Click on Japan’s Dorozoku website, and a map pockmarked with clusters of orange and yellow circles will appear—each one representing a noisy resident. Invented by a work-from-home software developer in 2016, the digital map allows users to pinpoint spots of sonic disturbance, from squawking children to chatty couples. It serves as a warning to noise-phobes: Enter these zones at your peril.¹

The map is controversial in Japan, where its exposure of people’s daily hubbub is seen as an anonymous shaming ritual. But the Dorozoku platform reveals a silent frustration for unwanted sounds, a discontent that expands out to the cacophony of modernity itself—the whirring cranes that erect the skyline at 5 a.m., the grating thrum of cars whipping down the highway.

In any collective environment, there’s a conflict between the space we physically inhabit and the space we sonically inhabit. We expect, to a degree, that the two will align: that our front doors will shield us from trespassers as much as from the sound of boom cars and the neighbor’s morning school run. But any absolute boundary is impossible. Noise leaks through apartment walls, bleeds over garden fences and spools in from airplanes, traffic and construction. It undermines the very promises granted by private property: a sovereign space, a room of one’s own.

What right to silence do we have, then, if our soundscape is inevitably shared? Auditory disturbance can jeopardize health, with the World Health Organization describing it as an “underestimated threat.” But at its extreme, the dream of a silent utopia becomes a full-blown moral panic. Noise Free America, a “coalition” doing battle with noise on all fronts—from airport terminals’ Muzak to garden leaf blowers—declares so-called “noise violators” to be “criminally-minded” and intent on “pursu[ing] lawlessness.” Lurking inside every toddler there’s a potential felon. Here, the right to silence slips into the right to interpret from decibels alone, to clench the fist of social control. Noise is never received neutrally: The exaggerated revving of an engine becomes a sign of machismo, the crying of a child demonstrates a lack of parental discipline.

For the less zealous, a silent city may come with trade-offs. Enforced quiet—imposed, say, through city-wide regulations—is far from a cure-all. Not only would it limit activity and deflate the vitality of urban life, but it would inevitably shrink that third space between home and work. The street—the liminal zone of travel, meetups and play—would be reduced to quiet desolation.

Is there a resolution to the politics of noise? The dissonant tones of cityscapes tend to invoke what cultural theorist Sianne Ngai describes as “ugly feelings”—negative emotions which, in contrast to the dynamic, passionate experiences of joy or rage, assume a minor place in our philosophy of feeling. Urban noise, in particular, inspires these feelings: annoyance rather than anger, irritation rather than rage, quietly dropping pins on an online map instead of screaming at the neighbors. We can overcome our ugly feelings through noise-canceling headphones and gentle neighborly requests; but we can also do so by listening to, instead of overhearing, the texture of the city—by keeping an ear out for signs of life.