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5 min readWhen did it become OK to blast TikToks in public?
Manuela López Restrepo, a writer and producer at NPR's All Things Considered, came to It's Been a Minute with a specific gripe: someone on her morning commute pulls out a phone and starts watching short-form videos on speaker, forcing everyone nearby into "the disgusting murky depths of their personal algorithm." Host Brittany Luce had her own version of the story—a person in her 70s blasting videos behind her at an airport. The annoyance is everywhere: restaurants, doctor's waiting rooms, grocery stores. But what starts as a petty complaint opens onto a much larger question about how noise works in American life, who gets to decide what counts as noise, and what happens when the loudest noises are no longer human at all.
The soundscape and its history
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Opening: The Public TikTok Grievance** - Host Brittany Luce and guest Manuela Lopez Restrepo (writer/producer at All Things Considered) introduce the episode's complaint: people blasting short-form videos on speaker in public spaces like trains, airports, and restaurants.
- 2 (03:33) **The Soundscape Concept and Historical Context** - Architecture critic Kate Wagner introduces the concept of "soundscape," pioneered by composer R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s, and art historian Niall Atkinson explains how pre-industrial sound carried meaningful information.
- 3 (05:00) **Industrial Noise and Its Physical/Emotional Toll** - The conversation shifts to the primary source of urban noise pollution—cars—and the widespread damage noise inflicts on hearing and mental health.
- 4 (06:18) **The Politics of Noise and the Social Contract** - Wagner explains that distinguishing "natural" urban sounds from "noise" is politicized, and Niall Atkinson warns that creating quiet spaces can reinforce segregation.
- 5 (07:43) **Gentrification and the Weaponization of Quiet** - Writer Sochal Gonzalez (The Atlantic) describes how a preference for quiet became associated with upper-classness, and how gentrification exported this demand into public spaces.
- 6 (13:10) **Gentrification's Impact on Joyful Noise** - Brittany and Manuela connect the demand for quiet to the loss of community gatherings and the "suburbanization of the urban."
- 7 (14:44) **Case Study: Ginger's Bar and Historical Noise Policing** - The discussion turns to Ginger's, a historic lesbian bar in NYC, which canceled Pride DJ events due to noise complaints, and the history of organized noise suppression.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
It’s a now-common scenario: you’re using public transit, or waiting at the airport, or dining in a restaurant, when you hear the tinny music and computerized voice-overs of someone scrolling TikTok – no headphones. This aggravated All Things Considered producer and writer Manuela López Restrepo enough to look into it. And what she found was a rich history of how public noise works in our culture: who is allowed to make (or avoid it), who gets punished – and the companies that seem to get off scot-free.
Manuela shares her reporting with Brittany and they dive deep into the politics and policy of noise.
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