auditory experiences. Michael Bull claimed that the pedestrian's usage of iPod is creating a "privatized auditory bubble" for city walkers, which enables them the "inhabit" the placelessness in which they move across, such as the route of commute (Bull, 2005). For minorities such as the teenagers, putting headphones on can be a way to "reclaim" the public space, which is often beyond their control (Keeffe & Kerr, 2015). In recent years, the rapid development and commercialization of noise cancelling headphones (Cleer Audio, 2023) presents itself as the latest frontier of this pursue for a isolated personal sonic experience.

It appears, at this point, as if the "traditional" urban sound sources has been obscured and erased to the point of irrelevance in the placemaking process. However, in a postphenomenological way, here we recognize the active role of noise cancelling as a radical way of engaging with the urban environment --- an act of negative soundscaping. In order to evident the intentionality that is constitutive of soundscaping practices, I will analyze noise cancelling from two theoretical angles: one of multi-sensory aesthetics, and one of techno-social power distribution.

The Aesthetics in Noise Cancelling

In the times before the prevalence of noise cancelling headphones, iPod users were already aware of the aesthetic effect created by putting on headphones when moving through the city. By selecting (or intentionally not selecting) soundtracks of their liking, people ascribe personal meanings to otherwise unfocused environments. In his interviews, Bull discovered that, when listening in an urban setting, iPod users get a feeling of watching a movie or music video. The visual of the surroundings "seem to work in tandem somehow with the music", and "dramatizes things a bit" (Bull, 2005). Sociologist Jean-Paul Thibaud attributes this "aesthetization" and "spetacularization" of visual environments through personal soundtracks to the "visiophonic knot" between the listener and the urban environment (Thibaud, 2003). In this regard, the positive sound waves that is iPod users' chosen music constitutes a soundscaping element in their urban experience in a aesthetic way.

In the case of negative sound waves produced by noise cancelling headphones, however, it seems like they lacks the meaning-ascribing ability of soundtracks and music, acting only in a passive capacity to reduce the distortion of an intended acoustic environment. However, as we will later explore, by actively detecting environmental sounds and negating them, noise cancelling algorithms exhibits an aesthetic intentionality of muting the sounds created by the visible surroundings, which manifests as an practice of active acoustic experience creation.

In movies and other forms of visual storytelling, intentional silence is a common technique to create tension, convey emotions, and facilitate audience immersion (Tiwari, 2023). In analyzing what he calls the audiovisual silence in filmmaking, Torras i Segura stressed the importance of visual and musical context in shaping the meaning and symbolism behind such aesthetic silence (Torras i Segura, 2022). A scene of an arguing couple with the content of their argument muted make the audience focus on the emotional state of the character, the tension in the atmosphere, and the higher-level dramatic implication of the scene. Likewise, when we see a car whizzing by the street without a roaring sound, we do not just passively accept a lack of sonic expression from the visible environment. Instead, we hear the silence by its very absence. By actively dampening and negating the urban noise, we see the pulse of the city from a more abstract angle, which produces auditory sensations that does not exist otherwise.

In this sense, we can argue that the negative sound waves generated from the noise cancelling algorithms ascribes aesthetic choices and meanings to the visual element in the environment, just like their positive counterparts. Thus, we proposes that noise cancelling constitutes an act of soundscaping of its own right --- an act of negative soundscaping.

The Power in Noise Cancelling

The usage of noise cancelling technology in creating personal sonic experience is also significant from a techno-social standpoint. Specifically, it presents a re-distribution of power.

Noise-cancelling headphones do far more than attenuate decibels; they reorganize the very distribution of power between listener and milieu. Active noise cancelling can be read as a concrete instantiation of what Erich Hörl calls environmentality---a regime in which control is exercised not by enclosing bodies in fixed spaces, but by continuously tuning an environment around them (Hörl & Schott, 2018). It also reflects Gilles Deleuze's observation of the shift of power distribution from disciplinary "molds" to cybernetic "modulations" (Deleuze, 1992).

From this angle, Valentin Ris argues that noise cancelling headphone becomes an environmental technology---a responsive medium that redraws the subject/space relation on the fly (Ris, 2021). Inside the ear-cup, real-time algorithms capture external sound, calculate an inverse waveform, and inject it back into the micro-acoustic cavity. The result is a privatized zone of auditory governance, and what appears as silence is therefore an active signal of power: a continuous feedback loop that disciplines the sonic field without ever appearing coercive.

In sound researcher Mack Hogood's reading, this in-ear micro-politics dovetails with larger neoliberal logics of self-optimization, with noise being socially constructed and situated in hierarchies of race, class, and gender (Hagood, 2019). He claims that:

When the "normal" perception of noise is already suffused with unexamined race, class, and gender ideologies, the production and use of noise-cancelling technologies can never be neutral. (Hagood, 2019)

Marketing campaigns --- Sony's WF-1000XM series, for instance --- depict predominantly white, middle-class men who "regain control" over chaotic streets or open-plan offices the moment they activate ANC. Here noise is racialized, gendered, and spatialized as an external irritant to be neutralized, while the empowered consumer becomes a node of autonomous regulation (Ris, 2021). The headphone thus becomes a commodified infrastructure of negative soundscaping: it produces a curated, opinionated emptiness, in which the individual can work harder, rest easier, or simply feel "free".

Seen through this lens, negative soundscaping is political twice over. First, it extends the reach of auditory capitalism into sensory experience --- much as Spotify's recommendation system algorithmically sculpts the what music should be experienced (Franklin, 2023; Tofalvy & Koltai, 2023), noise cancelling sculpts what silence should sound like. Second, it naturalizes a paradigm in which responsibility for managing environmental stress is shifted from collective urban planning to personal technology consumption (Hagood, 2019). By foregrounding the intentionality in the process of creating an experience of absence, noise-cancelling headphones materialize a contemporary form of power, which makes the silence itself speak.

Implications

Political Considerations

On a political level, the concept of negative soundscaping highlights how the creation of "silence" is never neutral or apolitical. What counts as unwanted noise is often socially constructed, mapped onto existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. By privatizing silence as a consumer good, ANC technology risks reinforcing those power divisions and treating acoustic comfort as a luxury rather than a common right.

Recognizing this dynamic opens the door to critique and change -- it encourages urban planners and policymakers to value quiet as a shared urban resource, not just a premium experience for the equipped. By acknowledging the politics behind who gets to tune out city noise (and who cannot), we can also push for more inclusive participation of silence design in noise-cancelling technology, which recognizes and addresses the social positionality of noise.

Aesthetic Opputunities

In silencing parts of the city's sound palette, noise-cancelling headphones do more than subtract -- they add a new sensibility to what remains. The absence of expected noises (a honking horn, a ringing phone) becomes perceptible and meaningful -- a deliberate quieting that can heighten one's awareness of subtler sounds or visual details. This suggests that silence itself can function as an aesthetic layer, imparting its own mood and focus.

Such experiences hint at creative opportunities. Designers and artists might deliberately integrate negative soundscaping -- using active noise reduction as a real-time "audio mixing" tool (e.g. Haas et al., 2020) to shape perception. Embracing these possibilities means treating quiet not just as the void between sounds, but as a designed space in its own right.

Conclusion

Framing noise-cancelling as negative soundscaping invites a more nuanced and hopeful outlook on the future of urban sound. It acknowledges the power dynamics and ethical questions at play, yet also recognizes the potential for positive change.

Ultimately, negative soundscaping underscores that silence is not a mere absence, but a presence we create -- and in that creation lies an opportunity to reshape our cities' soundscapes with intention, to listen more carefully to both the noise and the quiet, and to harmonize the relationship between our technology, our senses, and our shared sonic experience.

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