The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (40 page)

William James, an early tourist in North Carolina, was able to register the defacement of a beautiful forest by the farmers: “But, when
they
looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward.” To James, however, “The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had … cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps. … The larger trees he had girdled and killed … and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc. … The forest had been destroyed; and what had’ improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty.”

Because of his dependence on visual stimuli, modern man has allowed himself to be led by the tourist industry into believing that tourism consists simply of sightseeing. But the sensitive human being knows that environment is not merely what is seen or possessed. A good tourist inspects the whole environment, critically and aesthetically. He never merely “sightsees"; he hears, smells, tastes and touches. A tourist of the soundscape would demand not
Sehenswiirdigkeiten
but
Hörenswürdigkeiten
. With increased leisure all men could become tourists of the soundscape, remembering affectionately the entertainment of soundscapes visited. All it would take is a little travel money and sharp ears.

Soundwalks
     
A
listening walk and a soundwalk are not quite the same thing, or at least it is useful to preserve a shade of distinction between them.

A listening walk is simply a walk with a concentration on listening. This should be at a leisurely pace, and if it is undertaken by a group, a good rule is to spread out the participants so that each is just out of earshot of he footsteps of the person in front. By listening constantly for the footsteps of the person ahead, the ears are kept alert; but at the same time a privacy for reflection is afforded. Sounds heard and missed can be discussed afterward.

The soundwalk is an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide. The score consists of a map, drawing the listener’s attention to unusual sounds and ambiances to be heard along the way. A soundwalk might also contain ear training exercises. For instance, the pitches of different cash registers or the duration of different telephone bells could be compared. Eigentones could be sought in different rooms and passages.
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Different walking surfaces (wood, gravel, grass, concrete) could be explored. “If I can hear my footsteps as I walk, I know I am in an ecological environment,” said a student. When the soundwalker is instructed to listen to the soundscape, he is audience; when he is asked to participate with it, he becomes composer-performer. In one soundwalk a student asked participants to enter a store and to tap the tops of all tinned goods, thus turning the grocery store into a Caribbean steel band. In another, participants were asked to compare the pitches of drainpipes on a city street; in another, to sing tunes around the different harmonics of neon lights.

A series of ingenious soundwalks ought to be of interest to the tourist industry, and it would be of great value also in introducing ear cleaning into schools.

Exercises such as these are the root of the acoustic design program. Yet they require no expensive equipment and they do not camouflage simple acoustic facts with pictures or statistical displays which, being silent, are
not acoustic information
.

When a school of acoustic design worthy of the title finally comes into existence, ear cleaning must be its basic course.

FIFTEEN

The Acoustic Community

Acoustic Space
      We have already encountered the conflict between visual and acoustic space. The influence of our visual orientation has not only left its impression on works of art, but even more emphatically in law. Property is measured in physical terms, in square meters or kilometers. Within the territorial limits of property holdings, the owner is permitted to create a desired environment with comparative freedom. When the world was quieter, privacy was effectively secured by walls, fences and vegetation. When visual and acoustic space were more congruous, the latter required no special attention.

Today acoustic space has important environmental and legal implications not fully appreciated. The acoustic space of a sounding object is that volume of space in which the sound can be heard. The maximum acoustic space inhabited by a man will be the area over which his voice can be heard. The acoustic space of a radio or a power saw will be the volume of space in which those sounds can be heard. Modern technology has given each individual the tools to activate more acoustic space. This development would seem to be running a collision course with the population increase and reduction of available physical space per individual.

A property-owner is permitted by law to restrict entry to his private garden or bedroom. What rights does he have to resist the sonic intruder? For instance, without expanding its physical premises, an airport may show a dramatically enlarged noise profile over the years, reaching out to dominate more and more of the acoustic space of the community. Present law does nothing to solve these problems. At the moment a man may own the ground only; he has no claim on the environment a meter above it and his chances of winning a case to protect it are slender.

What is needed is a reassertion of the importance, both socially and ultimately legally, of acoustic space as a different but equally important means of measurement. The following historical observations will assist in replanting this notion.

The Acoustic Community
      Community can be defined in many ways: as a political, geographical, religious or social entity. But I am about to propose that the ideal community may also be defined advantageously along acoustic lines.

The house can be appreciated as an acoustic phenomenon, designed for the first community, the family. Within it they may produce private sounds of no interest outside its walls. A parish was also acoustic, and it was defined by the range of the church bells. When you could no longer hear the church bells, you had left the parish. Cockneydom is still defined as that area in East London within earshot of Bow Bells. This definition of community also applies to the Orient. In the Middle East it is the area over which the muezzin’s voice can be heard as he announces the call to prayer from the minaret.

An interesting example of an acoustic community from the ninth century shows how the Huns constructed their communities in a series of nine concentric fortified circles. “Between these ramparts, hamlets and farmsteads were arranged in such a way that the human voice could carry from one to the other Between circle and circle all farms and habitations were laid out in such a way that the news of any happening could be conveyed from one to the other by simply blowing a trumpet.”

Throughout history the range of the human voice has provided an important module in determining the grouping of human settlements. For instance, it conditioned the “long” farm of early North American settlers, where the houses were placed within shouting distance of one another in case of a surprise attack, and the fields ran back from them in a narrow strip. The acoustic farm may still be observed along the banks of the St. Lawrence River though its
raison d’être
has vanished.

In his model Republic, Plato quite explicitly limits the size of the ideal community to 5,040, the number that can be conveniently addressed by a single orator. That would be about the size of Weimar in the days of Goethe and Schiller. Weimar’s six or seven hundred houses were for the most part still within the city walls; but it was the voice of the half-blind night watchman which, as Goethe tells us, could be heard everywhere within the walls, that expressed best the sense of human scale which the poets found so attractive in the small city-state.

A consideration of the acoustic community might also include an investigation of how vital information from outside the community reaches the ears of the inhabitants and affects their daily routine. We had an opportunity to investigate this when we undertook a soundscape study f the French fishing village of Lesconil, on the south coast of Brittany. Lesconil is surrounded on three sides by the sea and is subject to an onshore-offshore wind cycle known as “les vents solaires.” Distant sounds are carried to the village in a clockwise sequence, beginning from the north at night, moving to the east and south during the day, and finally to the west in the evening. In the early morning, when the fishermen put out to sea, the Plobannalec church bells and nearby farming noises are heard clearly. By 9 a.m. it is the bells of Loctudy to the northeast; by 11 a.m. the “puffer” buoys off the east coast; then by noon, the motors of the trawlers out to sea at the south. (On a calm day they can be heard up to 12 kilometers away.) By 2 p.m. the western buoys are clearly heard, and by 4 p.m. it is often possible to hear the blowhole at Point de la Torche, 12 kilometers away to the west. If the weather is foggy, the afternoon will bring the sound of the great foghorn at Eckmuhl, on the same coast. By evening, the farm sounds return and with them the bells of Treffiagat to the northwest.

This pattern is characteristic mainly of the summer months when the weather is clear and the fishing is good. Variations in it indicate weather changes: for instance, when certain buoys are heard out of sequence, there will be a squall; or when the surf is strong in the west, good weather will follow. Every fisherman and every fisherman’s wife knows how to read the nuances of these acoustic signals and the life of the community is regulated by them.

The acoustic community eventually found itself in collision with the spatial community, as evidenced by numerous noise abatement by-laws. This conflict is also recorded in the decline of Christianity when the parish shrank under the bombardment of traffic noise, just as Islam waned when it became necessary to hang loudspeakers on the minarets, and the age of Goethe’s humanism passed when the watchman’s voice no longer reached all the inhabitants of the city-state of Weimar. (A further sign of the muzzling of Weimar humanism was a nineteenth-century by-law forbidding the making of music unless conducted behind closed windows.)

Modern man continues this retreat indoors to avoid the canceled environments of outdoor life. In the lo-fi soundscape of the contemporary megalopolis, acoustic definitions are harder to perceive. The sound output of the police siren (100+ dBA) may have surpassed the faltering voice of the church bell (80+ dBA), but such an attempt to produce a new order by sheer might is today proving anachronistic, as increased anomie and social disintegration prove. Today, when the slop and spawn of the megalopolis invite a multiplication of sonic jabberware, the task of the acoustic designer in sorting out the mess and placing society again in a humanistic framework is no less difficult than that of the urbanologist and planner, but it is equally necessary. The problem of redefining the acoustic community may involve the establishment of zoning regulations; but to limit it to this, as is common today, is to mistake the trajectories of the soundscape for the property lines of the landscape. Only when the out-sweep and interpenetration of sonic profiles is known and accepted as the operative reality will acoustic zoning rise to the level of an intelligent undertaking.

Outdoor Versus Indoor Sounds
      Space affects sound not only by modifying its perceived structure through reflection, absorption, refraction and diffraction, but it also affects the characteristics of sound production. The natural acoustics of different geographical areas of the earth may have a substantial effect on the lives of people. For instance, on the Arkansas prairies Thomas Nuttall (1819) remarked that “no echo answers the voice, and its tones die away in boundless and enfeebled undulations.” On the other hand, the heavy forests of British Columbia are richly reverberant. “The dense forest around and beyond seemed to echo back the warning tones of the speaker’s voice, and as the congregation united their voices in songs of praise, the very trees seemed to lend their cadence in the melody.”

Outdoor sounds are different from indoor sounds. Even the same sound is modified as it changes spaces. The human voice is always raised outdoors. If one takes a portable tape recorder from an indoor room outdoors, talking constantly at the same distance from the microphone, the playback volume will register an increase. This results from the higher ambient noise as well as the fact that with decreased reverberation more vocal energy is required to give the sound the same apparent volume. But also psychologically a public place has replaced a private one and there is often an instinctive tendency to be more demonstrative in a public place. We have had occasion to note (see page 64) that people who live out of doors in hot climates tend to speak more loudly than those who live indoors. It is also significant that northern peoples seem more disturbed by noise than southern.