The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (9 page)

The English language reproduces only those animals with which English man, in his many migrations, has found himself in closest contact. But the English language knows no special words for those animals remote from English man: the galago, the mangabey, the llama or the tapir.

Some day a linguist ought to investigate those even more primeval human imitations, still found in folklore or children’s rhymes, where we have a decisive attempt to duplicate the actual sounds of animals and birds. The differences between languages are interesting.

Dog: bow-wow (E), arf-arf (A), gnaf-gnaf (F), how-how (Ar), gaû-gaû(V), won-won (J), kwee-kwee (L).

Cat: purr-purr (E), ron-ron (F), schnurr-schnurr (G).

Sheep: baa-baa (E), méé-méé (Gr, J, M), maa’-maa’ (Ar).

Bee: buzz (E), zŭz-zŭz (Ar), bun-bun (J), vū-vū (V).

Cockerel: cock-a-doodle-doo (E), cock-a-diddle-dow (Shakespeare), kikeriki (G), kokke-kokkō (J), kiokio (L).
^d

To this list one could add many other interesting words, for example, sneeze: kerchoo (A), atishoo (E), achum (Ar), cheenk (U), kakchun (J), ach-shi (V).

Such imitations are limited, of course, to the phonemes available for their reproduction in any given language; but such a study, if pursued diligently enough, might bring us closer to measuring how the critical features of natural sounds are perceived by different peoples.

In onomatopoeic vocabulary, man unites himself with the soundscape about him, echoing back its elements. The impression is taken in; the expression is thrown back in return. But the soundscape is far too complex for human speech to duplicate, and so it is in music alone that man finds that true harmony of the inner and outer world. It will be in music too that he will create his most perfect models of the ideal soundscape of the imagination.

THREE

The Rural Soundscape

The Hi-Fi Soundscape
     In discussing the transition from the rural to the urban soundscape, I will be using two terms: hi-fi and lo-fi. They need to be explained. A hi-fi system is one possessing a favorable signal-to-noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level. The country is generally more hi-fi than the city; night more than day; ancient times more than modern. In the hi-fi soundscape, sounds overlap less frequently; there is perspective—foreground and background: “… the sound of a pail on the lip of a well, and the crack of a whip in the distance"—the image is Alain-Fournier’s to describe the economic acoustics of the French countryside.

The quiet ambiance of the hi-fi soundscape allows the listener to hear farther into the distance just as the countryside exercises long-range viewing. The city abbreviates this facility for distant hearing (and seeing) marking one of the more important changes in the history of perception.

In a lo-fi soundscape individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds. The pellucid sound—a footstep in the snow, a church bell across the valley or an animal scurrying in the brush—is masked by broad-band noise. Perspective is lost. On a downtown street corner of the modern city there is no distance; there is only presence. There is cross-talk on all the channels, and in order for the most ordinary sounds to be heard they have to be increasingly amplified. The transition from the hi-fi to the lo-fi soundscape has taken place gradually over many centuries and it will be the purpose of several of the following chapters to measure how it has come about.

In the quiet ambiance of the hi-fi soundscape even the slightest disturbance can communicate vital or interesting information: “He was disturbed in his meditation by a grating noise from the coachhouse. It was the vane on the roof turning round, and this change in the wind was the signal for a disastrous rain.” The human ear is alert, like that of an animal. In the stillness of the night a paralyzed old lady in a story by Turgenev can hear the moles burrowing underground. “That’s when it’s good,” she reflects; “no need to think.” But poets do think about such sounds. Goethe, his ear pressed to the grass: “When I hear the humming of the little world among the stalks, and am near the countless indescribable forms of the worms and insects, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, Who created us in his own image. …”

From the nearest details to the most distant horizon, the ears operated with seismographic delicacy. When men lived mostly in isolation or in small communities, sounds were uncrowded, surrounded by pools of stillness, and the shepherd, the woodsman and the farmer knew how to read them as clues to changes in the environment.

Sounds of the Pasture
     The pasture was generally quieter than the farm. Virgil describes it well:

… Hyblaean bees coax you with a gentle humming through the gates of sleep … you will have the vine-dresser singing to the breezes, while all the time your dear full-throated pigeons will be heard, and the turtle-dove high in the elm will never bring her cooing to an end.

Shepherds may, as Lucretius suggests, have got the hint of singing and whistling from the sound of the wind. Or it may have been from the birds. Virgil says that Pan taught the shepherd “how to join a set of reeds with wax” as a means of conversing with the landscape.

Sweet is the whispered music of yonder

pinetree by the springs,

goatherd, and sweet too thy piping. …

Sweeter, shepherd, falls thy song

than yonder stream that tumbles

plashing from the rocks.

Shepherds piped and sang to one another to while away the lonely hours, as the dialogue form of Theocritus’s
Idylls
and Virgil’s
Eclogues
shows us; and the delicate music of their songs forms perhaps the first and certainly the most persistent of the man-made sonic archetypes. Centuries of piping have produced a referential sound that still suggests the serenity of the pastoral landscape clearly, though many traditional literary images and devices are beginning to slip away. The solo woodwind always paints the pastorale, and this archetype is so suggestible that even such a grandiloquent orchestrator as Berlioz slims his orchestra to a duet between solo English horn and oboe to draw us gently into the country
(Symphonie Fantastique
, third movement).

In the still landscape of the country, the clear dulcet tones of the shepherd’s pipe took on miraculous powers. Nature listened, then responded sympathetically: “The music struck the valleys and the valleys tossed it to the stars—till the lads were warned to drive home and to count their sheep, by Vesper, as he trod unwelcome into the listening sky.” Theocritus was the first poet to make the landscape echo the sentiments of the shepherd’s pipes, and pastoral poets have been copying him ever since.

… Practice country songs on a light shepherd’s pipe …

teaching the woods to echo back the charms of Amaryllis

says Virgil. For a recurrence of this miraculous power in music, we must wait until the nineteenth-century romanticists.

The pastoral soundscape our poets have been describing continued on into the nineteenth century. Alain-Fournier describes it in France: “Now and then the distant voice of a shepherdess, or of a boy calling to a companion from one clump of firs to another, had risen in the great calm of the frozen afternoon.” The juncture between town and pasture is attractively captured in this description by Thomas Hardy:

The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town chimneys, without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep pastures encroach upon the burghers’ backyards. And at night it was possible to stand in the very midst of the town and hear from their native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward the mild lowing of the farmer’s heifers, and the profound, warm blowings of breath in which those creatures indulge.

Sounds of the Hunt
     
A
quite different type of sonic archetype has come down to us from the hunt, for the horn transpierces the gloom of the forest wilderness with heroic and bellicose tones. Almost all cultures seem to have employed some type of horn in association with warfare and the hunt. The Romans used a hooped horn of conical tube as a signaling instrument for their armies and there are numerous references to it in Dion, Ovid and Juvenal; but when Rome declined, the art of smelting brass seems to have disappeared and with it went a special sound. When “Sigmund blew the horn that had been his father’s, and urged on his men,” it was an animal’s horn that he blew. The same type appears in the pages of the
Chanson de Roland
. But by the fourteenth century, the skill of smelting brass had been recovered and brilliant metallic tones began to echo across Europe.

By the sixteenth century the
cor de chasse
had taken on something like a definitive character and it is this instrument that gained special significance in the European soundscape, a significance that has lasted until recent times. In the days when hunting was popular, the countryside can scarcely have ever been free of horn calls, and the elaborate code of signals must have been widely known and understood.

As the
cor de chasse
was an open horn possessing only a few natural harmonics, its various signals possessed more distinctive rhythmic than melodic character. The various codes that have been preserved are of considerable complexity and, of course, vary greatly from country to country. They may be classified as follows:

1. brief calls intended to cheer on the hounds, to give warning, to call for aid or to indicate the circumstances of the hunt;
   
2. a special fanfare for each animal (several for the stag, depending on his size and antlers);
   
3. fancy tunes to begin or close a hunt, or sounded as special signs of joy.
   

Tolstoy has given us a good account of the festive nature of the hunt in Russia.

The hounds’ cry was followed by the bass note of the hunting cry for a wolf sounded on Danilo’s horn. The pack joined the first three dogs, and the voices of the hounds could be heard in full cry with the peculiar note which serves to betoken that they are after a wolf. The whippers-in were not now hallooing, but urging on the hounds with cries of “Loo! loo! loo!” and above all the voices rose the voice of Danilo, passing from a deep note to piercing shrillness. Danilo’s voice seemed to fill the whole forest, to pierce beyond it, and echo far away in the open country.

A contemporary recollection by a young woman shows how strong the heritage of the hunt still is in northern Germany.

It was still quite dark when one of the hunters ceremonially opened the hunt with a fanfare on his horn. Unless the stretch of land to be hunted was an open field, the only method of communication between hunters and beaters was through horn signals. During the formation, in which the hunters enclosed the area on three sides and the beaters on one, everyone was very quiet so as not to disturb the animals. The silence was broken by a horn signal, which was answered by a terrible, shrill toot from a single-pitch trumpet (which looked like a toy trumpet) blown by one of the beaters. We started to attack the land in front of us with rattles, pots, pans, noisemakers of every sort and shouts in all modulations. Frightened by the noise, every living creature was stirred up and chased out of its shelter in the direction of the hunters. As children we just loved to make the loudest noises. …

At the end of the day, everybody gathered around and listened to the horn player blowing the fanfares for the dead animals. There was a signal for every animal, and I remember that the one for the fox was the most beautiful, whereas the one for the rabbit was quite short and simple. At the end of the day, in the evening darkness, the hunt was ended by a cheerful, almost triumphant fanfare.

The hunting horn presents us with a sound of great semantic richness. On one level its signals provide a code which all participants understand. On another level it takes on a symbolical significance, suggesting free spaces and the natural life of the country. I also spoke of the hunting horn as an archetypal sound. Only sound symbols which are carried forward century after century qualify for this distinction, for they knit us with ancient ancestral heritages, providing continuity at the deepest levels of consciousness.

The Post Horn
     Another sound of similar character which was also ubiquitous on the European scene was the post horn. It too persisted for centuries, for it began in the sixteenth century when the administration of the post was taken over by the family of Thurn and Taxis, and as the postal routes extended from Norway to Spain so did the horn calls (Cervantes mentions them). In Germany the last post horns were heard in 1925. In England the post horn was still in use in 1914 when the London-to-Oxford mail was conveyed by road on Sundays. In Austria, horns were also heard until after the First World War, and even today no one is permitted to carry or sound a post horn, thereby enhancing the sentimental symbolism of the instrument (Article 24 of the Austrian Postal Regulations, 1957).