The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (6 page)

The volcanoes of Iceland produce something of the same effect, but moving back from them one is surprised by the change of sound effects.

At the crater itself there are thunderous, explosive sounds and even near the crater you can feel the ground shaking. The fatal walls of lava (2–3 meters high) inch out killing everything in their path. They are almost silent, but not quite, for listening carefully you can hear delicate, brittle snaps in the crust—dry clicks, like the fracturing of glass, spread out over several miles. When it meets wet land the lava also hisses in a suffocating sort of way. Otherwise all is nearly silent.

Even where there is no life, there can be sound. The ice fields of the North, for instance, far from being silent, reverberate with spectacular sounds.

Within three or four miles of the glaciers you begin to hear the cracking of massive ice packs. It sounds like distant thunder and recurs every five or six minutes. As you get closer you can distinguish between the initial crack, like a huge pane of glass being cracked, followed by the rumble of falling ice, and then the whole is reverberated distantly in the mountains.

Rivers of glacier water form tunnels underneath the ice. The falling ice inside these tunnels, the running water and the movement of mud and rocks create a noise which is amplified many times by the hollow structure and hits the observer on the surface with great force.

Nor is it silent below the earth’s surface as Heinrich Heine discovered when he visited the mines of the Harz Mountains in 1824.

I did not reach the deepest section… the point I reached seemed deep enough,—a constant rumbling and roaring, sinister groaning of machinery, bubbling of subterranean springs, water trickling down, everywhere thick exhalations, and the miner’s lamp flickering ever more feebly in the lonesome night.

When Krakatoa exploded on the night of August 26,1883, the sound was reported heard over the area shaded here
.

Apocalyptic Sounds
     Perhaps the universe was created silently. We do not know. The dynamics of the wonder which introduced our planet were without human ears to hear them. But the prophets exercised their imagination over the event. “In the beginning was the Word,” says John; God’s presence was first announced as a mighty vibration of cosmic sound. The prophets had a vision of the end also making a mighty noise. References are especially plentiful in Judaic and Muslim prophecies.

Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.

By the din of the drums of resurrection they have pressed tight their two ears in terror.

They put their fingers in their ears against the thunderclaps, fearful of death.

In the imagination of the prophets the end of the world was to be signaled by a mighty din, a din more ferocious than the loudest sound they could imagine: more ferocious than any known storm, more outrageous than any thunder.

The loudest noise heard on this earth within living memory was the explosion of the caldera Krakatoa in Indonesia on August 26 and 27,1883. The actual sounds were heard as far away as the island of Rodriguez, a distance of nearly 4,500 kilometers, where the chief of police reported: “Several times during the night … reports were heard coming from the eastward, like the distant roars of heavy guns. These reports continued at intervals of between three and four hours, until 3 p.m. on the 27th. …” On no other occasion have sounds been perceived at such great distances, and the area over which the sounds were heard on August 27 totaled slightly less than one-thirteenth of the entire surface of the globe.

It is as difficult for the human being to imagine an apocalyptic noise as it is for him to imagine a definitive silence. Both experiences exist in theory only for the living since they set limits to life itself, though they may become unconscious goals toward which the aspirations of different societies are drawn. Man has always tried to destroy his enemies with terrible noises. We shall encounter deliberate attempts to reproduce the apocalyptic noise throughout the history of warfare, from the clashing of shields and the beating of drums in ancient times right up to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs of the Second World War. Since that time worldwide destruction has been lessened perhaps, but sonic destruction has not, and it is disconcerting to realize that the ferocious acoustical environment produced by modern civilian life derives from the same eschatological urge.

TWO

The Sounds of Life

Bird-Song
      One of the most beautiful miracles in all literature and mythology occurs in the midst of the brutalities of the
Saga of the Volsungs
when Sigurd, after slaying the dragon Fafner and tasting his blood, suddenly understands the language of the birds—a moment which Wagner used to great advantage in his opera
Siegfried
.

The language and song of the birds has been a subject of much study, though still today it is highly debatable whether the birds “sing” or “converse,” in the customary sense of those terms. Nevertheless, no sound in nature has attached itself so affectionately to the human imagination as bird vocalizations. In tests in many countries we have asked listeners to identify the most pleasant sounds of their environment; bird-song appears repeatedly at or near the top of the list. And the history of effective bird imitations in music extends from Clement Janequin (d.
c
. 1560) to Olivier Messiaen (b. 1908).

Like birds themselves, bird vocalizations are of all types. A few are penetratingly loud. The call of the rufous scrubbird
(Atrichornis rufescens)
of Australia “is so intense that it leaves a sensation in one’s ears.” Other birds can at times dominate a soundscape because of their numbers. The bell minor bird
(Manorina melanophrys)
heard around Melbourne, with its persistent bell-like ring always sounding at approximately the same pitch (E
–F
-F#), gives rise to a soundscape as dense as that created by cicadas, but different in that it maintains a certain spatial perspective; for the bird sounds issue from recognizable points, unlike the stridulations of the cicadas, which create a continual presence, seemingly without foreground or background.

In most parts of the world, bird-song is rich and varied, without being imperialistically dominating. Thus, St. Francis of Assisi adopted birds as symbolic of gentleness in much the same manner as his Muslim contemporary Jalal-ud-din Rumi adopted the reed flute for his mystic sect as a symbol of humility and simplicity in opposition to the vulgarity and opulence of his time. The symbolic importance of bird-song for both music and the soundscape is a subject to be returned to later.

The vocalizations of birds have often been studied in musical terms. In the early days ornithologists constructed charming words in no man’s language to describe their sounds.

Musical notation was also used, and still is, by Olivier Messiaen, who has turned transcription into a complex art form. But despite the ingenuity of such work, bird vocalizations, with few exceptions, cannot be notated in musical terms. Many of the sounds uttered are not single tones but complex noises, and the high-frequency range and rapid tempo of many songs preclude their being transcribed in a notational system designed for the lower frequency ranges and slower tempi of human music. A more precise method of notation is that of the sound spectrograph and ornithologists are now using this method.

The structure of bird-song is often elaborate, for many birds are virtuoso performers. Some are also mimics. The Australian lyrebird is a superb mimic and its song often includes not only imitations of the songs of up to fifteen other species of birds, but also the neighing of horses, the sounds of cross-cut saws, car horns and factory whistles! The songs of many birds contain repetitive motifs, and though the function of the repetitions is often obscure, these melodic leitmotivs, variations and expansions show certain similarities to melodic devices in music, such as those employed by the troubadours, or by Haydn and Wagner. In some details, the affective language of certain birds has been shown to bear a relationship to the shapes of human vocal and musical expression. For instance, the distress notes of chicks are composed of descending frequencies only, while ascending frequencies predominate in pleasure calls. The same general contours are present in man’s expressions of sadness and pleasure.