The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (12 page)

When the smith wanted more flattening he would tap the side of the anvil with two rapid flourishes.

One has to have experienced this to appreciate how deftly the smith would move in and out fashioning the metal between the powerful steady blows of the assistant. We measured the sound at over 100 decibels and residents on the outskirts of the village testified that they used to be able to hear the hammering, which began at dawn and would continue during the harvest season (when scythes had to be flattened regularly) late into the night.

Up to the time of the Industrial Revolution, the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer was probably the loudest sound a solo human hand ever produced—a brilliant tintinnabulation.

In the Middle East it was the tinsmith’s hammer that gave the most strident keynote. They may be heard there still, the happy tinsmiths, squatting in the bazaars, their backs straight as the letter alif, beckoning the visitor with their staccato hammering, which forms a strange counterpoint to the phlegmatic shuffling of feet over the uneven stones of the alleys. Today they fashion samovars for tourists; in the past they produced great gongs for the royal armies. In the Orient, the gong served in place of both drum and bell. “We started at break of day from the northern suburb of Ispahan, led by the
chaoûshes
of the pilgrimage, who announced our departure by loud cries and the beating of their copper drums.”

KeytlOtc Sounds
     Many of the most unique keynote sounds are produced by the materials available in different geographical locales: bam-boo, stone, metal or wood, and sources of energy such as water and coal. In older European cities the visitor from abroad is immediately struck by the preponderance of stone. Stone, and objects bumping it, chipping it or scraping it, form the first line of European keynotes. Scott Fitzgerald somewhere comments on “the substantial cobblestones of Zürich, and the way they echoed sound in the narrow streets at night.

In North America wood was a more important keynote, for many towns and cities were carved out of virgin forest. (Wood had, of course, been an original keynote of Europe also; but the forests were depleted when wood was required for the smelting and forging of metals.) The special keynote of British Columbia is still wood. In the early days of Vancouver, wooden planks were used in the construction of sidewalks and streets as well as buildings.

The first streets were planked and, where necessary, as with the old Water Street, supported on pilings. Photos of the time fail to convey the rumble and roar that quickened the pulse as carriages sped over the timbers. Vancouver had little cobblestone to represent its early paving, and thus the original surface has long since been composted. The sidewalks too were of plank, spaced to the detriment of women’s shoe heels.

In those days (1870–1900) some of the Vancouver streets close to the seashore were also paved with clamshells. Wood, especially when elevated on pilings, is a musical surface, for each board gives its own pitch and resonance under boot heel or carriage wheel. Cobblestones possess this quality also, but the drudgery of asphalt and cement is uniform.

Wood meets stone in a combinatory keynote when casks are rolled over cobblestones, a sound which must have created a considerable disturbance in the old days. The city of Cape Town prohibits it (Police Offences Act, No. 27,1882, para. 27), and it is also prohibited in the Australian city of Adelaide (By-law No. IX, 1934, para. 25a).

A subtle keynote is offered by the sounds of light. Between the soft sniffing of the candle and the stationary hum of electricity a whole chapter in human social history could be written, for the way men light their lives is equally as influential as the way they tell time or write down their languages. (In attributing dynamic social change to the appearance and decline of the printing press, Marshall McLuhan developed only one of several fertile themes.) The potent invention of the mechanical clock is more immediate to our study, but the effect of lighting cannot be ignored.

In the special darkness of the northern winter, where life was centered in small pools of candlelight, beyond which shadows draped and flickered mysteriously, the mind explored the dark side of nature. The underworld creatures of northern mythology are always nocturnal. By candlelight the powers of sight are sharply reduced; the ear is supersensitized and the air stands poised to beat with the subtle vibrations of a strange tale or of ethereal music. …

Romanticism begins at twilight—and ends with electricity. By the era of electricity, the last romanticists had folded their wings. Music dismissed the nocturne and the
Nachtstuck
, and from the Impressionist salons of 1870 onward, painting emerged into twenty-four-hour daylight.

We will not expect to find striking confessions concerning the sounds of candles or torches among the ancients any more than we find elaborate descriptions among moderns of the 50- or 60-cycle hum; for although both sounds are inescapably there, they are keynotes; and, as I am taking repeated trouble to explain, keynotes are rarely listened to consciously by those who live among them, for they are the ground over which the figure of signals becomes conspicuous. Keynote sounds are, however, noticed when they change, and when they disappear altogether, they may even be remembered with affection. Thus I recall the vivid impression made on me when I first went to Vienna in 1956 and heard the whispering gas lights on the suburban streets; or, on another occasion, the huge hiss of the Coleman lamps in the unelectrified bazaars of the Middle East—which, in the late evening, quite overpowered the bubbling of the waterpipes. Similarly, in a reverse manner, when the heroine in
Doctor Zhivago
first arrived in Moscow after having spent her childhood in the Urals, she was “deafened by the gaudy window displays and glaring lights, as if they too emitted sounds of their own, like the bells and the wheels.” In the country, night had been accompanied by “the faint crackling of the wax candles” (Turgenev’s phrase), and she was immediately struck by the change. Another example: in his diary of 1919, amidst painterly thoughts, Paul Klee paused to listen when, in his Schwabing apartment, “the asthmatic gas lamp was replaced by a glaring, hissing and spitting carbide lamp.”

The Sounds of Night and Day
     When towns and cities were dark at night, the sounds of curfew and the voices of night watchmen were important acoustic signals. In London the curfew bell was decreed by William the Conqueror to be rung at eight o’clock. On the first stroke of the signal bell, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, all other churches took up the toll and the city gates were closed. Curfew bells were still rung in English towns up to the nineteenth century, as Thomas Hardy records.

The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the housefronts than a clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the High Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the day.

In Persian towns curfew was also announced, but the sounds were different.

I had in succession watched the distant din of the king’s band, the crash of the drums, and the swell of the trumpets, announcing sunset.

I had listened to the various tones of the muezzins, announcing the evening prayer; as well as to the small drum of the police, ordering the people to shut their shops, and retire to their homes. The cry of the sentinels on the watch-towers of the king’s palace was heard at distant intervals. …

After the town settled down for the night, the soundscape, even of a big city like Paris, became hi-fi.

Later that night—last night—when the children and women had quieted down in their back yards enough to let me sleep, I began hearing cabs roll by in the street. They passed only now and then, but after each one I waited for the next in spite of myself, listening for the jingling bell, the clatter of the horse’s hooves on the pavement.

Throughout the night, in towns the world over, night watchmen reassured the inhabitants with their punctual sounds.

Twelve o’clock,

Look well to your lock,

Your fire and your light,

And so good night.

Such was the London cry as recorded by Richard Dering in 1599. Milton records that in his day watchmen carried a bell and chanted a blessing
(II Penseroso
, line 82 f.). Leigh Hunt has preserved descriptions of several London night watchmen in 1820.

One was a Dandy Watchman, who used to ply at the top of Oxford Street, next the park. We called him the dandy, on account of his utterance. He had a mincing way with it, pronouncing the
a
in the word “past” as it is in
hat,—
making a little preparatory hem before he spoke, and then bringing out his “Pặst ten” in a style of genteel indifference, as if, upon the whole, he was of that opinion.

Another was the Metallic Watchman, who paced the same street towards Hanover Square, and had a clang in his voice like a trumpet. He was a voice and nothing else; but any difference is something in a watchman.

A third, who cried the hour in Bedford Square, was remarkable in his calling for being abrupt and loud. There was a fashion among his tribe just come up at that time, of omitting the words “Past” and “o’clock,” and crying only the number of the hour.

But by this time the cries of the watchman and the chimes of the town clock were clearly tautological and the watchman was on the wane. Virginia Woolf catches this situation well by placing the watchman sentimentally in the distance. The quote is from
Orlando
, set at about the same period. “There was the faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night watchman—’Just twelve o’clock on a frosty morning.’ No sooner had the words left his lips than the first strike of midnight sounded.” Sometimes the watchmen rang bells, sometimes rattles, as reported by Gorky in
The Artamonovs
. Sometimes they blew whistles, and I have heard them blow to one another every fifteen minutes throughout the night in Mexican towns today.

Such nocturnal interruptions were by no means always appreciated; they outraged Tobias Smollett in the eighteenth century.

… I go to bed after midnight, jaded and restless from the dissipations of the day—I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants.

With the first rays of sunlight the watchman fell silent, and after the introduction of street lighting, he disappeared altogether.

With daybreak a different commotion began. Smollett continues: “… and by five o’clock I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm made by the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green pease under my window.”

The Keynotes of Horse and Wagon
     Smollett was by no means the only commentator to be irritated by the continuous and asymmetrical rattle of brass-bound wheels over cobblestones, and not only Europeans but people living in other parts of the world frequently complained of it. “The creaking of the wheels is indescribable. It is like no sound ever heard in all your life, and makes your blood run cold. To hear a thousand of these wheels all groaning and creaking at one time is a sound never to be forgotten—it is simply hellish.” With the carts came the cracking of whips, which the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer reckoned as the nastiest distraction from intellectual life.

I denounce it as making a peaceful life impossible; it puts an end to all quiet thought No one with anything like an idea in his head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden, sharp crack, which paralyzes the brain, rends the thread of reflection, and murders thought.

That Schopenhauer was not alone in resisting the noise of whips is evident from numerous pieces of legislation, from Europe and abroad, prohibiting “the unnecessary clapping of wagon whips.”

One of the most influential keynotes of the early urban soundscape must have been the clatter of horses’ hooves, everywhere evident over cobblestone streets, and different from the hollow tramp of hooves on the open ground. Leigh Hunt writes of the night journey by coach when the only way the traveler knew he was passing through a town was the sharpening of the hoofbeat. Returning to the country road, “the moist circuit of the wheels, and the time-beating tread of the horses” eventually hypnotize even the most wakeful passenger.