The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (44 page)

During Holy Week the church bells were silenced and ratchets were used to announce services. Dating back to a pagan period, some of these ratchets were enormous and were pushed through the streets like wheelbarrows. Easter used to feature a passion play in the streets. The peasants still tell the visitor how it was stopped in 1821 when the man portraying Christ stepped on some spiny chestnut husks, which a few prankish boys had placed in his path, and cursed so loudly that the bishop put an end to the procession altogether. When we were there, Easter Day featured only a procession by the volunteer fire brigade, all decked out in cere-monial uniforms with epaulets and swords. Afterward they returned to the fire hall and sounded the sirens.

On Easter Day, the bells of Cembra were rung once again,
El Campand
style, and the
mortaretE
were fired over the valley. The
El Campand
ring is reserved for special days and consists of a single bell, followed by the ringing of all the bells of Cembra’s three churches simultaneously, an effect which is supposed to be beautiful at a distance, say across the valley.

In summer everyone would change their winter hobnailed boots for wooden clogs, and the sound of footsteps—always distinct in Cembra’s cobbled streets—changed from metal crunching to hollow wooden clops. Every day the village would hear the goatherd’s horn when he took the animals to pasture each morning and returned in the evening. Summer evenings were also a time for group singing. Men, women and children would gather outdoors after supper and sing antiphonally in groups. One special singing event was the
Canta dei Mesi
(Song of the Months) when people would dress in costume and sing the different verses of the song.

The principal summer feasts (St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, San Rocco’s and the Assumption of the Virgin) were followed by All Saints’ Day. Then the cattle were brought back from summer pasture, bells ringing, and the village began to move indoors again. It was then that firewood was hauled from hills above the village in carts which dragged over the cobblestones like skids—a special construction of the area, to help brake the vehicles on the steep hillsides, and a sound which schoolchildren told us was one of their favorites.

I have used the past tense in this brief sketch because so many of the sounds are now no longer to be heard in Cembra and they can only be surmised by discussion with the inhabitants. Today, juke boxes have moved into Cembra, so have big new mountain busses and television sets. Yet Cembra is still a place where one can hear a sound like that of the sacristan, a portly young man, huffing and puffing after ringing the evening bell as he climbs onto his trembling bicycle and spins off into the darkness.

The Rhythms of Radio Broadcasting
      The modern city does not display such deliberate acoustic rhythms as the village or the natural soundscape. Better stated, the great profusion of rhythms cancel one another out. The principal feature of the city soundscape is random motion and it may be heard to best advantage from a distance or late at night. It is the continuous low-frequency roar one hears from an adjacent hill or through an open window in the small hours of the morning. This is pedesis, Brownian motion, Gaussian noise. It is composed by a million Mr. Browns and Ms. Smiths running around in their private circles or slipping through some more haphazard routines, rarely synchronizing their activities, rarely considering one another.

We do not have enough ceremonies in our lives, Margaret Mead somewhere says, which might be paraphrased to mean that modern socialife lacks rhythmic definition. Through a superfluity of activities even special events become monotonous and uniform. Let me illustrate this problem with reference to a single activity which tries to be special all of the time: radio broadcasting. (Television would do as well but since our concern is with audio culture, let’s stay with radio.)

While sociologists have done a certain amount of content analysis, a study of broadcast rhythms appears never to have been undertaken. Such research would have special advantages for soundscape studies. First, broadcasting is separated into independent information channels so that the confusion of simultaneity, so often present in the soundscape at large, is absent. Second, broadcasting is a deliberate attempt to regulate the flow of information according to human responses and information-processing capabilities. Third, broadcasting is always changing and these changes can thus be studied, exactly as a critic or historian studies the styles and tendencies of contrasting schools of literature or music. We have already mentioned how broadcasting was at first occasional, separated by extensive periods of silence or low-keyed activity. Here I am concerned only with the shapes of contemporary radio in North America, which today provide the models which much of the rest of the world is copying.

Each radio station has its own style of punctuation and its own methods of gathering the material of its programs into larger units, just as the phrases of language are shaped into sentences and paragraphs. Different events are repeated periodically in daily or weekly schedules, and within each day certain items may be repeated several times at fixed intervals. Station calls are such methods of punctuation. In North America these are repeated frequently, often with musical accompaniment; in other parts of the world they still tend to be more stately, synchronizing with the hours of the clock. In private broadcasting systems, commercials may also be repeated without variation at fixed points throughout the day. These patterns may be called
isorhythms
. Like community sound signals, they anchor time and help listeners to gain temporal orientation. Isorhythmic occurrences may have varied or unvaried content; thus, while certain recorded messages may be repeated exactly, other items, such as the news, may occur at fixed times but use fluctuating material. In news broadcasts we witness a continual evolution of content as units are gradually altered or dropped to make way for new events. In the case of a key news story we may witness a theme with variations spread over several days or weeks.

There are other items which recur unpredictably, but insistently enough to be called
leitmotivs
. For instance, our studies of Vancouver radio stations show that during a one-hour period one disc jockey repeated certain items with great insistence. The name of the station was mentioned 28 times during the hour; the disc jockey mentioned his own name 16 times and the city of Vancouver 13 times during the same period. Following behind these primary citations was a long string of words receiving three or more repetitions. In decreasing order these were:’Travel, first, new, modern, contemporary, popularity, money, perfection, best, reward, prize,convenience, speed, reliability, simplicity, power, entertainment, great, love.” During the same hour, 12 records were played and there were 16 commercials. This pattern varies little from day to day, month to month, with the number of commercials—always the maximum permitted by broadcast regulations—eventually emerging as the most ubiquitously recurrent element.

The tempo of broadcasting also deserves careful study. The question to bear in mind here is whether such tempi attempt to reproduce the rhythms of social life, or whether they attempt to alter them by speeding them up or slowing them down. In an extensive word-per-minute count of newscasters on four Vancouver radio stations we were able to determine that reading speeds varied considerably.

Curiously enough, CKLG is a teenagers’ station, concentrating on pop music, while CHQM styles itself as a “relaxed” station for the middle-aged. All of these word-per-minute counts were in excess of those we counted for human conversation, except when it became highly excited.

A 16-hour continuous survey of the same four stations showed something even more revealing: new program items appeared on the average every 1 to 2 minutes—that is to say, this was the amount of time given to a single subject before it was abandoned in favor of a new topic. This is even more brief than the normal pop recording, which long ago fixed the average human interest span for music at no more than three minutes.

The graphs from which I extracted the foregoing information show that the recurrence of isorhythmic and leitmotiv material forms tight little loops throughout the day. It is rarely more than an hour between news broadcasts, rarely more than fifteen minutes between weather reports and rarely more than five minutes between commercials on most of the stations. The all-at-once quality of modern broadcasting is further accented by the uniform dynamic level of programs, a technique known as
compression
. On some stations all program material is compressed to the highest permissible level.

The continuous sound wall of radio broadcasting stands in sharp contrast to the other rhythms mentioned in this chapter. It contradicts them and in many ways has contributed to a lessening of our appreciation for them. This need not be so. Radio, like art, is deliberately created. But art is a skillful selection of experiences, fashioned to give us an intimation of higher, or at least alternative, modes of existence. Radio, too, could be employed to show us alternative modes of living. If modern life is too fast-paced, radio might find a new vocation if, instead of increasing its tempo as it appears to be doing, it assisted man in slowing down by reinforcing once again the natural rhythms of life.

This is the idea behind Bruce Davis’s Environmental Radio. Davis’s plan is to have microphones installed in wilderness areas from which would be transmitted nothing more or less than the natural soundscape, bringing city-dwellers direct relays from the wilds. The key to the plan is that nothing would be added or edited. The station would simply transmit continuously the sounds at the microphone location.

For years man has been pumping his affairs out across the wildnerness environment. For once the natural soundscape would be allowed, in its wisdom, to speak back to us.

SEVENTEEN

The Acoustic Designer

When the rhythms of the soundscape become confused or erratic, society sinks to a slovenly and imperiled condition. That was the thesis announced in the introduction to this book. But the other thesis under which I have written is that the soundscape is no accidental byproduct of society; rather it is a deliberate construction by its creators, a composition which may be as much distinguished for its beauty as for its ugliness. When a society fumbles with sound, when it does not comprehend the principles of decorum and balance in soundmaking, when it does not understand that there is a time to produce and a time to shut up, the soundscape slips from hi-fi to lo-fi condition and ultimately consumes itself in cacophony.

It is important to realize that the lo-fi state is not a natural corollary to higher density living or population increase. A visit to the bazaars and traditional towns of the Middle East will impress one by the quiet, almost furtive manner in which large numbers of people manage to go about their business without disturbing one another. The sound sewer is much more likely to result when a society trades its ears for its eyes, and it is certain to result when this is accompanied by an impassioned devotion to machines.

If the acoustic designer favors the ear, it is only as an antidote to the visual stress of modern times and in anticipation of the ultimate reintegration of all the senses.

The Principles of Acoustic Design
     The acoustic designer may incline society to listen again to models of beautifully modulated and balanced soundscapes such as we have in great musical compositions. From these, clues may be obtained as to how the soundscape may be altered, sped up, slowed down, thinned or thickened, weighted in favor of or against specific effects. The ultimate endeavor is to learn how sounds may be rearranged so that all possible types may be heard to advantage—an art called orchestration. The outright prohibition of sound being impossible, and all exercises in noise abatement being consequently futile, these negative activities must now be turned to positive advantage following the indications of the new art and science of acoustic design.

Acoustic design does not, therefore, consist of a set of paradigms or formulae to be imposed on lawless or recalcitrant soundscapes, but is rather a set of principles to be employed in adjudicating and improving them. In addition to the lessons taught by music, these principles consist of:

1. a respect for the ear and voice—
   when the ear suffers a threshold shift or the voice cannot be heard, the environment is harmful;
   
2. an awareness of sound symbolism—
   which is always more than functional signaling;
   
3. a knowledge of the rhythms and tempi of the natural soundscape;
   
4. an understanding of the balancing mechanisms by which an eccentric soundscape may be turned back on itself