In Pursuit of Silence (13 page)

Shopping and noise have been associated since the first shill hawked his wares. In ancient bazaars (and a number of modern-day souks) salesmen shouted out the nature, quality, and prices of their goods; the loudest voice promising the best bargains often drew the biggest crowd. It’s basic, big-lung competition. But except for a few connoisseurs of street noises (such as Irving Howe, who wrote approvingly in
World of Our Fathers
of markets where you could
“relax in the noise of familiars”
), the loudness of the scene was not itself a draw. Newspapers describing the peddler trade in early-twentieth-century New York almost invariably
attach the adjective “noisy” to this form of commercial activity—in close conjunction with “aromatic,” “unsightly,” and “dirty.” When Mrs. Isaac Rice, who founded America’s first society to fight noise pollution, took a trip down to the Lower East Side in 1908 to hear the
“unnecessary rackets
in that section,” she pronounced it the “saddest place” she had ever visited. To end the “noises made by the hucksters” she proposed that residents of the tenement houses “display different colored cards to indicate the peddlers they wanted to buy from. A red card could attract the vegetable vendor, a yellow card, the fruit man, and other colors other tradesmen.” Through this means she hoped to minimize noise in neighborhoods where people were already condemned to insufficient sleep “owing to their long toil.” A few decades later, most people applauded Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to eliminate pushcarts—in part because it meant confining the noise of commerce to the new indoor markets the mayor had built. And when a
New York Times
article in January 1940 reported on the belated closing of the East Side pushcart market, it noted that
“only a few sentimental
New Yorkers” regretted the fact that Orchard Street, Hester Street, and Rivington Street would no longer “resound to the raucous cries” of “bull-voiced peddlers.” Still, the clamor of the pushcarts was not the thunder of Abercrombie & Fitch. I decided to contact A&F to ask them about their sound strategy.

Unfortunately, my questions made “corporate” fall suddenly as silent as Trappist monks after compline. But eventually I discovered DMX, the sound-design company responsible for implementing A&F’s auditory will. Leanne Flask, an executive with DMX, invited me to Austin, where the company is headquartered,
to discuss the thinking behind Abercrombie & Fitch’s acoustics, and to give me a tour of the mall.

Flask is a stylish blonde with a big, apprehensive smile. The day I met her, her right arm was encased in a lavender-colored cast, the result of a volleyball disaster. As we drove to Barton Creek Square, Flask told me that DMX had started out in the mid-1970s marketing an uninterrupted music service that was beamed into stores by satellite. Music design for retail was then in its infancy: most providers, Flask explained, took the approach that just throwing on a CD did the trick. “You would have a store selling teen ballet slippers playing classic rock.” There was a complete disconnect between product aura and store sound.

Today, the DMX Web site describes the company as “an international leader in multi-sensory branding” that enables clients to express their brand’s “unique personality and create an unmistakable identity.” These days, Flask explained, acoustical branding is much more than a matter of loading up an iPod for a client. “We hand-design how every single sound flows from song to song seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.” DMX provides clients with “mood, energy, texture.” In her experience it was incredibly difficult for people to grasp that these elements had no connection to the most popular artist or the most popular song. What was it about then? I asked. “It’s all about connection.” She swung into a parking place in the mostly deserted mall lot and dug in her cowhide-pattern purse for a pair of sunglasses. “I’ve lived my whole life in music. I love what I do.” She looked up at me. “This power to heal and connect and bring people together who otherwise wouldn’t be … That’s amazing.”

As Flask and I began to loop the store, she hollered the odd factoid above the din. Pointing to a set of cellblock-like dressing rooms, she explained that though it sounded here as though the music had been cranked louder, it was just due to the fact that the dressing rooms lacked the stacks of clothing that provided a measure of sound absorption. I stopped to write a note, whereupon a young girl twitched up out of nowhere to ask if she could help us, then jiggled swiftly away when we shook our heads. Flask aimed a finger after her. “She thinks we’re managers reviewing the store and she’s freaking out. If you ever want to torment the people working in an Abercrombie & Fitch store, just come in with a little notebook writing things down.” We started moving again. Flask yelled a few more insights in my direction. I gestured helplessly toward my ears; her remarks had been entirely drowned out. She started to shout louder, then gave up.

At last we staggered back out of the gates of the store to a position far enough away that we could hear each other without screaming. She glanced back at the storefront. A sympathetic human weariness passed across her features. “Everything’s very dark inside. So they use the music to make it lighter.” I nodded encouragingly and she gathered steam. “So all the music—everything’s like very, very uplift-y. It’s like—I’m going to start my day in a club!” She adopted the expression of someone being ecstatically strangled. “That’s a branding tactic.”

When DMX got the Abercrombie & Fitch contract, corporate management told her that the store “needs to feel like a place where everyone’s having fun
all the time
. A happy place
with a positive, happy feeling. Like a party. So for us, we have to be careful. Because there’s a feeling they want you to express and it’s not what they’ve done with the visual design. I have to look at what they already have and figure out how I can make it feel like an upbeat, uplift-y, happy, positive place when everything’s really
dark
. So I’m going to have to go to extremes of happy and energetic.” She looked back once more at the vibrating blackness.

While Abercrombie & Fitch technically targets fifteen-to twenty-eight-year-olds, Flask believes it’s really going after the college freshman and those who idealize the freshman lifestyle. “It’s the mentality of first time away from home,” she said. “It’s like, ‘
Woohoo!
I’m going out at night and I’m not going home afterward!’”

I inquired to what degree sheer loudness was part of the equation she had to work with. She cast me a look like I was making fun of her. “We have to be
very
aware of exactly how every sound will be heard at the levels they’re going to be played at,” she said. “So if a song is going to start splattering at a certain level, we can’t use it.” She went into a lengthy technical digression about how they gauged the risk of splatter in different acoustical conditions.

“But how is all this about creating a connection?” I asked, gesturing toward the booming storefront. Flask paused. “This isn’t about using music to create a connection,” she conceded. “It’s about using music to create an event.”

All of this seems designed to push a simple, primeval trigger: Abercrombie & Fitch uses loud music and spotlit darkness to induce a state of celebratory arousal. Indeed, if you walk around your local branch of Abercrombie & Fitch, you may feel that
there would be something downright frigid in considering your purchase too closely. Far better to release your inner “Oh my God I’m away from my home!”

This is not, of course, a use of noise that Abercrombie & Fitch invented. Despite what Flask said, this too can be understood as a means of creating connection, only it’s less between people than between the individual and a state of group ecstasy.

Iegor Reznikoff is a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris who has a fondness for medieval chanting and spelunking. In 1983, he went on a visit to Le Portel, a Paleolithic cave in France. When he walked into Le Portel, he began humming to himself, as he generally does when he goes into a new room, to
“feel its sounds.”
Reznikoff was intrigued to discover that when the walls were adorned with painted animals, his humming became louder and more intense. Working with Michel Dauvois, a colleague, Reznikoff went on to demonstrate that ancient paintings on cave walls around the French Pyrenees are positioned in synchrony with points of heightened acoustical resonance. In the course of subsequent explorations across France, Reznikoff found that there was almost no resonant point in caves once inhabited by Paleolithic peoples that did not contain at least some painted markings—and, conversely, that the positioning of some of the markings could only be understood in relationship to sound. Moving through the caves in total darkness while using his voice as the only sound source, Reznikoff would come to “a
particularly resonant place,” turn on the light, and invariably find a sign,
“even in a place unsuited
for painting.”

Reznikoff believes that this intersection of painting with acoustically hyperresponsive stone walls reveals how the shaman heightened the emotional power of ritual through amplification and echoes. (The resonance at these sites is, indeed, powerful enough that when he himself made sounds in the caves Reznikoff felt
his whole body vibrating
in tandem with the gallery.) Sound effects enhanced a sense of communion with both the space and the images painted there. Such synchrony would also have boosted the shaman’s effort to identify with specific animals. By making a sound near a picture of an animal, Reznikoff discovered he was able to make it seem that the animal itself was calling out.

Reverberation, echoes, amplification, and resonance were all part of the prehistoric wise man’s bag of tricks for inducing a state of high emotion and minimal reason. This, it seemed to me, was getting closer to the territory of the mall.

Flask and I wandered on through Barton Creek Square and stepped into The Limited, a loud, throbby, high-contrast space, which to me sounded like Abercrombie & Fitch on a light Zoloft regimen. I asked Flask to analyze the store’s acoustical message.

She lowered her eyes a moment, and nodded to the beat. “The Limited girl is a little older. She works all day, but then she goes out, without having the time to drive home and change her clothes. She’s probably just out of college, just entering the workforce. This works.”

After Flask conjured up the busy, vibrant life of the Limited girl for me (I sort of did and did not want to meet her), I wondered aloud whether the noise strategy of the mall today did not, after all, just come down to sex. Was what we were hearing simply a matter of different stores taking on the acoustic personae of giant bullfrogs in a fecund swamp at springtime? A kind of precopulatory croak-off between—

“There’s a lot of sex,” Flask broke in. But it was also, she added, a matter of energy dynamics. “All of the energy of the loudness makes you feel very energetic.” She raised her voice several notches. “‘George, did you see this shirt! Did you see this?!’ It raises the ambient energy in the store. It feels like excitement, and starts a whole reaction of people. There’s a circuit of energy! The music is fast and loud so you move through the store more quickly without using as much energy.”