J. Gregory McDaniel, the Boston University mechanical engineer who explained all this to me, is a big man with a rockcracking laugh and a jaw off Mt. Rushmore. He is now using the pattern-recognizing tree-frog eggs as a model to create “biologically inspired” sensors for the U.S. Army. Soldiers will scatter them like tiddlywinks every meter or so across areas in Iraq and Afghanistan where they want to be able to monitor the history of patterned vibrations, like mine burying, before they drive through. “The army told me the sensors had to cost less than a dollar a piece!” McDaniel repeated more than once before giving his cliff-breaking laugh. “Now we’re starting to make them so you can put ’em in water to detect patterned vibrations there. Just like the eggs!” Vibration-monitoring devices based on frog embryos may soon be saving troops and ships around the world.
Just as we’re instinctually predisposed to be disturbed by sounds that stick out from the ambient flow, when we hear lots of different sounds simultaneously, the result can be not just less jarring but actually more calming—closer kin to the family of silence—than even low-level sounds we hear separately. Hence the sleep-inducing patterns produced by white-noise machines that bring together all audible frequencies at once. Or the musical productions produced twenty-four hours a day by the infrastructure of our great cities.
At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, Dr. William Braid White, director of research and acoustics for the American Steel and Wire Company, created a nationwide stir when he proposed that the roar of cities actually had a musical undertone. Dr. White encouraged every member of his audience to go to the twentieth story of a New York skyscraper, open a window, and lean out. “Let him then listen carefully to the noises that float up to him from the street below,” Dr. White instructed. “After a while he will notice that the crashes, bangs, and clatters that, upon the street level, come as a succession of shattering blows upon his ears, now begin to blend into a single continuous roar.” Having reached this point of higher acoustical consciousness, the fellow hanging out of the window was commanded to concentrate still further until he made out “a low bass hum below the main roar.” This, Dr. White argued, was the “ground tone” of New York, based on innumerable small elements, which, while individually disagreeable, together made for a genuinely musical tone. (New York’s, he said, was pitched between A and B flat in the low bass.)
Every city in the world, Dr. White claimed, has its own special ground tone. Chicago, for example, though filled with people who are just as noisy as New Yorkers, seemed to Dr. White “more lighthearted.” Though the Loop was “crowded to suffocation,” the lake acted as a damper—all the more necessary because the streetcars were noisier and the sound of the elevated “far more pervasive.” All in all, Dr. White was inclined to place Chicago’s ground tone at E flat. London, on the other hand, had “a heavy hum” close to the lowest C, because it was a city of “low buildings, wood paving blocks, moist atmosphere”—and a “law-abiding population” not prone “to displays of excessive excitement.”
Dr. White confessed that his discovery might not carry overwhelming scientific relevance, but he contended that if we listen for the particular character of music made by our respective blendered city noises, we might achieve insights into both the innate psychologies and environmental influences acting upon residents. There were also, he implied, benefits for the listener: all you need is a little distance in order to begin receiving something of the concertgoer’s pleasure from an experience of sound that might otherwise strike the ears simply as noxious clamor.
I thought about frog eggs, snakes, Dr. White’s experiment, and about sound and offensive sound. When does a multiplicity of noises add up to a musical undertone as opposed to a galling cacophony? If a mall roof was stripped off, and Dr. White was elevated to a point high above it, how would he characterize the nature of the place from its sound?
But the phenomenon in question goes far beyond the mall. The sound designer DMX lists restaurants, hotels, entertainment complexes, health and fitness centers, and a handful of prestigious universities among its clients. Supermarkets, hospitals, building lobbies, parking garages, public restrooms, and most airports today have sound streamed through their waiting areas and corridors. Even the depths of our swimming pools are now sometimes amplified with music, as I discovered when a conference on noise took me to Foxwoods Casino. It’s very, very loud everywhere you turn at Foxwoods, and the blanket of green trees beyond the casino confines are off-limits to guests. The only “escape” permitted is gambling. I consoled myself that once I dove beneath the water of the pool I would steal a break for as long as I could hold my breath. To my shock, when I dipped beneath the water I found that speakers were playing there as well. Muzak, at the height of its popularity, used music primarily as a backdrop to visual displays. Today, so-called foreground music, which is played at higher volumes and features original artists with vocals, bass, and percussions intact, is the soundtrack of choice.
The new noise is all about trying to demodulate and defy any larger pattern of environmental sound. Usually this translates into being loud, but not always. Designers are now dedicating themselves to provoking moods and emotional connection from sounds of every dimension made by individual products themselves. Sonic branding is fast becoming a major business. More and more product noises are now manipulated to punch up the consumer’s desire to purchase. The purr or roar of an automobile engine. The sound of a golf ball. The click of a camera. The crunching of foods. The sound of the lipstick-container top popping off and the lipstick sliding up. Already these sounds are being analyzed and enhanced. Everything we buy is going to join the acoustical menagerie endlessly bleating out its sonic identity to every passerby.
Going back to Dr. White, I would propose a definition of noise as sound that you can’t get distance on—sound that gets inside your head and won’t go away. Hypersonic sound, a relatively new technology that dispenses with the loudspeaker altogether by shooting a super-focused ray of sound directly at its target, is only an extreme version of what most of the new noise is trying to do. When the acoustical laser beam of hypersonic sound hits the ears, it feels as though a projected voice is speaking inside the “listener’s” skull. I got beamed by one playing party dance music in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. As the person holding the flat-black tablet-style speaker pans the beam across you, you hear the sound pass from ear to ear through your head. Big wow factor. There are numerous online diaries and pleas from people who may or may not be paranoid schizophrenics discussing hypersonic sound as one more proof of a conspiracy involving a huge time and energy commitment by extremely scary forces to take over their brains and drive them to suicide.
For all of us, the effect of sound we can’t get away from can be literally dizzying. When it is loud enough it can disturb the vestibular system in the inner ear on which our sense of equilibrium depends. Even when not actually inducing vertigo, there’s a loss of psychological balance that comes from being taken over by a sound; our aural back and forth with the world is gone and we are shaken into the larger vibrations.
One afternoon at rush hour I went to Grand Central Station. I stood in the middle of the terminal, beneath the great vaulted ceiling with its twinkling stars, listening.
At midnight on January 2, 1950, a series of extraordinary, spontaneous protests brought to an end a 13-week program in which canned music, along with 240 commercials per 17-hour period, were broadcast through 82 loudspeakers positioned throughout the terminal. The program had been a profitable public-private partnership: the New York Central Railroad was making $1,800 a week (almost $15,000 in today’s terms) from leasing the soundscape of Grand Central Station to Muzak and the advertisers who worked with it. But the commuters rose up, insisting on their inalienable right not to be exploited as “captive audiences,” demanding their “right not to listen.” They made dire prophecies that if this practice were tolerated, the trains themselves would
be next. They enlisted psychiatrists to argue that the constant sound was deleterious to the nervous system, and advertisers who testified that the initiative would besmirch the integrity of the business of advertising. They refused to be silenced and began preparing legal briefs.
And suddenly, amazingly, the railroad backed down and abandoned the program. “We just threw in the towel,” one unnamed railroad spokesperson declared. The manager of the terminal concluded his announcement of the termination of the public-address system broadcast by thanking “all our passengers for giving us the benefit of their sincere opinions on the subject, pro and con, for it is only after a thorough airing of the issues that such matters can be decided.”
I stood a few moments, letting the great reverberating waves of sound wash over me. I heard the rolling wheels of suitcases; the unfolding crinkles of maps; the scuffs and squeaks of shoes on the big, polished light tiles; the chink of an umbrella onto the stone; a broken sentence, “Anyway—here you are”; an impossibly low, faint bellowing of some train announcement. Above all, I heard the different frequencies of thousands of melding voices floating up to the great blue-green barrel vault dancing with golden stars and the silent bestiary of the zodiac, swelling and ebbing in one great sublime roar. I stood there and shut my eyes. As I listened, I knew I could only have been in this one place in all the world.
After my visit to Grand Central, I knew we couldn’t blame all noise today on evil anonymous retailers, restaurateurs, and the corporations who supply them. How did we ever get to the point of giving the acoustical shock troops such a wide field of opportunity? What is the nature of our complicity? As the commuters in Grand Central once demonstrated, life doesn’t have to sound this way.
To get a better handle on why we let things come to such a pass, I still had to travel to the extremes of loud; to people who choose not just to pound with sound but to pulverize—to turn themselves and others inside out with noise. For if I now understood some of the motivations for amping up the volume, I had yet to grasp the rationale behind the pursuit of noise for noise’s sake. I suspected that this principle underlay a great deal of the day-to-day sound of today. Noise has become our way of “just saying no” to many, many things. I wanted to zero in on the cultural and technological developments that have driven us to make sonic punishment a badge of freedom.
First, however, I needed a break. I felt as though I’d been on an exhausting tour to some not very nice places. Come to think of it, I had. Now, like any other weary traveler, I wanted to put down my guidebook and take off my shoes. I needed refreshment: an out-of-the-way café shaded with umbrellas, serving lemon ices; an inviting spring shadowed by a willow tree; a hidden garden graced with old gray statues and lichen-ambered stone benches. I craved a little quiet time.
CHAPTER SIX
Silent Interlude
Having neither time nor money for a holiday flight, I decided to go on a tour of oases of silence near my midtown office. As a matter of principle, pursuing silence should be pleasurable, like hunting for prize wild mushrooms or bathing in mild seas, not painful, like striving to flatten one’s stomach or to maintain a stern budget.
Wherever you live there are ways of finding silence—it’s just that these ways are often not as pleasant as they should be. Silence is still around, but often it’s been marginalized to the point where it conveys the prospect of eternal silence a little too vividly. Abandoned, broken-glass-strewn lots behind barbed wire, vacant buildings, and mortuaries might be quiet, but at what cost?
That said, the basic strategy for locating the remaining sites of silence in your hometown is to envision it as the Costa del Sol. The beach is out of the question. All the places people are naturally drawn to for work, recreation, and shopping are going to be impossibly loud. But a short distance inland cuts the crowds down to a dribble of locals and suddenly one finds oneself in an authentically foreign place. So ask yourself: What is the interior of the place I live? Where do surf and sand stop? What’s the road no one bothers to drive? The bench where no one sits?
In many cities, the land underneath the yawning arches where old bridges sink their foundations is a place of refuge, as are the tops of undistinguished skyscrapers. In smaller towns, historical societies and libraries with inadequate Internet connections are almost invariably deserted. Museums of unfashionable subjects are a good bet anywhere (you can almost always hear a pin drop in collections attached to schools of medicine). Cemeteries on weekdays, wherever you live, are an obvious but reliable refuge. Just remember to keep asking, Where’s the culture pulling everyone? Now turn around and walk the other way. Keep walking.
Manhattan might not seem like the most promising foraging ground for a couple of hours of silence, but I’m in an especially fortunate area for hunters of that aural truffle. My own circuit is small and more effortless than it might be in many ostensibly quieter communities.
POCKET PARKS
Within a ten-minute walk of where I work there are two marvelous and one better-than-nothing example of the pocket park. Pocket parks—also known as miniparks and vest-pocket parks—are small patches of landscaped nature generally built on vacant building lots or scraps of urban land that fall between the cracks of real estate interests.
I began my morning’s pursuit of moderate silence at Paley Park on East Fifty-third Street, just across Fifth Avenue from the Museum of Modern Art. Opened in the spring of 1967, it is one of the oldest pocket parks in the United States. It is named for William Paley, the former chairman of CBS, who financed and oversaw the park’s design on the site of the old Stork Club. When he announced his plans to create the park, Paley described it as a “resting place” and a “new experiment for the enjoyment of the out-of-doors in the heart of the city.” It proved an enormous hit from the moment it opened, and has remained popular ever since. The New York Times called it “a corner of quiet delights amid city’s bustle.” Early visitors waxed enthusiastic about the relief it provided from the din of the streets, and the “acoustic perfume” of the park’s waterfall.
To enter Paley Park, you ascend a few steps from Fifty-third Street into a narrow gap between tall buildings, flanked by ivy-covered walls. (The park’s landscape designer, Robert Zion, described them as “vertical lawns.”) Almost instantly, the waterfall at the far end of the park—twenty feet high and running with some 1,800 gallons of water per minute—entirely drowns out the street noise. The morning I visited, the park’s tall, scraggly honey locusts were still bare, but the gray pots scattered around the park were bright with clumps of yellow tulips. From the entrance, the rectangular sheet of brown stone at the far end of the park over which the white water flows resembles a movie screen, but as you come closer you realize that the backdrop is in fact composed of countless small brown-and-gray irregular stones that sometimes slow and highlight the pattern of falling water. It’s beautiful. Like the other two pocket parks in my neighborhood, there’s no real quiet. Water masks the grinding city sounds. It works: the effect on the spirit is one of silence.
Jacob Riis is credited with having invented the idea of the pocket park in 1897, when he was secretary of New York City’s Committee on Small Parks. The committee issued a statement declaring that “any unused corner, triangle or vacant lot kept off the market by litigation or otherwise may serve this purpose well.” New York abounded with possibilities at the turn of the century, but Riis’s idea went largely unrealized. The real surge in implementing the concept occurred in postwar Europe, London and Amsterdam in particular, where the staggering numbers of bombed-out building sites provided the opportunity to create an array of small parks at less cost than reconstruction. Pocket parks thus came into their own in literal gaps in the fabric of the city. In New York, their proliferation began in the late 1960s during the Lindsay administration, under the stewardship of the commissioner of parks Thomas Hoving. Noting the profusion of small parcels of empty land in the city—Bedford-Stuyvesant alone had 378 vacant lots along with another 346 abandoned
buildings—Hoving saw that even a modest allotment of parks money, less than 10 percent of the annual budget, would be enough to acquire and develop 200 pocket parks across the city.
Hoving recognized how great a difference these small oases could make in the lives of the communities where they were situated. They offered the city not only “lungs” and a respite from noise but opportunities for collective action on the part of the surrounding communities that Hoving enlisted to reclaim the land. Hoving saw that the communal act of making these spaces of quiet itself promoted harmony.
Greenacre Park, where I walked next, on Fifty-first Street between Second and Third Avenues, is larger and to my mind still more exquisite than Paley. At the far end of the park from its Fifty-first Street entrance, an even higher waterfall tumbles down over great uneven blocks of rough-hewn brown granite. The steps leading down to each of the park’s three levels are themselves edged by a stream of water running over irregular stones. The lovely, pale branches of a Japanese magnolia tree scribble at the western border of the waterfall, and this afternoon a large ornamental pear tree up above was gorgeously festooned with white blossoms. Miraculous.
I sat down on a white metal chair on the lowest level of the park, nearest the waterfall. Having individual chairs, as opposed to benches, was part of what made the pocket parks novel—and successful. Several studies undertaken a few years after the opening of Paley Park to look at the use of public plazas and other open areas in the city found that their effectiveness was directly tied to their “sit-ability”—defined both by availability of seating and the ability to shift the position of one’s seat at will. Our sense of the quiet of a place depends on being able to comfortably pause within it wherever the mood takes us.
In Pursuit of Silence Page 10