The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (32 page)

"For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.” (Jonah 2:3.) To be saved from the clutches of corruption and chaos, as Jonah was, is always interpreted as a rebirth; for the miracle of water is that it is at once both the eternal destroyer and the grand deliverer. Jung remarks: “Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. … Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious. … The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.”

The Greeks distinguished between Pontos, the mapped and navigable, and Okeanos, the infinite universe of water. Pontos corresponds to the closed world of Euclidean geometry, Okeanos to mystery and tempestuousness—for a storm on an unknown sea could swallow up a ship without warning or trace. The primal chaos of Okeanos is well served by the sound of a stormy sea. When the sea is worked into anger, it possesses equal energy across the entire audible spectrum; it is full-frequencied white noise. Yet the spectrum always seems to be changing; for a moment deep vibrations predominate, then high whistling effects, though neither is ever really absent, and all that changes is their relative intensity. The impression is one of immense and oppressive power expressed as a continuous flow of acoustic energy. In a storm at sea, the sound is not articulated into waves. It is only in a boat that wave motion becomes audible, for the bulkheads groan and shudder violently as the ship rolls and pitches. (By this means I once timed the waves at between 6 and 11 seconds in a gale on the Pacific.)

The sea symbolizes brute power; the land, safety and comfort. The ension between them is made audible in the crashing of the breakers. No sound unites continuity and discreteness so effectively within its signature. Thus, as we move back to the shoreline, power gives way to regular beating and, in a miraculous manner, the sea begins to suggest its opposite—the discrete side of its signature—rhythmic order. Rhythm replaces chaos as the sea becomes benign. Finally, the sea hangs over the horizon as an expiring murmur, blending with the gentler expressions of music. Here is how Thomas Mann, born on the Baltic, recalled it in
Tonio KrÖger:

… he played the violin—and made the tones, brought out as softly as ever he knew how, mingle with the plashing of the fountain that leaped and danced down there in the garden beneath the branches of the old walnut tree. The fountain, the old walnut tree, his fiddle, and away in the distance the North Sea, within sound of whose summer murmurings he spent his holidays—these were the things he loved, within these he enfolded his spirit, among these things his inner life took its course.

Modern man is moving away from the sea. Ocean travel has given way to air travel. The sea, which is down from everywhere, has come to be treated as a trough into which pollutants are dumped. Avoiding “the sea’s green crying towers,” modern man, landlocked and with untroubled heart, imagines the sea a sound romance. (Our Sound Preference Survey showed this clearly; see pages 147–148 and Appendix II.) He believes that the ebb and push of the waves on the summer beach exist merely to rhyme with relaxed breathing. But modern man is losing touch with the suprabiological rhythms that make the sea so notorious as a trembling presence in ancient art and ritual. Do all memories turn into romance? If so, the sea is the first example.

The Deviousness of the Wind
     By comparison with the barbaric challenge of the sea, the wind is devious and equivocal. Without its tactile pressure on the face or body we cannot even tell from what direction it blows. The wind is therefore not to be trusted. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” (John 3:8.) Jung speaks of the wind as the breath of the spirit.

Man’s descent to the water is needed in order to evoke the miracle of its coming to life. But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know—since it is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to which neither human expectations nor the machinations of the will have given life. It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through the man who thought that “spirit” was merely what he believes, what he makes himself, what is said in books, or what people talk about. But when it happens spontaneously it is a spookish thing, and primitive fearseizes the naive mind. The elders of the Elgonyi tribe in Kenya gave me exactly the same description of the nocturnal god whom they call “maker of fear.” “He comes to you,” they said, “like a cold gust of wind, and you shudder, or he goes whistling round in the tall grass”—an African Pan who glides among the reeds in the haunted noontide hour, playing on his pipes and frightening the shepherds.

There is some etymological basis to what Jung writes. The Old German word for soul was
saiwalô
, which may be a cognate of the Greek
aioΛos
, meaning “quick-moving, wily or shifty.”

The illusory nature of the wind finds its instrument in the Aeolian harp, whose haunting and elusive tones were so affectionately regarded by the romanticists. Novalis wrote: “Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose sounds come from the plucking of higher strings within us.” But at times the wind seems to have a downright evil character. What are we to make of winds such as the Fohn in Germany and the Chinook in America, which have been cited as the cause of aberrational behavior and even death, usually by suicide? In an interesting unpublished paper, Dr. Philip Dickinson of the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton mentions the case of an elderly woman who tried to commit suicide.

Her reason for the attempt: a low throbbing noise, that she alone seemed to be able to hear. … The local health department was unable to hear or record anything at all. It was then found that many other people also heard the noise, but were afraid to say so. Hence “expert” advice was brought in. A noise consultant visited the area with his wife, who was medically trained, and although he could hear nothing, recorded the “nothing” he could hear. On analysis of the noise a distinct peak was discovered in the 30–40 Hz range. Following newspaper accounts of these tests, reports came in from all over the country of severe noise disturbance from a low throbbing noise. … Many of these were investigated and in all cases a distinct peak of noise was discovered in the 30–40 Hz range. The noise was audible to the sufferers mainly at night, especially so on cold winter mornings in a slight breeze and in conditions of temperature inversion. Never on a hot summer day with no wind or with a very stiff breeze. Attempts to find the origin of the noise pinpointed power transmission lines in many of the areas. In some of these lines the wooden posts were vibrating so much that it was painful to place the ear against them. Not all the places had transmission lines, in others it seemed the noise was amplified by houses and possibly thin trees!

Dr. Dickinson has attributed these low-frequency vibrations to the wind. Uncontrolled low-frequency vibrations have been credited with causing brain tumors, a matter which Dr. Dickinson also raises in connection with his study.

Illusory, capricious and destructive, the wind is the natural sound man as traditionally mistrusted and feared the most. We recall that Typhoeus was a devious god because he spoke with so many tongues. The trickery of the wind has continued right down to modern times as anyone who has tried to make tape recordings outdoors well knows.

The Manddla and the Bell
      erhaps no artifact has been so widespread or has had such long-standing associations for man as the bell. Bells come in a vast array of sizes and have been put to an incredible diversity of uses. Most may be said to function in one of two distinct ways: either they act as gathering (centripetal) or scattering (centrifugal) forces. This can be seen from the following partial table.

Not all bells can be categorized so easily according to function. In the Middle Ages in Europe, knights wore little bells attached to their armor and women wore them jingling from their girdles. Centripetal? But what do we say about the court jester, whose cap was adorned with the same tle bells? And then there are the countless bells attached to animals all over the world in order to inform their owners of their whereabouts, or to identify the lead animal.

The bell is hung round the neck of the most willing horse of the pack, and from that moment he takes the lead. Till he moves on, it is almost impossible to force any of the others forward. If you keep back your horse for a mile or two when on the march, and then give him the rein, he dashes on in frantic eagerness to catch up to the rest. Get hold of the bell-horse when you want to start in the morning, and ring the bell and soon all the others in the pack gather round.

In the same account we learn how the bell of the lead horses signaled the approach of another pack train along the narrow trails of the Rocky Mountains. The jingling bells, attached to horses’ harnesses, sounded a festive note which Edgar Allan Poe caught in a famous poem.

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight,

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

from the bells, bells, bells,

     bells, bells, bells, bells,

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells!

Such bells were an adornment to the soundscape in many parts of the world, until the internal combustion engine eliminated them. In some places their demise was also assisted by regulations. A Saskatchewan bylaw (No. 10, 1901) stated: “Horses and cows shall not carry bells within the limits of Prince Albert.” And from Russia we recall how the eccentric Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
had all the animal bells on his estate tied up and stuffed with paper.

The church bell originally maintained both a centripetal and centrifugal function, for it was designed both to frighten away evil spirits and also to attract the ear of God and the attention of the faithful. In ancient times church bells were accorded rich symbolism by numerous Christian commentators.

The bell denotes the preacher’s mouth, according to the words of St. Paul: “I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” The hardness of the metal signifies the fortitude of the preacher’s mind according to the passage, “I have given thee a forehead more hard than their forehead.” The clapper of iron which, by striking on both sides maketh the sound, doth denote the tongue of the preacher, the which with the adornment of learning doth cause both Testaments to resound. The striking of the bell denoteth the preacher ought first of all o strike at the vices in himself for correction, and then advance to blame those of others. The link by which the clapper is joined or bound to the bell is meditation; the hand that ties the clapper, denotes the moderation of the tongue. The wood of the frame upon which the bell hangeth doth signify the wood of our Lord’s Cross. The iron that ties it to the wood denotes the charity of the preacher, who, being inseparably connected with the Cross exclaims: “Far be it from me to glory, except in the Cross of the Lord.” The pegs by which the wooden frame is joined together are the oracles of the prophets. The hammer affixed to the frame by which the bell is struck signifieth the right mind of the preacher by which he himself holding fast to the Divine commands, doth by frequent striking inculcate the same to the ears of the faithful.

Here is another explanation of the bell, no less heartfelt but quite different, from a time nearer to our own:

The whole air seemed alive. It was as if the tongues of those great cold, hard metal things had become flesh and joy. They burst into being screaming with delight and the city vibrated. Some wordless thing they said touched something so deep inside you that they made tears come. Some of them were given in memory of dead people. That’s a splendid living memorial, live voices speaking for the dead. If someone were to die and you were permitted either to see or hear them, I think it would be best to hear their voice.

While the contemporary church bell may remain important as a community signal or even a soundmark, its precise association with Christian symbolism has diminished or ceased; and it has accordingly experienced a weakening of its original purpose.

Bells and gongs differ in important respects which must now be explained. To a considerable extent these differences correspond to a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western cultures. A bell is a hollow cup-shaped body of cast metal, usually bronze. Chinese bells are struck on the outside, often with wooden mallets, but the European bell is struck by a metal clapper hung inside. In fact, the Europeans developed the clapper to great size, its weight sometimes reaching 1,500 pounds, as is the case with the great bell of Cologne Cathedral. Since it takes some time for the blow of the clapper to overcome the inertia of the metal, it embraces within its signature a sharp attack followed by a rounded orb of swelling sound. A gong is made of hammered, malleable metal, flat, or approximately so, and is usually struck with a soft mallet. As with Chinese bells, the sharp attack of the clapper is absent from the oriental gong. The sound of a gong is therefore more mellow, more diffused, though if the instrument is thin the metal will shiver, producing a rich transient distortion of full-frequency noise. The sounds of the two instruments may be approximately compared in the following graphs.