In discussions of noise pollution, the detrimental ecological effects of modes of transportation tend to be projected onto their sounds: noise becomes harmful by virtue of its proximity to air pollution. Marina Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles, by contrast, hones in “on noise itself, finding it a means of tracing atmospheric matters” (12). Taking as her point of focus the noise of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Peterson draws on archival materials, photographs, audio recordings, and testimonials to trace the ways that “the sounds of the sky shapes neighbourhoods and lives” (1). As “an unintended effect of infrastructure that makes it possible for humans to move from ground to air” (12), the noise of Los Angeles’ airport functions as a structuring force that is palpable through its effects.

Petersen’s opening pages outline the book’s theoretical and methodological stakes, offering a preliminary definition of three key concepts: the atmospheric, noise, and listening. For Peterson, the atmospheric “emerges as a quality coalescing across multiple registers: that of the arial and the ephemeral, dynamic relationships between forms of matter, and the indeterminacy of forms and concepts” (5). In Peterson’s account, noise “proliferates into an array of atmospheric forms. Attuning toward noise is thus also an attuning toward the atmospheric” (4). Noise is approached primarily as an ethnographic concern. Drawing on Steven Feld’s notion of acoustemology, Peterson describes the book as a “sonic ethnography of how people (and some technologies) listen” (7): it concerns listening with others, including residents living in close proximity to flight paths, acoustical engineers, legislators, and airport environmental staff, and interrogating how they listen to and with the aural by-products of the air travel.

The book’s six chapters deal with various articulations, framings, and encounters with the atmospheric noise of LAX, weaving together histories of architecture and community activism, governmental hearings, acoustical engineering research, urban planning and philosophical reflections on sound, sensation, and materiality. Chapter One examines the intersection of air and ground through listening, covering various U.S. congressional hearings and legal cases concerning aircraft noise in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning in 1959, with the first transcontinental commercial jet flight from Los Angeles International Airport, the chapter addresses how residents living close perceived and responded to the introduction and intensification of atmospheric noise. Experiences of airport noise mobilised residents, leading them to create civic groups, lobby officials and bring lawsuits against the airport and the city. Yet the ephemerality of noise made it difficult for the residents to achieve juridical solutions: “experience” is considered “an unreliable form of evidence, as neither noise nor its effects appear to last” (21). The noise of the airport therefore opened up a struggle “between experience on the one hand and law on the other” (22).

Chapter Two addresses the relationship between noise and annoyance, and with it, the relationship between perception and inscription, listening and measurement, while Chapter Three traces the shift in noise as nuisance to noise as pollution. Emerging in the 1960s as an environmental concern, the notion of noise pollution marks a transition where noise goes from being an issue relating to particular sources and perpetrators to “a dispersed, undefined, atmospheric condition” (78). Taken together, these two chapters offer an insightful overview in how concepts of noise have transformed with changing legislation, emerging environmental concerns, ideas of privacy and control, and acoustic research.

Chapter Four marks a shift in writing style, consisting of a series of short pieces. Petersen describes these as “the physicality of the ephemeral that emerges in the productive gaps between the bases of establishing what noise is and what is excluded from noise and its control, what nonetheless continues to resonate, meaningful as its other” (17). I found the final fragment, on a 1974 kite flying competition organised by mothers who were tired of the airplane noise at their children’s school, to be particularly engaging.

As noise became environmental, architectural solutions were found to protect against it and control its audibility within the home. Chapter Five explores the adoption of residential soundproofing as a means of ameliorating noise for those living or attending school near the airport. In this context, noise becomes attached to different notions of materiality. Not only does soundproofing mark the possibility of separating off the inside from outside, it also constitutes the disarticulation of sound from air: “in closing the home from sound, air had to be brought inside by other means” (148).

The final chapter turns to consider the “indefinite urbanism” referred to in the book’s title, tracing the transformation of neighbourhoods into “infrastructural edge spaces” that are now inhabited by an endangered species of butterfly. Peterson identifies key moments of instability, uncertainty and flux in the neighbourhoods that found themselves in LAX’s flight paths, covering the violent eviction of residents so their house could be bulldozed to make way for the airport, racial desegregation, and the rezoning of neighbourhoods. Today, the seemingly “empty” spaces resulting from the airport’s attempts to mitigate noise by purchasing land under flight paths are home to El Segundo blue butterflies, which feed on the buckwheat plant. Drawing on discourses about human-inhuman encounters and interspecies entanglements, Peterson posits that “the butterflies compose a volumetric city of another scale” (184).

Atmospheric Noise is a rich and complex interrogation of urban noise, and there is much to engage readers interested in sonic philosophy, auditory culture, and histories of acoustics. However, the “compositional” form of the book, with which chapters move swiftly between different topics, concepts, and perspectives, is likely to make it a challenging read for some. Likewise, it is seemingly assumed that the reader has some degree of familiarity with critical and philosophical literature: much theoretical and conceptual terminology is mentioned in passing, rather than explained, unpacked, and applied. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to follow the connections between the book’s philosophical and theoretical components, and its historical and ethnographic details. Nonetheless, Atmospheric Noise offers an original account of how the sounds of Los Angeles airport came to shape lives, neighbourhoods, and the urban environment.