When we watch a film, we are aware that the images flickering before our eyes are not the only way information, emotions and plot cues are transmitted. If we were to only “watch” a movie, we would be missing a big aspect, one where a variety of sonic information is combined with dialogue and music score: the soundtrack.

In a similar fashion, our personal presence is not only physical and visual. We constantly carry with us a soundtrack of our own noises, inherent to our corporeity and existence. This soundtrack is both determined and influenced by our physiological traits, personal habits, performative inflections, tastes and even our clothing.

A person with long nails accentuates each action of their fingers with subtle ticks. Someone wearing high heels builds a pathway of reverberant, percussive steps. In a train, a commuter tries not to fall asleep because the idea of snoring in public embarrasses him. A worker that uses an intercom feeds her environment with beeps and low resolution utterances.

These are examples of different personal soundtracks, distinctive sound traces that are as important to our existence as our visual and corporal presence are. We can categorize the sounds of our soundtrack into four groups: organic sounds, internal sounds, sounding items and performative sound gestures.

Breaths, blowing noses, clearing throats, sneezes. Organic sounds come from events that originate inside our complex bodies. They also serve both as existence marks and voluntary signals, like a person clearing their throat to make their presence evident. The intrinsic connection between the production of these sounds and our bodies, particularly our speech apparatuses, make them personal identity marks: your sneeze sounds like yours because it resonates in your bones and your speech apparatus, and you may voluntarily choose to suppress it depending on the circumstances.

Moreover, the body also emits internal sounds of a much lesser intensity, like abdominal/bowel sounds and heartbeats, that can only be listened to in moments of great intimacy and sonic attention. Similarly, inside our inner ear, otoacoustic emissions happen, which are generally understood as echoes of the correct functioning of the cochlear amplifier. These emissions are very soft sounds - normally unperceivable, with a loudness of up to 10 db SPL. The fact that they appear naturally in the hearing process shows that the generation of sounds is inherent to our existence and our perception. Composer Maryanne Amacher is known for having used a variation of this phenomenon in her compositions, working with so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emissions,” which are generated by the wobbling of two pure tones juxtaposed at similar frequencies. One such example is her piece Chorale 1, in which the combination of raw electronic tones generate a third “voice”, entirely created by our ears. According to the composer herself, the higher the volume, the more noticeable the effect will be. We can also take John Cage’s recollection of his visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber as an example. In the chamber, the composer was able to hear his nervous and cardiovascular systems at work. Although his perception was later contested by medical specialists, Cage’s story indicates that we could add even more components to the soundtrack of internal sounds - a priori, silent in normal conditions.

Some accessories and clothing items bring with them characteristic sounds: The rattling of pendants, the rubbing of certain types of cloth, the beat of leather boots. Our personal choices on visual aesthetics are also sound choices. From the moment we choose to use a garment or accessory that has its own sonority, we are incorporating it to our score, as if it were another foley effect.

Lastly, we also can include small performative sound gestures in our personal score. These are present in some people: singing back an earworm, playing a rhythm with our fingers to mitigate boredom and anxiety, or speaking out loud are just a few ways in which we voluntarily generate sound and occupy an “acoustic space.”

These mentioned groupings function as a tentative categorization of the components of the personal soundtrack, in the same way that a soundtrack of a movie or visual piece has several layers: Foley, score, SFX, etc. Another distinction could be made: some sounds of our soundtrack are temporary (noisy accessories like chains or fake nails), while others are permanent (eg, I have poor breathing so I blow my nose frequently).

Steph Ceraso’s multimodal listening framework - according to which the listening act “moves away from ear-centric approaches to sonic engagement and, instead, treats sonic experience as holistic and immersive” - can be useful to understand and reflect on personal soundtracks, both ours and of the people around us. In Ceraso’s work, there is a distinction between two terms: “listening to” and “earing.” If “earing” is the total attention to the reception of a specific audible message (such as the spoken word), “listening to” includes a wider openness to the sonic world and allows for “distractions,” thus connecting with how sound interacts in an integral way with the environment and with human senses and emotions. Working within this assumption, if we were to “ear” a person, we would receive their sound in a clear and direct way without distraction as if we were receiving instructions or orders. Instead, if we are “listening to” them, we generate an open, multidimensional channel, inside which we would notice the other sounds of their soundtrack: the pace of their breathing, mouth noises, laughter and the sound of their characteristic objects, alongside non verbal and paralingual cues like voice volume, speech speed and other linguistic events. In the same vein, if you hear yourself in a recording, you will probably notice sounds that our mind normally filters out: uhms, aahs, pops and clicks.

Nevertheless, the personal score can occasionally be disciplined or repressed. The volume control of our personal sounds starts to be enforced at infancy by our caregivers; we monitor our snoring volume with apps, try to moan softer if our neighbors are home, and need to laugh lower if somebody is sleeping in the house. Similarly, we might try to reduce our sound footprint if we are walking late at night in an unknown area. From the appearance of silent wagons on transit systems around the world, to the “Business for Diplomatic Action” consortium’s world citizen guide (a document appealing to American businessmen, encouraging them to speak less and more softly when traveling abroad), the volume of our personal score can even be observed through the lens of respective national identity. Our sound emission is variable and might be modified consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes, it’s not the time or place to sound.

The personal soundtrack can also have an interpersonal dimension: The score of sounds a person brings with them can interact in different ways with the sounds of others. A person that is overly conscious of the volume of their sounds might feel overwhelmed by the louder noises of someone that doesn’t have that qualm. On the other hand, a tacit agreement between different types and levels of sounds among a group can be achieved. The sonic signatures of individuals and groups intertwine to generate a new, combined sound scene, and we find that the score of laughter, non-verbal assenting sounds and breaths can favor or undermine the emergence of empathy, rapport or trust between individuals.

I have an unconscious habit of generating sounds and mini-musics around me: hitting the edge of the table, blowing bottles, rubbing glasses to make them vibrate. According to my dad, my grandfather, whom I’ve never met, did the same. This restless and playful sound score links me back unintentionally, to a relative I’ve never known. The personal soundtrack can serve as a sound and music heritage that encompasses and connects family, even between members that have never met.

If we know that our repertoire of sounds is a part of us and that it can be the result of many factors and circumstances, one can start to reflect: What is your soundtrack and what does it say about your story and habits? Do you modify it according to context or do you always let it flow naturally? Similar to the soundtrack of a movie, our sounds are part of our narrative, aesthetics and personality. Noticing and investigating them can contribute to further comprehending sound as a phenomenon subject to personal, social and interpersonal dynamics.