Underground Sonorities: An Ethnography of the Musicians of Buenos Aires’ Subway

Abstract

The subway of the City of Buenos Aires has as a distinctive feature the presence of hundreds of musicians who day after day compose the sound of this space. This article tries out an ethnographic exploration of these subjects in different lines, focused on the line H because it is the most recent and in which more musicians perform. Taking the contributions of critical geography and sound anthropology as interpretive tools, we discuss about the disputes that take place in the urban sound space. In this sense, the intention of the Buenos Aires’ government to modify the Contraventional Code arises as an inescapable aspect to understand the social implications of gathering the acoustic expressions of the public sphere under the concept of “annoying noises”. Subway musicians possess an informal mode of organization that overlaps the formality imposed by the State. Therefore, we consider the reform as a way in which it is intended to order these vanishing points in the sonority of the spaces.