Abstract
The discourse surrounding changes in city sound experience during national lockdowns has been largely centered on silence and solitude in public spaces. When it comes to culturally shaped understandings of the absence of noise and amplified meanings of privacy during the pandemic, silence and aural isolation have become synonymous with physical safety, as well as indicators of a proper quarantine lifestyle.
This paper will examine the recalibration of the public and private sound regimes during the pandemic in the Czech Republic - the public regime manifested e.g. in absence of warning sirens tests (due to concerns that they might cause panic during the state of emergency declared by the state), and the private regime in the increased importance of the privilege of private property (private garden vs. closed public park, private study room vs. closed public library). Although pandemic soundscapes have been aestheticized as purifying, the aim of this paper is to recognize the social processes and ideas that influence the evaluation of pandemic sounds and situate the technologies of privacy-as-safety and safety-as-silence (e.g. a car as a "sound bubble" that protects from a potentially threatening sound environment - Bijsterveld, 2010) in a broader contested territory of public sound practices and unequal distribution of possibility of privacy, exteriorized in sound and its absence.