The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (16 page)

The sounds of travel have deep mysteries. Just as the post horn had once carried the imagination over the horizon, so also did its replacement, the train whistle. On European trains the whistle is high and piping: “Then the shrill whistle of the trains reechoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the far-off come near and imminent.”

In North America, on the other hand, the whistle is low and powerful, the utterance of a big engine with a heavy load. On the prairies—so flat that one can see the full train from engine to caboose, spread out like a stick across the horizon—the periodic whistlings resound like low, haunting moans. “The Canadian train whistle sounds like a dejected monster. It wails, and the pitch descends, unlike that of our British trains which rises in a chirpy and optimistic manner. The Canadian whistle sounds as if it has travelled far and still has a long way to go.” Farmers knew how to interpret these sounds. “When the train’s whistle sounds hollow, the weather will turn colder,” runs an Ontario proverb. The train’s whistle was the most important sound in the frontier town, the solo announcement of contact with the outside world. It was the stop clock of the elementary community, as predictable and reassuring as the church bell. In those days trains spoke to the heart of every man, and small boys came to greet the panting engine.

Trains speak to each other too. Each railroad employs a binary code of whistle signals by which quite precise messages can be communicated. But unlike the signals of the post horn, which we are given to understand everyone knew, the language of the trains is a mystery code, known to the trainmen alone. Even without knowing the codes, those who listen attentively to the soundscape will notice the personality and style each engineer manages to bring to these elementary utterances. Some slur the signals, barely distinguishing the articulations; others separate each blast with lengthy pauses. With considerable artistry others manage to get the notes to slide in pitch by careful manipulation of the control valve. This last style of performance is atavistic, carrying us back to the old steam whistle which was naturally tapered at the edges. The original steam whistle was three-toned. Part of the fame of the legendary American engineer Casey Jones was acoustic, for Casey had a special five-tone whistle which he carried with him wherever he went.

Besides the variations in rhythm and articulation, the listener will also notice differences in sound quality and pitch. While the old steam whistles produced a cluster of frequencies, many modern whistles, especially on diesel engines, are single tones. Others are diads or triads, tuned in the factory, sometimes to the specifications of the customer. While American railroads have preferred the single pitch, Canadian railroads have withdrawn this type of whistle due to the number of level-crossing accidents attributed to it during the changeover period from steam to diesel engines. An attempt to reproduce the quality of the original steam whistle resulted in the adoption of specifically tuned air horns, one version of which, now used by the Canadian Pacific Railroad, is the E-flat minor triad in root position with the tonic pitched at 311 hertz. This deep and haunting whistle, sounded by every train, who knows how many thousands of times during the long haul from Atlantic to Pacific through spectacular and lonely countryside, provides the unifying soundmark of the nation. More than any other sound it is uncounterfeitingly Canadian.

The improvement in city conditions by the general adoption of the motorcar can hardly be overestimated. Streets—clean, dustless and odorless—with light rubber-tired vehicles moving swiftly and
noiselessly
over their smooth expanse would eliminate a greater part of the nervousness, distraction and strain of modern life.

Scientific American
, July, 1899

The Internal Combustion Engine
     The internal combustion engine now provides the fundamental sound of contemporary civilization. It is the keynote, as surely as water was the keynote of thalassocratic civilization, and the wind is the keynote of the steppes.

In the external combustion engine a load of water is mixed with a load of coal to produce driving energy. Coal and water are bulky and heavy. The steam locomotive was accordingly confined to public enterprises. The internal combustion engine is light and easy to operate; it transferred power to the individual. In industrially advanced societies the average citizen may operate several internal combustion engines in the course of an average day (car, motorcycle, truck, power lawnmower, tractor, generator, power tools, etc.) and the sound will be heard in his ear many hours each day.

By 1970, the United States was producing more automobiles annually than babies, but the Asian market still looked encouraging. An advertisement in
The New Yorker
magazine that year showed the globe with every available land mass covered with Hertz rent-a-cars. By that date classic cities of gems and germs like Istanbul and Isfahan had also become cities of incredible traffic jams. The reason for this was not merely the volume of traffic, but the way in which vehicles were driven. In order for a society to obey traffic codes it must have survived two important experiences: the Industrial Revolution and mechanized warfare. Americans can drive on the “belt” road (note the name) around Washington with great adroitness, but the Asian still drives his car as if it were a camel or a mule. Stoplights are ignored and the horn becomes a whip with which to cajole and punish the stubborn animal.

When two swaths of broad-band noise of the same intensity are superposed the result is an increase of approximately three decibels. Two cars, each producing a sound of 80 decibels, thus give a sound of 83 decibels. Assuming constant engine noise, each doubling of production in the automobile industry would give an elevation of three decibels of broad-band noise to the sonic environment. In fact, automobile engines are not uniformly constructed. The American manufacturers, for instance, produced their quietest automobiles around 1960. During the sixties they began to get louder again. By 1971 the Detroit manufacturers had begun to make the increased noise of their machines an advertised feature. The following is a magazine advertisement:

THE

1971

MUSCLE

CARS

This sleek, high-powered monster is

American Motors’ 7 Javelin AMX.

Press the accelerator,

it roars.

That year General Motors informed us that

… the trend toward large displacement engines and higher compression ratios makes for increased engine noise, induction, and exhaust noise … higher compression ratios … result in larger deformations of the engine-block structure and, hence, higher radiated noise levels. … We feel, on the basis of many cars, that muffler design and performance have nicely kept pace with requirements.

Today the value of the automobile is under serious scrutiny. As local noise abatement by-laws and practices seek to reduce its sound output by setting increasingly tough noise standards, in the end perhaps only energy shortages will silence it. As the automobile becomes obsolete, its rattle becomes deathening.

Sheer volume aside, the human sound which most closely approximates that of the internal combustion engine is the fart. The analogies between the automobile and the anus are conspicuous. First of all the exhaust pipe is placed at the rear, at the same position as the rectum in animals. Cars are also stored in dirty and dark underground garages, beneath the haunches of the modern dwelling. Freud says there are anal types. There are probably also anal eras.

The Growth of Muscle Sounds
     Someone once observed—I think it was Aldous Huxley—that for contemporary urban man half the imagery of traditional poetry was lost. The same thing is happening to the soundscape, where the sounds of nature are being lost under the combined jamming of industrial and domestic machinery. More is less. A couple of illustrations from close to home will suffice to illustrate the equation.

In 1959 Canada manufactured $8,596,000 worth of power chainsaws; by 1969 this had risen to $26,860,000. The power chainsaw produces a sound of between 100 and 120 dBA, giving it a sweepout in a quiet forest of 8 to 10 square kilometers. It is possible to theorize that by 1974 the combined ripping of the 316,781 power chainsaws produced that year alone, if operated simultaneously, could cover about one-third of Canada’s 9,222,977 square kilometers with their sound.

A West Coast Indian girl taught me how to listen to the voices of the trees through the bark of their trunks. “They tell the story of my people,” she said. When the white men arrived in British Columbia, they could not teach the Indians to use the mechanical saw, or to fell trees in such a way that one tree could be made to knock down four others—the so-called domino technique. When the spirit of the deity inhabits the tree, one hesitates. Today, as the jabberware of the forest industry bevels down the woods, no one hears the frightened cries of the tree victims.

"If a tree might move by foot or wing it would not suffer the pain of the saw or the blows of the axe,” wrote Rumi in the thirteenth century. As a matter of fact, we do know that trees and other vegetables tremble and send out electrical emergency charges before they are cut.

The snowmobile will serve as our other example of the devastating effect the careless introduction of technology can have on a society. The snowmobile, a Canadian discovery, is a recent invention but its ramming has already transmogrified the Canadian winter. Only in 1970, after millions of Canadians were being exposed to this new form of noise, was the National Research Council able to conduct research demonstrating that existing machines “present a definite hazard to hearing.” Their report showed that machines then on the market frequently exceeded 110 dBA at the drivers’ ear. The NRC recommended reducing the noise to 85 dBA (thereby at least lessening the risk of hearing damage) and they showed how this could be done. But the federal government responded by limiting the noise level of new machines to 82 dBA at 50 feet (i.e., approximately 92 dBA at 15 feet).

The intrusion of snowmobiles has now made deafness and ear disease the largest public health problem in the Canadian Arctic, according to Dr. J. D. Baxter, head of McGill University’s Otolaryngological Department. In his 1972 address to the Canadian Otolaryngological Society he pointed out that of 156 adult Eskimos examined in one area, 97 showed a significant hearing loss. The Canadian winter used to be noted for its purity and serenity. It was part of the Canadian mythology. The snowmobile has bitched the myth. Without a myth the nation dies.

… no sound issues from a cloudless quarter of the sky.

Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things
,

VI, 96

The Big Sound Sewer of the Sky
     It would be false to assume that man only became airborne in the twentieth century. In fact, man has always been airborne in his imagination, as the numerous magic carpets of folklore prove. The twentieth century has merely reduced the limitless spaces where the imagination soared to rare altitudes to specific air corridors of no intrinsic significance whatsoever. Listen to the sky. The whirring and scraping against the air is nothing but the wounds of a crippled imagination made audible. At one time it was only those unfortunate enough to live near airports who really suffered from aircraft noise. In those days a passing plane turned all heads upward. But since the Second World War all this has changed.

Sometimes I give a class of students the assignment: “You are facing south. You are to wait until a sound passes you by traveling from northeast to southwest.” It may take two minutes. It may take two hours. Usually it takes two minutes. Usually it is a plane. “Air travel is doubling every five years, and air freight is growing still faster. … Thus … the noise goes up in the ratio of the horsepower used in the industry as a whole, that is, it doubles every five years in aviation.”

This forecast refers only to the spread of noise energy in the sky. It assumes that we will continue to employ present-day aircraft but simply in greater numbers. To this we must add the very special problems of supersonic transport or any other aberrations that the international aviation industry may still be perpetrating on the drawing boards.

As every home and office is gradually being situated along the world runway, the aviation industry, perhaps more effectively than any other, is destroying the words “peace and quiet” in every world language. For noise in the sky is distinguished radically from all other forms of noise in that it is not localized or contained. The plangent voice of the airplane motor beams down directly on the whole community, on roof, garden and window, on farm and suburb as well as city center.

In our research on the Vancouver soundscape we showed that the annual traffic of aircraft over a downtown park in 1970 was 23,000 per year and that this had grown by 1973 to 38,700—a trend well in line with the quotation above. We also showed that in 1973 the same park soundscape was filled with aircraft noise, from the time each flight was detected on the acoustic horizon until it disappeared, for an average of 27 minutes per hour; and from our research we are able to predict that if the trend continues the noise will be total and uninterrupted by 1981.

A great deal of research has taken place on aircraft noise and it is going forward today more strenuously than ever; but the problem continues to grow. While most of the research has concentrated on the superscreams of jets (and it has succeeded in making the jumbo jets slightly quieter than their predecessors), the insidious jamming of smaller aircraft—for instance, the bitter-batter of helicopters—has been given practically no attention.

The advent of supersonic transports has succeeded in focusing additional public attention on the problem of aircraft noise. Not only do such aircraft produce more noise on take-off and landing, resulting in “a growth in far afield noise accompanied by a serious worsening of the lateral noise spread in the vicinity of the airport” but the most critical feature of this aircraft is that by flying faster than the speed of sound it produces an additional thunderclap called a sonic boom. Unlike the sound of other aircraft, the bang-zone of the supersonic transport boom is about fifty miles wide and extends along the entire length of the aircraft flight path. Supersonic aircraft turn the whole world into an airport.