Since the late-1970s, noise has been the number one environmental complaint in urban Taiwan at the same time that Taiwan has had a cultural heritage steeped in the celebratory noise of religious festivals. Moreover, while government records indicate that the rate of noise violations, determined by decibels, has gone down, the number of noise complaints continues to rise to record levels each year. What this suggests is that noise is not a static object but is produced in relation to the changing perceptions, measurement, and governance of noise. Drawing on over sixteen months of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at the Environmental Protection Administration in Taipei, I examine how the ever-increasing number of noise complaints are a referendum on the state’s efforts to deliver social progress and economic growth following the democratic transition. The ritualistic process of inspecting noise in Taipei, combined with the limitless possibilities of sounds that residents might hear as noise, points to sensory perception as an indomitable force in mediating citizens’ relations with the Taiwanese state.

Jennifer Hsieh is a faculty affiliate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at U-M. She examines how the human sensoria, specifically hearing and listening, are tied to geopolitical questions of citizenship and belonging and is currently completing a book project, Living with Noise: Sonic Socialities in Post-authoritarian Taiwan, that analyzes Taiwan’s noise-control system following the democratic transition from the 1980s to the present. Her work has appeared in top-tier peer-reviewed journals, including American Ethnologist, Hau, and Sound Studies Journal, and she has held research fellowships at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Vossius Center at University of Amsterdam. Dr. Hsieh received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford in 2017, her master’s from Columbia, and bachelor’s from Harvard.