The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (51 page)

Footnotes

INTRODUCTION

^a
For definitions of
ear cleaning, clairaudience
and other special terms, see the glossary.

CHAPTER ONE
:
The Natural Soundscape

^b
The Roman writer referred to is Pliny
(Natural History
, V. x. 54), who merely states that the cataracts were very noisy but does not claim that they caused deafness. A legend, nevertheless, seems to have grown up to this effect, for we find it mentioned in Bernardino Ramazzini’s
Diseases of Workers (De Morbis ArHficium)
of 1713, a work which is remarkable for being the first known study to mention industrial deafness.

CHAPTER TWO
:
The Sounds of Life

^c
Decibels are more accurately designated by the addition of A, B or C to their abbreviation of dB. DBA indicates that the lower frequencies of the sound are discriminated against by a weighting network in the measuring instrument in a manner roughly equivalent to the human ear’s discrimination against low-frequency sounds. DBB indicates less of such discrimination, while dBC represents nearly flat response to the sound being measured.

^d
Abbreviations for languages are: E—English, A—American, F—French, Ar—Arabic, V—Vietnamese, J—Japanese, G—German, Gr—Greek, M—Malay, U—Urdu, L—Lokele tribe of the Congo.

CHAPTER THREE
:
The Rural Soundscape

^e
I must warn the reader that Levi-Strauss informs me that the Sacred Noise theory developed in this book bears “little relationship, if any” to what he has written. Nevertheless, I must give him credit for igniting my imagination.

CHAPTER FOUR
:
From Town to City

^f
Typically, while both the Muslim and Christian faiths have important signaling devices, the Jewish faith, which is not missionizing, does not.

CHAPTER FIVE
:
The Industrial Revolution

^g
The earliest study of industrial deafness that I have been able to discover was that of Bernardino Ramazzini,
Diseases of Workers (De Morbis ArHficium)
, 1713.

CHAPTER SEVEN
:
Music, the Soundscape and Changing Perceptions

^h
A note of luxury is sounded in the three-tone horn, for it is standard equipment only on the most expensive cars: Cadillac and Lincoln Continental.

ⁱ
I recently came across an interesting confirmation of the above paragraph in the words of Stockhausen: “I was flying every day for two or three hours over America from one city to the next over a period of six weeks, and my whole time feeling was reversed after about two weeks. I had the feeling that I was visiting the earth and living in the plane. There were just very tiny changes of bluish colour and always this harmonic spectrum of engine noise. At that time, in 1958, most of the planes were propeller planes and I was always leaning my ear—I
love
to fly, I must say—against the window, listening with earphones directly to the inner vibrations. And though theoretically a physicist would have said that the engine sound doesn’t change, it changed all the time because I was listening to all the partials within the spectrum. It was a fantastically beautiful experience. And I really discovered the innerness of the engine sounds and watched the slight changes of the blue outside and then the formation of the clouds, this white blanket always below me. I made sketches for
Carr é
during that time, and thought I was already very brave in going far beyond the time of memory, which is the crucial time between eight- and sixteen-second-long events.” Jonathan Cott,
Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer
, London, 1974, pp. 30–31.

CHAPTER EIGHT
:
Notation

^j
The history of the technology of sound visualization would make a good subject for a thesis. Many of the people who worked on this problem came at the subject after work in visual studies. Typical was the case of Thomas Young, who invented the first practical means of projecting sound by means of a moving stylus connected to a tuning fork over a wax-coated revolving drum—an instrument called the phonautograph (1807). Young’s previous work had been in the study of light (he was the first to measure astigmatism) and in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

^k
On the other hand it seems necessary to point out that the proliferation of noise measurement systems, each claiming to be a refinement over the last, also tends to obscure the basic issue under a mask of jargon, designed largely to make it possible for engineers to stay in the noise pollution business without really solving it.

^l
See Appendix I for isobel contour and sound event maps.

CHAPTER NINE
:
Classification

^m
Drift (fading) or displacement (ambiguous point of origin) often result from atmospheric disturbances such as wind or rain.

ⁿ
Acoustical engineering firms have also already taken over our term
soundscape
and speak of “soundscaping an office” to refer to the same white-noise mesmerism.

^o
See Appendix II for International Sound Preference Survey.

CHAPTER TEN
:
Perception

^p
Piaget calls these two complementary aspects of perception “accommodation” and “assimilation,” but I prefer the outgoing suggestion of “expression.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
:
Morphology

^q
I am aware that there is a certain similarity between these two types of studies and what structuralists call a paradigmatic series and a syntagmatic chain, but I think it best not to use expressions which sound like rusty iron on the tongue.

^r
In the more restricted areas of specialized field study, the morphological approach can be applied more systematically. See in particular our study
Five Village Soundscapes
, Vancouver, 1976.

^s
The natural rustling of Maori women’s flaxen skirts
(piu piu)
produces a similar susurration of great beauty.

^t
And much more inexpensively than by going to the acoustical engineers. See Chapter Fourteen.

CHAPTER TWELVE
:
Symbolism

^u
The fact that numerous people tested (in Canada) also produced rounded drawings in response to steady-state drones such as those produced by air-conditioners is perhaps explained by my remarks to follow about the taming of natural sounds as man retreats into artificially controlled interior environments.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
:
Noise

^v
The Book of Noise
, Price Milburn Co., Wellington, New Zealand, 1973.

^w
It may be pointed out that in a few isolated cities the noise level has actually been lowered by means of strict noise abatement procedures. Thus when Moscow prohibited the use of car horns in 1956, the result was a drop of 8 to 10 phons (Constantin Stramentov, “The Architecture of Silence,”
The UNESCO Courier
, July, 1967, p. 11). The noise level in GÖteborg (Sweden) has also been lowered by 7 dBA in recent years due to strict limits on new busses, compressors and garbage disposal trucks (Dr. B. Mollstedt, personal communication).

^x
I am grateful to Dr. G. Schmezer for providing information from the municipal archives.

^y
For the sake of clarity a number of smaller municipalities supplying information, notably in Australia and Canada, have not been included. For a detailed assessment of the situation in Canada the reader is referred to the World Soundscape Project document,
A Survey of Community Noise By-Laws in Canada (1972)
. In the international survey we were unfortunately unsuccessful in securing sufficient accurate information from Communist countries. In the following table, communities with no legislation other than provision against noisy vehicle exhaust as part of a highway act or code are listed as possessing no legislation.

The Norwegian level for residential districts is 55 dBA at night during the summer, and 60 dBA during the winter. The levels for Bombay were obtained by S. K. Chatterjee, R. N. Sen and P. N. Saha (see note, p. 198). Most of these levels also fall below those required by Tokyo law, which is 45 dBA for residential districts at night. For further comparison, the night level for Sweden is 40 dBA and that for Richmond (Australia) is 30 dBA.

^aa
Freiburg also permits the mowing of lawns only from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Outside the Germanic countries, we have obtained information from only one other city with a by-law against carpet-beating—Adelaide (Australia): By-law No. IX, Paragraph 25b (1934).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
:
Listening

^ab
From Scarborough, England, comes the news that a British fisherman won what was billed as the World Shouting Competition by raising his voice to 3 decibels at a distance of three meters.

^ac
The Composer in the Classroom, Ear Cleaning, The New Soundscape, When Words Sing, Toronto, 1965, etc.

^ad
Eigenton
is the German word used to refer to the fundamental resonance of a room, produced by the reflection of sound waves between parallel surfaces. It can be located empirically by singing different notes. The room (particularly an empty one) will resonate quite loudly in unison with the voice when the right note is sounded.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
:
The Acoustic Community

^ae
A Helmholtz resonator is a cavity-type resonator, so constructed that it will vibrate only at a particular frequency. It was developed by the German physicist Hermann Helmholtz in the nineteenth century to analyze the harmonic components of complex sounds.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

p. 5

Music is sounds
Quoted from R. Murray Schafer,
The New Soundscape
, London and Vienna, 1971, p. 1.

p. 7

Therefore the music
Hermann Hesse,
The Glass Bead Game
, New York, 1969, p. 30.

p. 8

When a writer
Erich Maria Remarque,
All Quiet on the Western Front
, Boston, 1929, see Chapter 4.

p. 9

The days are hot Ibid
., p. 126.

William Faulkner
William Faulkner,
As I Lay Dying
, New York, 1960, p. 202.