The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (45 page)

This last point is most easily understood by turning to Chinese philosophy and art. It is the natural alteration of events that forms the secret of the
yin
and
yang
exchange, the perfect oscillation in which each part implies the existence of the other. Lao-tzu says: “Gravity is the root of lightness; stillness, the ruler of movement.” A Chinese painter puts it this way:

Where things grow and expand that is
k’ai;
where things are gathered up, that is
ho
. When you expand
(k’ai)
you should think of gathering up
(ho)
and then there will be structure; when you gather up
(ho)
you should think of expanding
(k’ai)
and then you will have inexpressible effortlessness and an air of inexhaustible spirit.

In ancient Chinese society balance and regulation were highly prized in all things. Excesses of any kind were to be avoided. In the music of this period,
p’ing
, or level unmodulating pitch, with its attributes of smoothness and repose, was contrasted with
tsê
, sudden or contrary movement, with its attributes of assertiveness, activity and aggression. Analyses of pieces of music of the period show that balance was strictly maintained between the two states, so that a composition contained an identical number of
p’ing
and
tsê
features. By contrast, Western music is unbalanced; it is always inclined to be more static or more active. And the soundscape of the West also runs to extremes. There are numerous states of imbalance in need of attention. In each case the term in the left-hand column appears to be dominating that in the right-hand column.

Sound/Not-sound

Technological sounds/Human sounds

Artificial sounds/Natural sounds

  Continuous sounds/Discrete sounds

Low-frequency sounds/Mid- or high-frequency sounds

Thought must now be given to how the weighting of these terms may be readjusted to create new harmony and equipoise. These are enormous issues beyond the abilities of any individual to appreciably alter. But the designer does not redesign a whole society: he merely shows society what it is missing by not redesigning itself. And if he does this with passion and talent, his recommendations will eventually be heard and understood. Society is always incapable of imagining improvements without the voice from beyond. Ask Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones what kind of house they want to live in and they’ll have you design a hovel every time. It devolves on the designer to point out alternatives.

This is the function of art: to open out new modes of perception and to portray alternative life styles. Art is always outside society and the artist must never expect to win popularity easily. The mind of the designer will move in huge unrealistic excursions too; but he may also engage in some very practical preservation and repair work.

The Preservation of Soundmarks
     One practical task of the coustic designer would be to draw attention to soundmarks of distinction and, if there is good reason to do so, to fight for their preservation. The unique soundmark deserves to make history as surely as a Beethoven symphony. Its memory cannot be erased by months or years. Some sound-marks are monolithic, inscribing their signatures over the whole community. Such are famous church or clock bells, horns or whistles. What would Salzburg be without its Salvatore Mundi, Stockholm without its Stadhuset carillon, London without Big Ben?

In Vancouver, for instance, we have a cannon, built in 1816, which since 1894 has been fired over the harbor each evening, originally to tell fishermen the time, now preserved as a sound souvenir. We also had a diaphone foghorn at the Point Atkinson lighthouse which dated from 1912 and was recently replaced by the Ministry of Transport in its automation scrabble. A more recent arrival (1972) is a set of air horns on top of one of the city’s higher buildings which barks out the opening phrase of the National Anthem each day at noon (108 dBA a block away).

Whatever one may think of such soundmarks, they reflect a community character. Every community will have its own soundmarks, even though they may not always be beautiful. For instance: “During the very early period of gold mining [in Ballaarat, Australia] the very many quartz batteries operating caused a constant and sustained noise throughout the whole City area. This was accepted as part of the process of gold extraction.”

Some unusual sounds receive legal protection. Thus in the hot city of Damascus the sound of ice-making equipment is specifically exempted from the list of proscripted sounds mentioned in the noise abatement by-law, because such equipment performs a desirable community service and therefore presumably has an attractive symbolism.

It is the less ostentatious soundmarks that need the special vigilance of the acoustic designer, for despite their originality or antique charm, they are more likely to be unceremoniously excised from the soundscape. Often it will take the visitor to point out the value or originality of a soundmark to a community; for local inhabitants it may be an inconspicuous keynote. Let me mention a few originals from my own memory.

• the scraping of the heavy metal chairs on the tile floors of Parisian coffee-houses;
  
• the brilliant slam of the doors of the old carriages of the Paris Métro, followed by a sharp click, as the latch falls to the locked position (the effect can now, 1976, be heard only on the Marie d’Issy-Port de la Chapelle line);
  
• the sound of the leather straps on the trams in Melbourne, Australia—when they are tugged they twist around the long horizontal support poles and make rich squeaking noises;
  
• the virtuoso drumming of the Austrian bureaucrats with their long-handled rubber stamps:
  ta-te te-daa ta-te-daa;
  
• the high-pitched brilliant bells of the horse-drawn taxis in Konya, the last to be heard in any major town in Turkey;
  
• or in London, the memorable voice on the recording at certain sub-urban tube stations that says (or used to say), “Stand clear of the doors!"
  

The world is full of uncounterfeiting and uncounterfeitable sound souvenirs such as these, indelible memories for the aurally sensitive tourist, and always in need of protection against replacement by duds from multinational factories.

Repairs to the Soundscape
     Once acoustic design is established as a useful profession, and young designers move out into positions in government and industry, they will be able to effect numerous practical repairs to the soundscape. They might start by correcting some of the bungled design work of their tone-deaf predecessors.

Consider, for instance, a sonic signal for traffic crosswalks. There are several of these already in existence in different parts of the world. I have heard at least three: in Auckland (New Zealand), Växjö (Sweden) and London (England). In Auckland, the traffic lights have three modes: one for vehicular traffic in each direction and one for pedestrians, allowing them the freedom of the intersection. The cue for the pedestrians is a special light plus sonic signal, a hideous buzz, yet neither loud enough nor of sufficiently high frequency to clear the traffic noise. The signals in both London and Växjö consist of rhythmic effects. In London a series of rapid pips, a semitone apart, sound for about four seconds to signal the pedestrian to cross. In the signal I listened to, the two sounds always got out of phase, the one lagging slightly behind the other, in a manner that defied one to decide whether it was a stroke of British design genius or technical ineptitude. In Växjö a single ticking noise has two modes: a fast to go and a slow to stop. The first sounds like a ratchet and the second is set at about the heartbeat tempo of an Olympic sprinter, which is, I suppose, the image intended to be evoked.

The point I am trying to make is that while the acoustic crosswalk is probably a useful idea (one can appreciate its value for the blind), none of the signals heard so far meet all the design criteria, which are both social
and aesthetic
.

North America was introduced to a whole line of obnoxious buzzings when, about 1970, designers decided to equip cars with safety belts and installed a noise to remind the passenger to use them. Here again, the identical question: why must an acoustic attention-getter always be abominable?

Recall the aberrational quality of schizophonic devices such as public address systems. The sudden impact and startle effect of a voice barking an announcement down your neck, exaggerated by the instantaneous switch-on time of electroacoustical devices, is common enough today, but it needs to be redesigned. The technique of attracting attention without frightening the public out of its wits calls for subtle creative action. Sometimes a bell or buzzer is used for this purpose but the envelope of the bell is wrong. The P.A. sound cue should not have a sudden but a sloped attack. Not
but
.

The New Zealand Railway employs a tape-loop prelude to P.A. announcements consisting of an eight-second tune on a glockenspiel. But eight seconds is probably too long for repetitive use. In Holland, a short three-tone tune is played on an electric glockenspiel, but this is perhaps too short and boring. The student of acoustic design could profitably be given the assignment of designing a few short preludes to improve such situations.

These examples are only a few of those requiring attention, from a list long enough to keep an army of intelligent people amply occupied.

The Bad Pun of Bell’s Telephone Bell
     
All
public announcements abbreviate thought. An intelligent society would keep them to a minimum. The telephone also abbreviates thought. At any moment—perhaps even before I complete my next sentence—a voice from California or London or Vienna may jump onto the table announced by what Lawrence Durrell in
Justine
called “a small needle-like ring.”

Who invented the telephone bell? Certainly not a musician. Perhapsit is just a bad pun on the name of its inventor? It may be that such an audacious device should have an obnoxious sound, but the matter should be accorded more consideration. If we must be distracted ten or twenty times each day, why not by pleasant sounds? Why could not everyone choose his or her own telephone signal? In a day when cassettes and tape loops are cheap to manufacture this is entirely feasible.

It is true that the rings of telephones vary considerably from nation to nation. North American phones have single rings, caused by a mechanical clapper vibrating between two bells of identical or near-identical frequency. On Vancouver telephones this ring is repeated every 6 seconds with approximately 1.8 seconds of ring followed by 4.2 seconds of silence.

Although the intensity of the ring on North American telephones can be regulated to some extent by a dial on the base of the instrument, the intensity of the voice speaking and the ringback sound (i.e., the ringing heard over the receiver when a call is placed) are not strictly regulated. In one of our research projects we have registered a busy signal at over 120 dBA and conversation at over 100 dBA at the point where the ear would normally make contact with the receiver. This is loud enough to be an aural health hazard.

A modicum of design consideration was given to the British telephone, for its two loud rings, followed by a pause, was intentionally constructed to total five units—two beats of rings followed by three beats of silence—because it was thought that this asymmetrical meter would be more attention-getting than a meter of three, four or six. New Zealand telephones are constructed the same way, with two rings, and I timed the cycle at 3¼ seconds, resulting in a considerably more impatient sound than the North American telephone. (Also, on New Zealand telephones no manual adjustment of the intensity of the ringing is possible.) By contrast, in Sweden and parts of Germany the interval between rings is ten seconds. But in 1975 the Swedes began a conversion program to a faster-paced ring. For the telephone company time is money. Lines will be less tied up if telephones are answered more quickly. Thus in order for the telephone company to save a few crowns a whole nation is going to be made more jumpy.