Noise Underground: Transduction and Infrastructural Interference in German Deep-Shaft Coal Mines

Infrastructures built to move goods, people, and information across distance support the functioning of everyday tasks, logistical networks, and industrial lifeworlds across both the Global South and the Global North. What work does noise perform in their functioning? How does noise matter for their design? This paper suggests that noise within infrastructures elicits knowledge and alteration that it recursively eludes, but that such epistemes of representation and intervention are historically specific to the transductive chains through which noise manifests itself as interference. Working across two different historical examples, this paper compares the incommensurable ways that engineers and scientists understood and addressed the problem of noisy interferences within signaling systems engineered for communication within the deep-shaft coal mines of Germany's Ruhr in the 20th century. This comparison requires decoupling the concept of noise as an audible phenomenon from its disruptive capacity manifested as interference within the transmission of signs, two aspects of noise often conflated. More broadly, the paper proposes a heuristic of transduction as an alternative framework for STS studies of infrastructures—one that shifts attention away from their elemental components (copper, steel, concrete) toward how noise within sociotechnical systems involving energy conversions and signal transmission comes to matter.