Feral frequencies
If you have been to the mountains of Rodriguez, Rizal, you may have seen signs warning of occasional “blasts” from the many quarry sites throughout the municipality. These explosions, along with the scarred landscapes and dusty roads, have become an unfortunate but familiar feature of the municipality’s landscape.
Loud sounds are hardly a novelty in the Philippine countryside. Firecrackers remain a New Year’s staple to ward off bad luck and evil spirits. Over time, neighborhoods have grown noisier. From the grainy hiss of transistor radios, neighborhoods embraced the booming Hi-Fi systems of the ’80s and ’90s. These living room sound systems, often decked out with colorful “patay-sindi” LED lights, resembling electric banderitas, were portable fiestas and public address systems rolled into one. Bass, once only heard in thunder or volcanic eruptions before subwoofers came into the picture, is now a constant presence in the modern Filipino sonosphere.
But the expansion of available frequencies and dynamic range affects more than just our environment. It reshapes the listening body. Long-term exposure to low frequencies can alter heart and respiratory function; high frequencies can impact mood, attention, and cognition. Quarry explosions often exceed 130 decibels, equivalent to a gunshot at close range, posing immediate risks to human and animal life. The audible violence extends outward, driving species from their habitats and placing immense environmental pressure on all within earshot.
In response to the sonic inflation came efforts to regulate noise levels. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources enforces ambient noise limits, based on guidelines from the National Pollution Control Commission. According to NPCC Memorandum 002, the maximum allowable daytime noise level for heavy industrial zones is 75 decibels, roughly as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
And yet, quarry blasts appear to fall outside the scope of these regulations. For instance, in a 2023 environmental performance report submitted to the DENR, Solid North Mineral Corporation claimed that “impacts are temporary, since noise will only occur for a split second during blasting and a few seconds after blasting, from falling rock fragments.”
Perhaps power has no real interest in regulating noise at all. Constant exposure to it dulls the senses, keeping citizens agitated, distracted, and easier to control. Maybe these explosions are left in the soundscape on purpose, as auditory reminders of unseen forces, designed to keep us anxious, obedient, in line.
This brings us to the question: can we isolate sound at all?
Montreal-based artist Adam Basanta’s 2015 piece, “The loudest sound in the room experienced very quietly,” reflects on these relationships between hearing and the unhearable. In this piece, a continuous feedback loop is created between a microphone, a PA system amplifier, and a speaker cone, all sealed inside a soundproof aquarium. Inside the enclosure, the sound intensity reaches up to 120 decibels, comparable to a small explosion. Though inaudible, its presence is indicated by a volume meter, offering proof of a sound we cannot hear.
Basanta’s dislocation of hearing plays off the imperial fantasy of total mastery of noise, the illusion that sound can be neatly segregated through sheer force. Yet the work teases us with the allure of an imperceptible presence. Thus, we struggle to listen more closely, more imaginatively, perhaps even on the verge of delusion. We see a different approach in Frankie Lalunio’s “Tuwing Kailan Humahagikgik Ang Kuliglig? Or: When The Cicadas Cry” (2025), featured in the show “In The Raw” curated by Dayang Yraola. Lalunio’s sounding machines hover over a corner in the exhibition space, some sticking like cicadas on the wall. Some of them are activated by light and proximity through sensors.
But what’s interesting is the porousness of kuliglig as subject, which in this work refers both to the cicada and the machine. Both the insect and the loud hand tractor fail to fit in the modern models of ambient sanitation. Lalunio lets both of them loose and allows them to merge, both acoustically and conceptually, invoking parallel yet analogous sound worlds in a curious symbio-synthetic link.
The two works explore sonic isolation through opposing strategies: Basanta seeks to control sound, Lalunio to rewild it. Yet both gesture toward a fundamental truth about how sound operates: the ear hears whether we want it to or not. Unlike the eye, which can close itself off from the world, the ear is always open, always receiving. But listening is something else entirely. It is an act of capture, of claiming. No two people hear the same sound in the same way. Every sound is permeable and impure: shaped by memory, by context, and by all the other sounds that accompany or precede it.
A harmonious relationship between sound and listener begins with accepting sound’s feral and infinitely intimate nature. There is more to noise regulation than imposing limits: there should be respect for other people’s inner sound worlds. To merely soften the impact of an explosion while continuing to expose people to the terror of blasts is absurd. The real aim should be to eliminate not just the volume, but the very need, and possibility, for such violence.
