The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (42 page)

In a quiet world, building acoustics flourished as an art of sonic invention. In a noisy world it becomes merely the skill of muting internal shuffles and isolating incursions from the turbulent environment beyond. Thus the great high-rise towers of the world stand on tiptoes, looking out across the fires of the city.
Bellevue—mats mauvais son
.

The Modern Architect as Acoustic Designer
      One day I was discussing matters of mutual interest with a group of architecture students. Drawing a picture of a possible future city on the blackboard I asked them what the salient features of this environment appeared to be. There were seven helicopters in the sky of my drawing, yet no student found this particularly salient. I (exasperatedly): “Have you ever
heard
seven helicopters?”

The modern architect is designing for the deaf.

His ears are stuffed with bacon.

Until they can be unplugged with ear cleaning exercises, modern architecture may be expected to continue its same rotten course. The study of sound enters the modern architecture school only as sound reduction, isolation and absorption.

Listen to the sounds a building makes when no one is in it. It breathes with a life of its own. Floors creak, timber snaps, radiators crack, furnaces groan. But although buildings of the past made characteristic sounds, they cannot compete with modern buildings for the strength and persistence of sound emitted. Modern ventilation, lighting, elevators and heating systems create strong internal sounds; and fans and exhaust systems disgorge staggering amounts of noise into the streets and onto the sidewalks around the buildings themselves.

Architects and acoustical engineers have often conspired to make modern buildings noisier. It is a well-known practice today to add Moozak or white noise (its proponents prefer to call it “white sound” or “acoustic perfume") to mask mechanical vibrations, footsteps and human speech. The following thoughts from a recent textbook are typical of the present message being pushed at the graduates and flunctuates of the architectural profession.

Contemporary environmental control can create a complex artificial environment in buildings that will meet all the physical, physiological, and psychological requirements of the occupants. This artificially created synthetic environment is in many respects superior to the natural one. No exterior atmosphere is comparable to an air-conditioned and humidity-controlled room. Lighting fixtures presently available will not only simulate daylight but will create an improved (shadowless) luminous environment indispensable for certain activities.

The author of these comments is Leslie L. Doelle and the book they came from appeared in 1972. Concerning noise suppression Mr. Doelle has this to say:

On the other hand, if the sound is undesirable (noise from a neighbor’s television set or traffic noise), unfavorable conditions must be provided for the production, transmission, and reception of the disturbance. Measures must be taken to suppress the intensity of the noise at the source; an attempt must be made to move the noise source as far as possible from the receiver. The effectiveness of the transmission path must be reduced as much as possible, probably by the use of barriers which are adequately sound or vibration-proof, and the receiver must be protected or made tolerant to the disturbance by using noise or background music. All these measures belong to the realm of noise control. …

The phenomenon of masking is properly exploited in environmental noise control. If a masking noise is uninterrupted and not too loud, and if it has no information content, it will become an acceptable
background noise
and will suppress other objectionable intruding noises, making them sound psychologically quieter. Ventilating and air-conditioning noises, the noise created by uninterrupted traffic flow of a highway, or the sound of a water fountain are good masking-noise sources.

So much for the memorial drool of Leslie Doelle.

There may indeed be times when masking techniques can be useful in soundscape design but they will never succeed in rescuing the botched architecture of the present. No amount of perfumery can cover up a stinking job.

You are being too severe, the profession insists. In the acoustic design of concert halls and auditoriums, architects and acoustical engineers have brought their work down to a fine science. The fact is that the inventor of room acoustics, Wallace Clement Sabine, still remains, after seventy-five years of this so-called science, its only real luminary. Sabine’s Symphony Hall in Boston is still considered probably the finest hall in North America, and it was opened in 1900. Sabine aimed to reproduce the acoustics of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, which has a reverberation time, when empty, of 2.30 seconds. Though the seating capacity of the Boston hall was to be about 70 percent larger than the Leipzig auditorium, he managed to come remarkably close with a reverberation time of 2.31 seconds (empty).

The problem with most modern halls is that they are too large. Here, as in all other aspects of modern life, quantity considerations have forced quality sacrifices. A comparison of some of Europe’s best halls (created before the so-called science of acoustics took over) with some pregnant modern structures reveals this clearly enough.

One of the most spectacular buildings of modern architecture is the Sydney Opera House. The sight of its huge cream-colored butterfly wings, seen from the little, elderly ferries which ply the harbor, is indeed unforgettable, even though the location of the building is convenient rather than inspirational, for the vulgarity of the Sydney skyline behind it and especially the great inelegant bridge at its side, do it no good.

Shortly before it opened in 1973,1 was taken on a tour of the Opera House by its sound consultant. I was pleased to note the incorporation of large natural Helmholtz resonators in the walls of the concert hall—functioning more or less exactly as Vitruvius described them two millennia ago—the only hall I know to boast the revival of this technique. In the lobbies, however, I noted the innumerable little speakers which betrayed the inevitable Mooze installation. “The public seems to want it,” my guide said feebly.

In the restaurant, the third and smaller but still hugely arched structure of the complex, I was told that the floor was to remain uncarpeted and the kitchen was to be open and situated in the center. I picked up an eight-foot board that was lying at hand and let it fall. The reverberation compared favorably with that of Saint Sofia in Istanbul, probably exceeding eight seconds.

My guide put his finger in his ear and blinked.

If you’re ever in Sydney, remember to try out the echo with your soup spoon.

SIXTEEN

Rhythm and Tempo in the Soundscape

The rhythms of the universe are infinitely various. Some are of such magnitude as to be incomprehensible. Imagine, for instance, that the creation of the world was but one pulse in a great universal symphony of creation and destruction. We do not as yet have an intimation as to when the next pulse may be expected; yet within the incommensurable framework of eternity, these may be but two insignificant cycles contributing the merest fragment of a tone to the universal symphony. Other rhythms are too rapid to be perceived, and can only be designated as “happenings” which, in huge multiplications, give rise to the tiniest recorded events: an instant in the life of a waterfall or a fragment of a radio signal.

Man is an anti-entropic creature; he is a random-to-orderly arranger and tries to perceive patterns in all things. In its broadest sense, rhythm divides the whole into parts. An appreciation of rhythm is therefore indispensable to the designer who wishes to comprehend how the acoustic environment fits together. To do this a scale or module is needed. The possession of such a scale does not imply that all things must be governed by it; only that through it they become more comprehensible. Just as the body of the human being gives us the scale by which architects and designers plan human settlements and by extension can measure uninhabited spaces beyond our reach or control, so the body also gives us modules for comprehending the acoustic rhythms of the environment and universe. What rhythm modules can we discover?

Heart, Breath, Footstep and Nervous System
      First there is the regular, continuous rhythm of the heart, which may run as low as 50 beats per minute among well-trained athletes, or may go as high as 200 r more during illness or fever, though the normal relaxed beat will be about 60 to 80 per minute. This is a regular dipodic rhythm, pumping in and out, varying only in tempo.

The heartbeat has had a strong influence on the tempo of music. Before the invention of the metronome, the tempi of music were determined from the human pulse, and the difference between a saturnine or frenetic beat in music depended on how far it departed on one side or the other from this modulator. Thus tempi which lie close to the human heartbeat have an obvious appeal for man. In studying the rhythms of Australian aboriginal music, Catherine Ellis discovered that the fundamental drumbeat always hovered near the normal heartbeat. The same has been shown to be the case with Beethoven’s“Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony. The composer’s original metronome mark of 80 beats per minute is in this range and, while the performance tempi of different conductors vary considerably, the heartbeat range is well respected.

It would be pleasant to conclude that all music or indeed all human activities in this moderate tempo range might be indicative of the well-adjusted society. Unfortunately, this tempo range is also popular among the purveyors of Mooze, where it achieves little more than a bovine character. And by pushing the tempo up slightly, military music has never failed to fire enthusiasm. The heartbeat is nothing more than a rhythm module, roughly dividing humanly perceived rhythms into fast and slow.

Another continuous rhythm is that of breathing, which also varies in tempo with exercise and relaxation. Normal breathing is said to vary between 12 and 20 cycles per minute, that is, 3 to 5 seconds per cycle. But breathing may be slowed down during relaxation or sleep to cycles lasting 6 to 8 seconds. Part of the sense of well-being we feel at the seashore undoubtedly has to do with the fact that the relaxed breathing pattern shows surprising correspondence with the rhythms of the breakers, which, while never regular, often produce an average cycle of 8 seconds.

The correspondence between breath and wave motion was understood by Virgil. In his
Sixth Eclogue
he tells how the Argonauts searched for a lost youth “till the long beach itself called ‘Hylas’ and again’Hylas.’ “ Each cry one breath. Each wave one cry. Perfect synchronization.

The rhythms of all poetry and recited literature bear a relationship to breathing patterns. When the sentence is long and natural, a relaxed breathing style is expected; when irregular or jumpy, an erratic breath pattern is suggested. Compare the jabbing style of twentieth-century verse with the more relaxed lines of that which preceded it.
Something
has happened between Pope and Pound, and that something is very likely the accumulation of syncopations and offbeats in the soundscape. And the perceptible jitteriness in Pound’s verse begins after he has moved from rural life in America to the big city of London. Just as human conversational style is abbreviated by the telephone bell, contemporary verse bears the marks of having dodged the acoustic shrapnel of modern life. Car horns punctuate modern verse, not bubbling brooks.

I am surprised that literary critics have not developed the relationship between breathing and writing. Walter Benjamin, at least, has picked up the theme in suggesting that in Proust, a sufferer from asthma, we experience a syntax which suggests fear of suffocating. In his cork-lined study—specially designed to insulate him from city noise—Proust wrote: “The wheezing of my breath is drowning out the sounds of my pen and of a bath which is being drawn on the floor below.”