R. MURRAY SCHAFER
Destiny Books
Rochester, Vermont
To my co-workers on
the World Soundscape Project
Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE: FIRST SOUNDSCAPES
ONE: The Natural Soundscape
TWO: The Sounds of Life
THREE: The Rural Soundscape
FOUR: From Town to City
PART TWO: THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOUNDSCAPE
FIVE: The Industrial Revolution
SIX: The Electric Revolution
INTERLUDE
SEVEN: Music, the Soundscape and Changing Perceptions
PART THREE: ANALYSIS
EIGHT: Notation
NINE: Classification
TEN: Perception
ELEVEN: Morphology
TWELVE: Symbolism
THIRTEEN: Noise
PART FOUR: TOWARD ACOUSTIC DESIGN
FOURTEN: Listening
FIFTEEN: The Acoustic Community
SIXTEEN: Rhythm and Tempo in the Soundscape
SEVENTEN: The Acoustic Designer
EIGHTEEN: The Soniferous Garden
NINETEEN: Silence
EPILOGUE: The Music Beyond
Appendix I: Sample Sound Notation Systems
Appendix II: International Sound Preference Survey
Glossary of Soundscape Terms
Footnotes
Notes
A Note About the Author
A Note About the Type
About the Author
About Inner Traditions
Other titles of interest…
Copyright
Preface
Ever since I began studying the acoustic environment, it has been my hope to gather my work together into one book which might serve as a guide for future research. This book accordingly borrows extensively from many of my previous publications, in particular the booklets The New Soundscape and The Book of Noise and the several documents of the World Soundscape Project, especially the essay The Music of the Environment and our first comprehensive field study, The Vancouver Soundscape. But it tries to build this fugitive material into a more careful arrangement.
As evidence has come in from more distant sources and as I have reflected further or been provoked by my fellow researchers, many early assumptions have been revised or abandoned. The present book is as definitive as it can be at the present time, but since only God knows for sure, it must still be regarded as tentative.
Much of the material of this book was revealed through an international study entitled the World Soundscape Project, which many agencies helped to fund. To my immediate co-workers on the Project I owe a great debt of gratitude for countless stimulating meetings and discussions. It is as much their book as it is mine, for they read it, criticized it and provided both facts and encouragement. In particular I wish to thank Hildegard Westerkamp, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse and Barry Truax. Jean Reed, now my wife, was a special help in checking sources, reading numerous drafts and tolerating the many moods of the author.
Numerous scholars in different disciplines have encouraged soundscape studies. Many have read portions of this book and have provided helpful commentaries. Others have suggested new angles of investigation or have sent material from abroad which could not otherwise have been obtained. In particular I wish to thank the following scholars: Professor Kurt Blaukopf and Dr. Desmond Mark of the Institute for Music, Dance and Theatre, Vienna; G. S. Metraux and Anny Malroux of UNESCO, Paris; Dr. Philip Dickinson, Department of Bioengineering, University of Utah; Professor John Large, Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton; Dr. David Lowenthal, Department of Geography, University College, London; Dr. Peter Ostwald, Langley Porter Neuropsy-chiatric Institute, University of California; Marshall McLuhan, Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto; Michel P. Philippot, l’ln-stitut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris; Dr. Catherine Ellis, University of Adelaide; Professor John Paynter, University of York; Professor Jean-Jacques Nattiez, l’Universite de Montreal; and Professor Pat Shand, University of Toronto.
I am especially indebted to Yehudi Menuhin for his constant encouragement of soundscape research and to Dr. Otto Laske for his valuable commentaries on my text.
The World Soundscape Project could lay no claim to its title without numerous reports and verifications from many countries. For supplying special information, or for helping to translate it, I thank: David Ahern, Carlos Araujo, Renata Braun, Junko Carothers, Mieko Ikegame, Roger Lenzi, Beverley Matsu, Judith Maxie, Albert Mayr, Marc Metraux, Walter Otoya, John Rimmer, Thorkell Sigurbjornsson, Turgut Var and Yngve Wirkander. Nick Reed deserves special thanks for valuable library research.
For typing numerous drafts of the manuscript I am thankful to Pat Tait, Janet Knudson and Linda Clark. When an author keeps changing his mind, typists have the hardest job of all.
R. MURRAY SCHAFER
Vancouver, August, 1976
Introduction
Now I will do nothing but listen …
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night. …
WALT WHITMAN, Song of Myself
The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a world problem. It would seem that the world soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time, and many experts have predicted universal deafness as the ultimate consequence unless the problem can be brought quickly under control.
In various parts of the world important research is being undertaken in many independent areas of sonic studies: acoustics, psychoacoustics, otology, international noise abatement practices and procedures, communications and sound recording engineering (electroacoustics and electronic music), aural pattern perception and the structural analysis of language and music. These researches are related; each deals with aspects of the world soundscape. In one way or another researchers engaged on these various themes are asking the same question: what is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change? Soundscape studies attempt to unify these various researches.
Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach. We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape. For many years I have been fighting for ear cleaning in schools to eliminate audiometry in factories. Clairaudience not ear muffs. It is an idea over which I do not wish to exercise permanent ownership.a
The home territory of soundscape studies will be the middle ground between science, society and the arts. From acoustics and psychoacoustics we will learn about the physical properties of sound and the way sound is interpreted by the human brain. From society we will learn how man behaves with sounds
and how sounds affect and change his behavior. From the arts, particularly music, we will learn how man creates ideal soundscapes for that other life, the life of the imagination and psychic reflection. From these studies we will begin to lay the foundations of a new interdiscipline—acoustic design.
From Industrial Design to Acoustic Design The most important revolution is aesthetic education in the twentieth century was that accomplished by the Bauhaus, that celebrated German school of the twenties. Under the leadership of architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus collected some of the great painters and architects of the time (Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe), together with craftsmen of distinction. At first it seemed disappointing that the graduates of this school did not rise to rival their mentors as artists. But the purpose of the school was different. From the interdisciplinary synergy of faculty skills a whole new study field was created, for the school invented the subject of industrial design. The Bauhaus brought aesthetics to machinery and mass production.
It devolves on us now to invent a subject which we might call acoustic design, an interdiscipline in which musicians, acousticians, psychologists, sociologists and others would study the world soundscape together in order to make intelligent recommendations for its improvement. This study would consist of documenting important features, of noting differences, parallels and trends, of collecting sounds threatened with extinction, of studying the effects of new sounds before they are indiscriminate released into the environment, of studying the rich symbolism sounds have for man and of studying human behavior patterns in different sonic environments in order to use these insights in planning future environments for man. Cross-cultural evidence from around the world must be carefully assembled and interpreted. New methods of educating the public to the importance of environmental sound must be devised. The final question will be: is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?
Orchestration Is a Musician’s Business Throughout this book I am going to treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition. This is an unusual idea but I am going to nudge it forward relentlessly. The definition of music has undergone radical change in recent years. In one of the more contemporary definitions, John Cage has declared: “Music is sounds, sounds around us whether we’re in or out of concert halls: cf. Thoreau.” The reference is to Thoreau’s Walden, where the author experiences in the sounds and sights of nature an inexhaustible entertainment.
To define music merely as sounds would have been unthinkable a few years ago, though today it is the more exclusive definitions that are proving unacceptable. Little by little throughout the twentieth century, all the conventional definitions of music have been exploded by the abundant activities of musicians themselves. First with the huge expansion of percussion instruments in our orchestras, many of which produce nonpitched and arhythmic sounds; then through the introduction of aleatoric procedures in which all attempts to organize the sounds of a composition rationally are surrendered to the “higher” laws of entropy; then through the opening-out of the time-and-space containers we call compositions and concert halls to allow the introduction of a whole new world of sounds outside them (in Cage’s 4’33” Silence we hear only the sounds external to the composition itself, which is merely one protracted caesura); then in the practices of musique concrete, which inserts any sound from the environment into a composition via tape; and finally in electronic music, which has revealed a whole gamut of new musical sounds, many of them related to industrial and electric technology in the world at large.
Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe!
And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!
Dionysian Versus Apollonian Concepts of Music it is easier to see the responsibilities of the acoustical engineer or the audiologist toward the world soundscape than to understand the precise manner in which the contemporary musician is supposed to attach himself to this vast theme, so I am going to grind my axe on this point for a moment longer.
There are two basic ideas of what music is or ought to be. They may be seen most clearly in two Greek myths dealing with the origin of music. Pindar’s twelfth Pythian Ode tells how the art of aulos playing was invented by Athena when, after the beheading of Medusa, she was touched by the heart-rending cries of Medusa’s sisters and created a special nomos in their honor. In a Homeric hymn to Hermes an alternative origin is mentioned. The lyre is said to have been invented by Hermes when he surmised that the shell of the turtle, if used as a body of resonance, could produce sound.
In the first of these myths music arises as subjective emotion; in the second it arises with the discovery of sonic properties in the materials of the universe. These are the cornerstones on which all subsequent theories of music are founded. Characteristically the lyre is the instrument of Homer, of the epos, of serene contemplation of the universe; while the aulos (the reed oboe) is the instrument of exaltation and tragedy, the instrument of the dithyramb and of drama. The lyre is the instrument of Apollo, the aulos that of the Dionysian festivals. In the Dionysian myth, music is conceived as internal sound breaking forth from the human breast; in the Apollonian it is external sound, God-sent to remind us of the harmony of the universe. In the Apollonian view music is exact, serene, mathematical, associated with transcendental visions of Utopia and the Harmony of the Spheres. It is also the anahata of Indian theorists. It is the basis of Pythagoras’s speculations and those of the medieval theoreticians (where music was taught as a subject of the quadrivium, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy), as well as of Schoenberg’s twelve-note method of composition. Its methods of exposition are number theories. It seeks to harmonize the world through acoustic design. In the Dionysian view music is irrational and subjective. It employs expressive devices: tempo fluctuations, dynamic shadings, tonal colorings. It is the music of the operatic stage, of bel canto, and its reedy voice can also be heard in Bach’s Passions. Above all, it is the musical expression of the romantic artist, prevailing throughout the nineteenth century and on into the expressionism of the twentieth century. It also directs the training of the musician today.
Because the production of sounds is so much a subjective matter with modern man, the contemporary soundscape is notable for its dynamic hedonism. The research I am about to describe represents a reaffirmation of music as a search for the harmonizing influence of sounds in the world about us. In Robert Fludd’s Utruisque Cosmi Historia there is an illustration entitled “The Tuning of the World” in which the earth forms the body of an instrument across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand. We must try once again to find the secret of that tuning.
Music, the Soundscape and Social Welfare In Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game there is an arresting idea. Hesse claims to be repeating a theory of the relationship between music and the state from an ancient Chinese source: “Therefore the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
Such a theory would suggest that the egalitarian and enlightened reign of Maria Theresa (for instance, as expressed in her unified criminal code of 1768) and the grace and balance of Mozart’s music are not accidental. Or that the sentimental vagaries of Richard Strauss are perfectly consistent with the waning of the same Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Gustav Mahler we find, etched in an acid Jewish hand, marches and German dances of such sarcasm as to give us a presentiment of the political dance macabre soon to follow.
The thesis is also borne out well in tribal societies where, under the strict control of the flourishing community, music is tightly structured, while in detribalized areas the individual sings appallingly sentimental songs.
Any ethnomusicologist will confirm this. There can be little doubt then that music is an indicator of the age, revealing, for those who know how to read its symptomatic messages, a means of fixing social and even political events.
For some time I have also believed that the general acoustic environment of a society can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about the trending and evolution of that society. Throughout this book I will suggest many such relationships, and though it is probably in my nature to do this emphatically, I hope the reader may continue to regard the method as valid even if some of the equations seem disagreeable. They are all open to further testing.
The Notation of Soundscapes (Sonography) The soundscape is any acoustic field of study. We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape. We can isolate an acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape. However, it is less easy to formulate an exact impression of a soundscape than of a landscape. There is nothing in sonography corresponding to the instantaneous impression which photography can create. With a camera it is possible to catch the salient features of a visual panorama to create an impression that is immediately evident. The microphone does not operate this way. It samples details. It gives the close-up but nothing corresponding to aerial photography.
Similarly, while everyone has had some experience reading maps, and many can draw at least significant information from other schematics of the visual landscape, such as architects’ drawings or geographers’ contour maps, few can read the sophisticated charts used by phoneticians, acousticians or musicians. To give a totally convincing image of a soundscape would involve extraordinary skill and patience: thousands of recordings would have to be made; tens of thousands of measurements would have to be taken; and a new means of description would have to be devised.
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 1