Musikalische Lärmbelastung im urbanen Raum: Konstruktionen der Bedeutung von Sound am Wiener Veranstaltungsort Arena

This article examines the multifaceted nature of social negotiations around sound, taking the Vienna-based venue Arena as its empirical point of departure. From a practice-theoretical perspective, I reconstruct how the same sonic source can simultaneously be framed as music, noise emission, a technical problem, and a site of political contestation. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, sound emerges as a relational constellation in which bodies, spaces, technical arrangements, legal categories, and cultural interpretations become situationally and normatively intertwined. The audience is involved as a collective resonance space and an affective co-producer of the sonic event. Particular attention is paid to practices of objectification: measurements stabilize sound as a decision-relevant entity and thereby enable forms of sound governance. This objectivity is constructed through professional routines, selective reductions, and the situational interplay of heterogeneous practices and forms of knowledge. The article argues for a sociology that addresses sound as a politically, materially, and affectively mediated problem of social ordering, and that analyses noise conflicts as expressions of social power relations and processes of negotiation.