The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World

by Trevor Cox

  5 Bill Davies, personal communication, September 2011.

  6 C. Spence and V. Santangelo, “Auditory Attention,” in The Oxford Handbook of Auditory Science: Hearing, ed. C. J. Plack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). When not writing about auditory attention, Charles Spence researches how sound affects taste.

  7 Switching talkers works only if both speakers are the same gender.

  8 UK data from MORI Social Research Institute: Neighbour Noise: Public Opinion Research to Assess Its Nature, Extent and Significance (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2003). US data from the 2000 US census as reported in L. Goines and L. Hagler, “Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague,” Southern Medical Journal 100 (2007): 287–94. EU data from Future Noise Policy, European Commission Green Paper, COM (96) 540 final (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 1996).

  9 V. J. Rideout, U. G. Foehr, and D. F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010).

  10 The quote is from Mike Caviezel (personal communication, May 13, 2011), whose experiences are given in full later in the book.

  11 R. Campbell-Johnston, “Hockney Works Speak of Rapture,” Times (London), January 21, 2012.

  1: The Most Reverberant Place in the World

  1 A. Tajadura-Jiménez, P. Larsson, A. Väljamäe, D. Västfjäll, and M. Kleiner, “When Room Size Matters: Acoustic Influences on Emotional Responses to Sounds,” Emotion 10 (2010): 416–22.

  2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Wallace Clement Sabine,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/515073/Wallace-Clement-Sabine, accessed May 30, 2013.

  3 W. C. Sabine, “Architectural Acoustics: Correction of Acoustical Difficulties,” Architectural Quarterly of Harvard University, March 1912.

  4 R. T. Beyer, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (New York: Springer, 1998). Original appeared in H. Matthews, Observations on Sound (publisher unknown, 1826).

  5 The physical volume might be altered as well. In designing a concert hall for classical music, at least 10 cubic meters (350 cubic feet) per seat is a useful rule of thumb.

  6 This quote comes from 1972, just before the lecture hall was improved by further renovations. B. F. G. Katz and E. A. Wetherill, “Fogg Art Museum . . . Room Acoustics” (paper presented at Forum Acusticum, Budapest, Hungary, August 29–September 2, 2005). The hall was demolished in 1973 to make way for student accommodation.

  7 The value is for a full audience at midfrequency.

  8 The quote comes from L. L. Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture (Hunting, NY: Krieger, 1979), which includes a wonderful first chapter detailing some of the myths of concert hall acoustics.

  9 P. Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 143.

  10 M. Barron, Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design, 2nd ed. (London: Spon Press/Taylor & Francis, 2010), 103.

  11 G. A. Soulodre, “Can Reproduced Sound Be Evaluated Using Measures Designed for Concert Halls?” (paper presented at Spatial Audio & Sensory Evaluation Techniques Workshop, Guildford, UK, April 6–7, 2006).

  12 All My Children was a soap opera that appeared on ABC for forty-one years. The quote is from J. C. Jaffe, The Acoustics of Performance Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

  13 Other changes also affected the acoustics. See L. L. Beranek, “Seeking Concert Hall Acoustics,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 24 (2007): 126–30.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Loudness is also important for this effect. As an orchestra plays louder, for example, the envelopment and broadening increase.

  16 Brian Eno, speaking on the BBC Radio 4 program Acoustic Shadows, broadcast September 14, 2004.

  17 This quote comes from Concert Hall Acoustics: Art and Science, a 2001 exhibit at the South Bank Centre, London. Source unknown.

  18 L. L. Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 2004), 7–8.

  19 Barron, Auditorium Acoustics, 153.

  20 S. Quinn, “Rattle Plea for Bankrupt Orchestras,” Guardian (London), July 13, 1999.

  21 D. Trevor-Jones, “Hope Bagenal and the Royal Festival Hall,” Acoustics Bulletin 26 (May 2011): 18–21.

  22 It was an underestimation of the audience absorption that is mostly to blame for the lack of reverberance in the hall; see B. M. Shield, “The Acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall,” Acoustics Bulletin 26 (May 2011): 12–17.

  23 R. A. Laws and R. M. Laws, “Assisted Resonance and Peter Parkin,” Acoustics Bulletin 26 (May 2011): 22–29.

  24 I found reverberation time values for the Taj Mahal on the web, with figures ranging from 10 to 30 seconds, but I could not find a reliable source. Similarly, there are references to a reverberation time of 20 seconds for Gol Gumbaz, but no information to check the provenance of the number.

  25 Tor Halmrast, personal communication, October 3, 2011.

  26 This reverberation time comes from A. Buen, “How Dry Do the Recordings for Auralization Need to Be?” Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics 30 (2008): 108; it was recorded when there were twenty-five people in the room. A better value for the empty room at midfrequency is about 11 seconds, estimated using an impulse response from the software Altiverb.

  27 Or one needs to use a measure such as reverberation time, which does not depend on the loudness of the initial sound.

  28 The poem is from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, first published in 1907, and begins, “A trick that everyone abhors, / In little girls is slamming doors.” Rebecca gets her comeuppance when a bust falls from above a door and kills her.

  29 For the audio geeks out there, this is an average of the 500-, 1,000-, and 2,000-hertz octave bands. The calculation is based on measurement data from Damian Murphy from the University of York (http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/hamilton-mausoleum, accessed July 15, 2012) because there were too many people in the room (who absorb sound) when I was visiting.

  30 See P. Darlington, “Modern Loudspeaker Technology Meets the Medieval Church,” Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, 2002; or the modestly titled paper by D. Lubman and B. H. Kiser, “The History of Western Civilization Told through the Acoustics of Its Worship Spaces” (paper presented at the 19th International Congress on Acoustics, Madrid, September 2–7, 2007).

  31 R. C. Rath, “Acoustics and Social Order in Early America,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. M. M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 209.

  32 This estimate is based on Barron, Auditorium Acoustics, 19.

  33 S. J. van Wijngaarden and R. Drullman, “Binaural Intelligibility Prediction Based on the Speech Transmission Index,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123 (2008): 4514–23. The phenomenon is similar to what happens with the cocktail party effect, that magical process that enables us to pick out the sound of a single speaker from the hubbub of the rest of a party.

  34 Even if the priest is not straight ahead, these are ways for the brain to exploit this binaural processing.

  35 For a nonecclesiastical example, see H. M. Goddard, “Achieving Speech Intelligibility at Paddington Station,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112 (2002): 2418. The acoustic principles are the same.

  36 P. F. Smith, The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), 21.

  37 Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses, 9. Incidentally, Richard Wagner was an example of a composer becoming a successful acoustician when he helped design the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1876. The innovative orchestral pit had space for up to 130 players and extended deep under the stage. Since there is no direct line of sight between orchestra and audience, much of the treble sound is lost. In addition to creating the distinctive subdued, haunting Wagner sound, this arrangement enables the singers to be heard above a large orchestra.

  38 T. H. Lewers and J. S. Anderson, “Some Acoustical Properties of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,”
Journal of Sound and Vibration 92 (1984): 285–97.

  39 F. Jabr, “Gunshot Echoes Used to Map Caves’ Interior,” New Scientist, no. 2815 (June 9, 2011): 26.

  40 R. Newmarch, The Concert Goer’s Library of Descriptive Notes (Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1991), 72.

  41 This measurement is featured in “Western Isles and Shetland,” which was the fourth episode of the sixth series of the BBC television program Coast, first broadcast July 3, 2011.

  42 B. Blesser and L.-R. Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 180.

  43 Quotes from Resonant Spaces, “What’s It All About?” http://arika.org.uk/resonant-spaces/what/?, accessed July 23, 2012; and from a poster advertising the tour in the offices of James Pask.

  44 Mike Caviezel, personal communication, May 13, 2011.

  45 These dimensions are very rough estimates from my visit.

  46 This contrasts starkly with the American reservoir and how it was described to me by Mike Caviezel. Wormit is a cuboid, whereas the American reservoir is a huge cylinder, which might cause focusing and explain the different perceived qualities.

  47 The exact reason for this difference is unclear, but the impulse responses I measured with a balloon suggest that there are a lot of early beneficial reflections in the reservoir.

  48 W. Montgomery, “WIRE Review of Resonant Spaces,” Wire 299 (January 2009).

  49 Ibid.

  50 Over the trombone frequency range, the time taken to drop 10 decibels is 3 seconds, based on a more accurate estimation of reverberation time given later in the chapter.

  51 “Album Reviews,” Billboard, September 16, 1995.

  52 D. Craine, “Strangeness in the Night,” Times (London), November 16, 2001.

  53 “Stuart Dempster Speaks about His Life in Music: Reflections on His Fifty Year Career as a Trombonist, in Conversation with Abbie Conant,” http://www.osborne-conant.org/Stu_Dempster.htm, accessed July 19, 2012.

  54 This is for a strange frequency range of 125–2,500 hertz, dictated by the instruments on the recording. The extraction method is described in P. Kendrick, T. J. Cox, F. F. Li, Y. Zhang, and J. A. Chambers, “Monaural Room Acoustic Parameters from Music and Speech,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124 (2008): 278–87. The 27-second value is an overestimation because in such a reverberant space, with multiple players layering sound, it is hard to tell when the musicians stop playing notes.

  55 W. D. Howells, Italian Journeys (publisher unknown, 1867), 233.

  2: Ringing Rocks

  1 A number of papers exploring the acoustics of ancient sites have been met with skepticism. The one I have in mind is R. G. Jahn, P. Devereux, and M. Ibison, “Acoustical Resonances of Assorted Ancient Structures,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 99 (1996): 649–58.

  2 J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1839), 21.

  3 M. Barron, Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design, 2nd ed. (London: Spon Press/Taylor & Francis, 2010), 276.

  4 B. Thayer, “Marcus Vitruvius Pollio: de Architectura, Book V” [translation], http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/5*.html, accessed October 18, 2011.

  5 This is why schoolteachers keep reminding their pupils to turn and talk to the audience when performing for their parents at assemblies.

  6 Barron, Auditorium Acoustics, 277.

  7 E. Rocconi, “Theatres and Theatre Design in the Graeco-Roman World: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches,” in Archaeoacoustics, ed. C. Scarre and G. Lawson (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), 72.

  8 A number of academics have tried to decode the development of theaters to look for acoustic understanding, including J. Kang and K. Chourmouziadou in “Acoustic Evolution of Ancient Greek and Roman Theatres,” Applied Acoustics 69 (2008): 514–29.

  9 B. Blesser and L.-R. Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). A great book setting out how architectural acoustics affects us.

  10 Vitruvius also advocated the use of resonating vases to detect assailants digging tunnels under the walls of Apollonia. The bronze vessels were hung from the ceiling, and the blows of the excavators’ tools excited the resonance, according to F. V. Hunt, Origins in Acoustics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 36.

  11 Thayer, “Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.”

  12 M. Kayili, Acoustic Solutions in Classic Ottoman Architecture (Manchester, UK: FSTC Limited, 2005).

  13 A. P. O. Carvalho, V. Desarnaulds, and Y. Loerincik, “Acoustic Behavior of Ceramic Pots Used in Middle Age Worship Spaces—A Laboratory Analysis” (paper presented at the 9th International Congress on Sound and Vibration, Orlando, FL, July 8–11, 2002).

  14 P. V. Bruel, “Models of Ancient Sound Vases,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112 (2002): 2333. Quite a few academics have made measurements on vases and reached similar conclusions.

  15 L. L. Beranek, Music, Acoustics and Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1962), 5.

  16 D. Richter, J. Waiblinger, W. J. Rink, and G. A. Wagner, “Thermoluminescence, Electron Spin Resonance and 14C-Dating of the Late Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic Site of Geissenklösterle Cave in Southern Germany,” Journal of Archaeological Science 27 (2000): 71–89. This work made headlines around the world, so information can also be found on news websites—for example, P. Ghosh, “‘Oldest Musical Instrument’ Found,” BBC News, June 25, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8117915.stm.

  17 F. d’Errico and G. Lawson, “The Sound Paradox,” in Archaeoacoustics, ed. C. Scarre and G. Lawson (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), 50.

  18 I. Morley, The Evolutionary Origins and Archaeology of Music, Darwin College Research Report DCRR-002 (Cambridge: Darwin College, Cambridge University, 2006).

  19 N. Boivin, “Rock Art and Rock Music: Petroglyphs of the South Indian Neolithic,” Antiquity 78 (2004): 38–53.

  20 L. Dams, “Palaeolithic Lithophones: Descriptions and Comparisons,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 4 (1985): 31–46.

  21 Luray Caverns, “Discovery,” http://luraycaverns.com/History/Discovery/tabid/529/Default.aspx, accessed June 17, 2012.

  22 H. H. Windsor, “The Organ That Plays Stalactite,” Popular Mechanics, September 1957.

  23 An early press report suggested, “When four-year old Robert Sprinkle bumped his head on a stalactite while visiting the Caverns in June 1954, the deep resonant tone of the rock fascinated him and his father.” “Stalactite Organ Makes Debut,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 9, 1957. A great story, but according to the press office at Luray Caverns, it is sadly incorrect.

  24 “The Rock Hamonicon,” Journal of Civilization (1841).

  25 Ibid.

  26 Ibid.

  27 J. Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History (London: Kahn & Averill, 2005), 90.

  28 Allerdale Borough Council, “The Musical Stones of Skiddaw: The Richardson Family and the Famous Musical Stones of Skiddaw,” http://www.allerdale.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/museums-and-galleries/keswick-museum/the-musical-stones-of-skiddaw.aspx, accessed March 15, 2011.

  29 Blades, Percussion Instruments, 90.

  30 M. Wainwright, “Evelyn Glennie’s Stone Xylophone,” Guardian (London), August 19, 2010.

  31 “Online Special: Ruskin Rocks!” Geoscientist Online, October 4, 2010, http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/ruskinrocks, accessed May 16, 2011.

  32 Hunt, Origins in Acoustics, 152.

  33 Strictly speaking, this description fits only when you are in the middle of the stairwell, equidistant from the walls.

  34 The quote comes from the Tatton Park Biennial 2012 exhibition catalogue: http://www.tattonparkbiennial.org/detail/3070, accessed March 17, 2011.

  35 I. Reznikoff, “On Primitive Elements of Musical Meaning,” Journal of Music and Meaning 3 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005).

  36 S. J. Wa
ller, “Sound and Rock Art,” Nature 363 (1993): 501.

  37 David Lubman, personal communication, June 25, 2012.

  38 S. J. Waller, speaking on the BBC Radio 4 program Acoustic Shadows, broadcast September 14, 2004. I also appeared on this program, talking about acoustic test chambers, such as the anechoic chamber described in Chapter 7.

  39 L. Dayton, “Rock Art Evokes Beastly Echoes of the Past,” New Scientist, no. 1849 (November 28, 1992), 14.

  40 Waller, Acoustic Shadows radio broadcast.

  41 Dayton, “Rock Art.”

  42 This was the second trip that failed acoustically. When I tried to visit the Rouffignac Cave in France, I found that the floor had been excavated to fit an electric train into the cavern, which altered the acoustics and rendered any sonic investigation pointless.

  43 D. Wilson, Hiking Ruins Seldom Seen: A Guide to 36 Sites across the Southwest, 2nd ed. (Guilford, CT: Falcon Guides, 2011), 16–17. The book reports on a study by archaeologist Donald E. Weaver, who dates the petroglyphs to somewhere between AD 900 and 1100.

  44 Ibid.

  45 P. Schaafsma, “Excerpts from Indian Rock Art of the Southwest,” in The Archeology of Horseshoe Canyon (Moab, UT: Canyonland National Park, date unknown), 15.

  46 Waller, “Sound and Rock Art.”

  47 Lubman, personal communication, June 25, 2012.

  48 The pyramid is 24 meters (80 feet) high, and the square base is 56 meters (185 feet) wide.

  49 A colleague of mine has suggested that the corrugated roof might also chirp.

  50 Lubman, personal communication, June 25, 2012.

  51 C. Scarre, “Sound, Place and Space: Towards an Archaeology of Acoustics,” in Archaeoacoustics, ed. C. Scarre and G. Lawson (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), 6.

  52 T. Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008), 326.

  53 D. Barrett, “Review: Collected Works,” New Scientist, no. 2118 (January 24, 1998), 45.

  54 It is not known whether Stonehenge was used for sacrifices. The real purpose of the site is still open to debate.