PAREDÕES: SONIC WALLS, EMBODIED LISTENINGS, NEW TERRITORIES

Felipe Maia

The sound overwhelms me, there’s no escape. It’s useless to try and identify its source or specific form. Conversations between men and machines, men and machines cutting metal and wood, music over brown noise rusting, cracking, peaking. Everything blends together, amplified by echoes, shattered reverberation and clashing waves. It’s a garage. These two workers, Neguinho and Jean, are among the youngests. They assemble car sound systems known as paredões. The short time they’ve spent there has already taken a toll on Jean’s hearing, as he confided to me.

For those who work with paredão, hearing is a valuable asset at constant peril. Neither Neguinho or Jean protect their ears from the percuting and persistent, abrasive sound—such equipment is not mandatory. Over time, I get used to the harshness of the noise. The exception of the cacophony slowly fades into the norm, the unseen atmosphere. Sound is habitus: it manifests in a specific way in a given context, and through constant exposure, it becomes internalized, embodied, customized, and behavior responds to sound. I haven’t realized when sound stopped being noise, a nuisance, and became imperceptible, the norm, the atmosphere.

In a small room at the corner of the 300m2-facility stands China. He is the owner and founder of this garage, also known as the montadora, which stands for “the place that mounts,” as in to assemble. “He’s the one who will ‘align’ this sound,” Neguinho explains to me. China comes to the main room and positions himself in front of a newborn paredão, 5 meters away from the wall of sound. He uses a car radio plugged into the sound system. He plays a song that blasts out of the speakers. He cranks the volume to the maximum. The sound overwhelms me, there’s no escape. No one seems bothered. On the contrary, everyone watches China with admiration, as listening to him is impossible, as if it was a solemn ceremony. He starts the “alignment” of the paredão.

Paredão, a Brazilian Portuguese word, literally translates into English as “big wall.” Unlike a wall, however, the paredão is not stationary, nor does its wall-ness quality come solely from its surface. In a future-bending techno-sonic organology, the paredão can be conceived as a branch of the sound system family, defined as an autonomous and independent instrument that relies on batteries to function. More than that, the paredão is a mobile sound system, a device found in the trunks of cars or attached to a car or truck, which has become synonymous with a cultural practice that has spread throughout Brazil in recent decades¹.

A more nuanced analysis of the word reveals that the “big” aspect of a paredão relies on its sonic pungency rather than its physical grandeur. All over Brazil, paredões of different sizes, structures, and firepower can be found, generating various terms: carretinha, bob, paredinha, reboque, som. Many of these devices are capable of reaching up to 120 dB of sound pressure at a 5-meter range, equivalent to the roar of a jet engine. Paredão is a

superlative of sound. When it tunes in, the realm of high volume and sonidos sucios (Calderón, 2013; Casillas, 2015) opens up. Excessiveness is an essential trait of a paredão: its audiophile, state-of-the-art craftsmanship, its extreme high-low amplitude when playing baile funk music, its loudness. Even names point toward abundance, in this case, from the aggressive Megatron to the boastful Carreta Exibida.

To build a paredão, the workers at the China Sound garage craft speaker boxes through woodcutting, shape a structure through iron welding, assemble cables and wires and finally plug in sound speakers. But the paredão has no life until it truly speaks. That’s the alinhamento, the alignment, when the paredão and China merge into a unique sonic body (Henriques, 2011): China press play on the car radio connected to the paredão, and so it babbles, screams, shouts; China listens with his ears and skin and eyes: with the help of a microphone positioned in front of the speakers, the audio signal is translated into real-time graphs on a computer screen. China then adjusts acoustic and electrical parameters such as delay and amperage in the paredão processors (also known as preamps). His goal is to avoid sonic wave clashes while achieving the most intense sound. He comes and goes in a give and take choreography, a sum and subtract game. It’s a fine-tuning process of listening, analyzing, and tweaking. It takes a few minutes². China stops when the paredão is bound to fulfill its role: to dominate through sound, to speak.

Building a paredão is less a matter of boxing speakers in a car trunk than a complex amalgamation of techniques that encapsulates maximalism into intricate, fine-tuned structures — resulting in machines that range from USD 250 to USD 175,000. A paredão is not a bric-a-brac puzzle. On the contrary, this device relies on high-value equipment and components, and assembling them requires a garage, like ChinaSound, with workers sharing technological dexterity, ranging from electronic to electrical engineering. It’s a bricolage, but not in the sense of a disregarded, disdained perspective toward the Global South. It’s bricolage because it bends Global North paradigms toward vectors of creativity and resourcefulness unfathomed by the US-EU-Japan audio industry.

Building a paredão is less a matter of Taylorist, alienated industrialism than a complex amalgamation of embodied expertise that transcends formalization. This creation-mash encompasses high-low stances through a local and global scenario that has unfolded over the past decades: the miniaturization of technical components, the rising power of microprocessing, and the growing accessibility of electronic tools. Arising from that, the paredão becomes the cutting-edge sonic embodiment of a popular acoustemology (Feld & Brenneis, 2004) that emerges as an undeniable thread of the Latin American social fabric. It’s an aural turn, “a displacement in the power of signification and mediation of the aural in the constitution of Latin America’s public sphere” (Ochoa Gautier, 2014).

Indeed, the paredão is part of a long line of sound systems built upon sedimented practices that have been running over decades in Central and South America and the Caribbean. These sonic devices are the result of different popular takes of technical manipulation and a wide range of approaches to collective listening, the likes of quilombola’s rádio-poste (Dias, 2009) Salvador’s trios elétricos (Paulafreitas, 2006), Pará’s aparelhagens (Lemos & Castro, 2009) and Maranhão’s radiolas (Pessoa, 2009), Colombia’s picós (Birenbaum Quintero, 2018), Dominican Republic’s chipeo, Puerto Rico’s voceteo, amongst others. None of these devices exist outside of an embodied listening positioning, one historically denied to Latin America under the shadow of enlightened colonization, its progress-driven enterprise, and its oral or written canons. In fact, the paredão escapes the language sign; it exists because of the sonic signal. Blueprint templates and hand-drawn models are helpful tools for this craft, as seen on the tables covered in sawdust at ChinaSound, but listening is the essential sparkle to bring the paredão to life.

Once it leaves China’s garage and hits the narrow streets and alleys of a favela in São Paulo, blasting the scorching kicks and abrasive lines of baile funk at street parties, the paredão becomes a unique actor in a social-technical network (Latour & Guilhot, 2007) entangled by sound. It entails a sonic dialogue merging China, music producers, and partygoers. China’s expertise, he says, is the result of years of experience in building this device, an aural formation that often manifests as tacit knowledge. The paredão, however, is anything but silent. If the builder of an anechoic chamber craves precise silence—encapsulating a space where the tinkle of a pin dropping or the faintest heartbeat can be heard—the builder of a paredão craves precise anti-silence, a sound that obliterate pins and pulses of all kinds, creating an ephemeral chamber of its own. Like a wall, the paredão raises new territories through the power of a new approach to listening. The sound overwhelms; there’s no escape.

¹The first mention of automobile sonic devices in Brazil dates as far as the beginning of the XX century with so-called “musical klaxons.” Paredão, on the other hand, is a device that has become ubiquitous in Brazilian cities in the past decades entailing a decade-long dialogue with other practices such as Trio Elétricos, Trenzinhos and car tuning.

²Once, China told me about the “miracle,” as per his words, he operated in a paredão meetup: he proceeded with the alignment of a carreta, a paredão with more than 200 sound speakers, in less than ten minutes. He won the sound clash competition that day.

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