The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (39 page)

We know a good deal about the behavior and tolerances of the ear and the voice. When, as today, environmental sound reaches such proportions that human vocal sounds are masked or overwhelmed, we have produced an inhuman environment. When sounds are forced on the ear which may endanger it physically or debilitate it psychologically, we have produced an inhuman environment.

There are few sounds in nature that interfere with our ability to communicate vocally and almost none that in any way pose a threat to the hearing apparatus. It is interesting to consider, for instance, that while the naked voice can be raised to quite a loud level (say about 80 decibels at a distance of a few feet), it cannot be raised in-normal human intercourse to a point where it might endanger the ear (over 90 decibels).
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In discriminating against low-frequency sounds, the human ear conveniently filters out deep body sounds such as brainwaves and the movement of blood in our veins. Also, the human hearing threshold has been set conveniently just beyond a level which would introduce a continuous recital of air molecules crashing together. The quiet efficiency of all body movements is another stroke of genius. And has anyone speculated on how inconvenient it would be if the ears, instead of being placed on the side of the head, had been placed next to the mouth, where they would have been subjected to close-quarter vocal garrulity and soup-slurping?

God was a first-rate acoustical engineer. We have been more inept in the design of our machines. For noise represents escaped energy. The perfect machine would be a silent machine: all energy used efficiently. The human anatomy, therefore, is the best machine we know and it ought to be our model in terms of engineering perfection.

Contrary to these simple lessons in acoustic ecology, we live in a time when human sound is often suppressed while mechanical jabberware is encouraged. While some of our students were measuring the noise of a downtown construction site in Vancouver, they were entertained by some members of the Hare Krishna sect, an Eastern movement dedicated to the worship of God with song in the streets. In 1971 this group was arrested under the noise abatement by-law, was convicted, appealed the conviction and lost the appeal. This by-law expressly excludes all noise made by construction and demolition equipment—though the students discovered that such noise often ran as high as 90 decibels at precisely the point where the Hare Krishna singers were arrested. True, singing or hawking in the streets is frequently annoying; but when it disappears, so does humanism.

Ear Cleaning
     The first task of the acoustic designer is to learn how to listen.
Ear cleaning
is the expression we use here. Many exercises can be devised to help cleanse the ears, but the most important at first are those which teach the listener to respect silence. This is especially important in a busy, nervous society. An exercise we often give our students is to declare a moratorium on speech for a full day. Stop making sounds for a while and eavesdrop on those made by others. It is a challenging and even frightening exercise and not everyone can accomplish it, but those who do speak of it afterward as a special event in their lives.

On other occasions we prepare for listening experiences with elaborate relaxation or concentration exercises. It may take an hour of preparation in order to be able to listen clairaudiently to the next.

Sometimes it is useful to seek out one sound with particular characteristics. For instance, try to find a sound with a rising starting pitch, or one that consists of a series of short nonperiodic bursts; try to find one that makes a dull thud followed by a high twitter; or one that combines a buzz and a squeak. Such sounds will not be found in every environment, of course, but the listener will be forced to inspect every sound carefully in the search. There are numerous other exercises like this in my music education booklets.
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Sometimes it is useful to document only single sounds in the soundscape in order to get a better impression of their frequency and patterns of occurrence. Car horns, motorcycles, airplanes can be counted by anyone with ears, and it is surprising how discriminating one becomes when isolating one sound from many. Social surveys can also be conducted simultaneously in which citizens are asked to estimate the number of such sounds they imagine occur over a given time period. In repeated exercises of this sort, we have discovered that the imagined traffic is much below the actual volume—often as much as 90 percent. For instance, when we asked West Vancouverites to estimate the number of seaplane flights over their homes in 1969, the average estimate was 8 per day compared with an actual count of 65. In 1973 the same experiment was repeated in the same area. This time the average estimate had risen to 16, but the actual count had also risen to 106. Exercises like this extend ear cleaning to a wider public. To be reminded of a sound is to think about it; to miss it is to listen for it next time.

The tape recorder can be a useful adjunct to the ear. Trying to isolate a sound for high-fidelity recording always reminds the ear of details in the soundscape that have previously gone unnoticed. Sound events and soundscapes can be recorded for later analysis and if merited can be permanently stored for the future. It goes without saying that only the best tape recorders should be used for this purpose. When we record sounds we provide them with cards giving the following information:

No. ___________________Title: ____________________

Date recorded: _______ Name of recordist: _____________

Equipment used:_______ 7½ i.p.s.    mono.______________

_______ 15 i.p.s.    stereo_______________

_______ other        quadraphonic__________

Place recorded:_______ Distance from source:____________

Atmospheric conditions:_________________ Intensity:_________dBA

_______dBB

_______dBC

Historical observations:___________________________________

Sociological observations:___________________________________

Additional observations:____________________________________

Names, ages, occupations and addresses of local people interviewed: _________________________________________________

Sounds threatened with extinction should be noted in particular and should be recorded before they disappear. The vanishing sound object should be treated as an important historical artifact, for a carefully recorded archive of disappearing sounds could one day be of great value. We are currently building such an archive. Our list is very extensive, but a few examples will suffice for illustration.

The ringing of old cash registers.

Clothes being washed on a washboard.

Butter being churned.

Razors being stropped.

Kerosene lamps.

The squeak of leather saddlebags.

Hand coffee grinders.

Rattling milk cans on horse-drawn vehicles.

Heavy doors being clanked shut and bolted.

School hand bells.

Wooden rocking chairs on wooden floors.

The quiet explosion of old cameras.

Hand-operated water pumps.

We train students in soundscape recording by giving them specific sounds to record: a factory whistle, a town clock, a frog, a swallow. It is not easy if the result is to be “clean,” without distracting interferences. How often has the novice recordist, sent out to record a “complete” passage of an aircraft, switched off the machine before the sound has dropped totally below the ambiance? Even the life of the more experienced recordist is often hazardous. On one occasion, for example, a small boy had watched our recording team setting up their sound level equipment and tape recorders to measure and record a particular noon whistle. Just as it began, the boy, who had been carelessly left next to a microphone, said: “Is that the whistle you want, mister?”

One of the recordist’s biggest problems is to devise ways of recording social settings without interrupting them. The equipment is conspicuous, and in many situations so is the recordist. Peter Huse catches this in a few lines from his poem
Waves
.

we stagger into a lounge.

Bruce in my leather trenchcoat squeaks

and points the way with his goatee as I,

        tweedpocket patched with tape,

    floppy beret

wired with earphones, and gold-heavy

Nagra

    digging into my shoulder,

cutting two tracks, I

angle the mikes in the handset as if

        the machine is off but

    the pots are ganged together at 83,

it’s on
RECORD
and hidden inside the leather case

Scotch 206 crosses the heads onto

    the take-up reel and we’re getting

overlapping heart-shapes of late night

fluorescent ferry atmosphere, a blonde siren

        looms toward us.

(Zoom-in jerky, wobbling frame. Engine rumble.

Door swinging. Close-up: her twisted face left

centre looking left. Shuffling, scraping of chairs. A

few slurred voices, hers loudest, grates the most.)

    Note bleached hair. Smell her

boozy breath. She’s drunk and that and hard up.

(Cut to get whole grouping: Tintoretto/home movie

only harsh lights, blue filter. Two men laugh.)

        She waves to us, she is singing

’I wanna hoi’ your han’ …”

and we get it on tape.

A Tourist in the Soundscape
     The student of acoustic design should keep a soundscape diary, constantly noting interesting variations in sounds from place to place and time to time. The ear is always much more alert while traveling in unfamiliar environments, as proved by the richer travelogue literature of numerous writers whose normal content is acoustically less distinguished. This at least seems to be true of such authors as Thoreau, Heinrich Heine and Robert Louis Stevenson. Returning from a trip to Rio de Janeiro (1969), an American student was able to produce a much more vivid account of the Brazilian soundscape than of the city in which he lived.

Rio de Janeiro

Street hawkers

Bargaining in the marketplace

Live chickens and birds in the markets

Man going around swatting flies in restaurants

Ice being chipped from blocks (no crushed ice)

Cars and wagons on cobblestones

Street cleaners sweeping by hand

Strange dial tone, busy signal and ringing of telephones

Predominance of old cars from 40s and 50s

Singing and dancing in the streets; music echoing through the whole city from amplifiers (Carnival)

Old hand-operated elevators

Steam engines in the country

Total silence in the classroom when teacher enters

No electrical machines in businesses and banks

250,000 people shouting together in a stadium

Cockatoos

Monkeys

Cutting of jacaranda

New York

Traffic

Horns of taxis

Bums on streets in the Village

Busses

Subway trains

Foreign languages on streets and in restaurants

Occasional drunks on streets at night

Police sirens

When one travels, new sounds snap at the consciousness and are thereby lifted to the status of figures. But the acoustic designer must be trained to perceive all aspects of
any
soundscape unmistakably, otherwise how should he be able to adjudicate it properly? How should he be able to gauge the effect of signals and soundmarks and know the function of keynotes and background sounds?

It is not enough to remain a tourist in the soundscape, but it is a useful stage in the training program. It enables a person to become detached from the functioning environment in order to perceive it as an object of curiosity and aesthetic enjoyment. Like tourism itself, this type of perception is a recent development in the evolution of human civilization. As the American geographer David Lowenthal has written: “Perception of
scenery
is only open to those who have no real part to play in the landscape.” Lowenthal illustrates the observation with quotations from Mark Twain and William James.

To Mark Twain’s steamboat traveler, the sunset glows eloquently over the rippling silvery water. To the pilot however: “This sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow … that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights … that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the’ break’ from a new snag.”