Every summer and winter, around the world, American tourists return home accused of the same crime: being loud.
As an American who has lived in Europe, I have found myself complicit. I have caught myself quieting my animated speech, thinking, “They’re going to think I’m one of them.” My own acquaintances have half-jokingly admitted, “I sound like an American,” when they get loud with excitement. But I noticed something else. The same label of “loud” and “noisy” is directed at immigrants or those whose ethnicity is not that of the majority. The observation about my fellow Americans became a window into a more profound question.
What if “loud” is another word for “foreign,” a perception not of decibels but of difference? What if “noise” is simply how the sounds of unfamiliar languages and cultures are perceived?
What we consider loud is subjective; it is a social and cultural judgment tuned to our perceptions. Consider these two contexts: the cacophony of a bustling open-air market in Rome and the chatter of a busy office in Midtown Manhattan. One is a symphony of commerce with the calls of vendors, sounds of customer bargaining, and plastic bags rustling, while the other is an ambient hum of productivity with the hushed phone calls, keyboard clicks, and squeaking office chairs. Both are relatively loud environments, yet to those within them they are just the typical and sweet sounds of everyday life.
Now, imagine the Roman market sound is relocated into the American office. Suddenly, those sounds of commerce would be deemed noisy and a source of irritation and unprofessionalism. The sounds are the same, but the context has shifted and so has our perception. What was consonant in one context was dissonant in the other.
This is the politics of sound. Our ears are not neutral. Ears flag sounds that are out-of–place and amplify them while drowning out familiar sounds. This instinctive discernment and judgment is how ears begin to demarcate exclusion and inclusion. There is a discriminatory side to this as our ears draw borders of marginality and centrality, separating what belongs and what does not. When we hear and listen, we play a game of “odd one out.” Sound is an overlooked dimension of what we consider when we think of bias.
As scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever details in her book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, racism is heard as well as seen. Loudness in racist stereotypes has long been associated as an innate character trait in people of color to link them to being disruptive, excessive, or overbearing. While American tourists may get some stares or raised eyebrows for their “loudness,” people of color in the United States are policed and arrested for the “Black noise” and loudness they make. Like the Roman market and New York office, loudness comes with vastly different repercussions and interpretations based on context. Listening can be deeply political, and reflecting on the loud American tourist stereotype is a window into deeper relations of how we feel, see, and ultimately hear social taxonomies and hierarchies.
In a continuum of hearing race and nationality, the logic that allows for the hearing of American whiteness also allows for the hearing of color. Despite our claims to have moved forward as a society that doesn’t see color, have we moved past hearing it?
Of course, this is not to say Americans are never “loud.” I have encountered Americans abroad in great volume, in both density and decibels. Tourism itself is a loud pursuit. Tourists’ awe and excitement often cannot be contained when people are faced with wonders of the world. A lack of cultural awareness often leads to unadjusted, ethnocentric, and inappropriate behavior.
So, are Americans really loud? Perhaps at times. But maybe what we are also hearing is something larger, louder, even — the volume of a nation that never stops talking.
The perceived loudness of Americans is rooted in a broader narrative of global dominance and disruption. The United States sounds at a cultural and political frequency, a constant, buzzing presence reverberating across global news cycles, pop culture, social media, and global public discourse. Many people in other countries closely follow news about the United States. Our “noise” saturates headlines in a constant, blaring drone of our country’s inner political turmoil, global trade tariffs, and presidential tweets. The United States is the most frequently mentioned country in news sites worldwide. Before even opening their mouths, American tourists have already been heard as echoes of a nation dominating the conversation. Being loud is making more sound than is needed. Ears around the world are already listening to America at full volume, and anything more could only seem excessive.
This illuminates just two examples of what is revealed when we use our ears to understand our world more deeply and intimately: how ears are instruments of bias and how they reveal the “sound of geopolitics.”
Now, the real question is: are Americans loud or is America loud?
Julianne Tai is a visiting graduate student in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
