The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World

by R. Murray Schafer

  A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen. Beyond aural perception is the notation and photography of sound, which, being silent, presents certain problems that will be discussed in a special chapter in the Analysis section of the book. Through the misfortune of having to present data on silent pages, we will be forced to use some types of visual projection as well as musical notation, in advance of this discussion, and these will only be useful if they assist in opening ears and stimulating clairaudience.

  We are also disadvantaged in the pursuit of a historical perspective. While we may have numerous photographs taken at different times, and before them drawings and maps to show us how a scene changed over the ages, we must make inferences as to the changes of the soundscape. We may know exactly how many new buildings went up in a given area in a decade or how the population has risen, but we do not know by how many decibels the ambient noise level may have risen for a comparable period of time. More than this, sounds may alter or disappear with scarcely a comment even from the most sensitive of historians. Thus, while we may utilize the techniques of modern recording and analysis to study contemporary soundscapes, for the foundation of historical perspectives, we will have to turn to earwitness accounts from literature and mythology, as well as to anthropological and historical records.

  Earwitness The first part of the book will be particularly indebted to such accounts. I have always attempted to go directly to sources. Thus, a writer is trustworthy only when writing about sounds directly experienced and intimately known. Writing about other places and times usually results in counterfeit descriptions. To take an obvious instance, when Jonathan Swift describes Niagara Falls as making “a terrible squash” we know he never visited the place; but when Chateaubriand tells us that in 1791 he heard the roar of Niagara eight to ten miles away, he provides us with useful information about the ambient sound level, against which that of today could be measured. When a writer writes uncounterfeitingly about directly apprehended experiences, the ears may sometimes play tricks on the brain, as Erich Maria Remarque discovered in the trenches during the First World War when he heard shells exploding about him followed by the rumble of the distant guns that fired them. This aural illusion is perfectly accountable, for as the shells were traveling at super-sonic speeds they arrived in advance of the sounds of their original detonations; but only someone trained in acoustics could have predicted this. All Quiet on the Western Front is convincing because the author was there. And we trust him when he describes other unusual sound events—for instance, the sounds made by dead bodies. “The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them. Many have their bellies swollen up like balloons. They hiss, belch, and make movements. The gases in them make noises.” William Faulkner also knew the noise of corpses, which he described as “little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling.”

  In such ways is the authenticity of the earwitness established. It is a special talent of novelists like Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and Thomas Mann to have captured the soundscapes of their own places and times, and such descriptions constitute the best guide available in the reconstruction of soundscapes past.

  Features of the Soundscape What the soundscape analyst must do first is to discover the significant features of the soundscape, those sounds which are important either because of their individuality, their numerousness or their domination. Ultimately some system or systems of generic classification will have to be devised, and this will be a subject for the third part of the book. For the first two parts it will be enough to categorize the main themes of a soundscape by distinguishing between what we call keynote sounds, signals and soundmarks. To these we might add archetypal sounds, those mysterious ancient sounds, often possessing felicitous symbolism, which we have inherited from remote antiquity or prehistory.

  Keynote is a musical term; it is the note that identifies the key or tonality of a particular composition. It is the anchor or fundamental tone and although the material may modulate around it, often obscuring its importance, it is in reference to this point that everything else takes on its special meaning. Keynote sounds do not have to be listened to consciously; they are overheard but cannot be overlooked, for keynote sounds become listening habits in spite of themselves.

  The psychologist of visual perception speaks of “figure” and “ground,” the figure being that which is looked at while the ground exists only to give the figure its outline and mass. But the figure cannot exist without its ground; subtract it and the figure becomes shapeless, nonexistent. Even though keynote sounds may not always be heard consciously, the fact that they are ubiquitously there suggests the possibility of a deep and pervasive influence on our behavior and moods. The keynote sounds of a given place are important because they help to outline the character of men living among them.

  The keynote sounds of a landscape are those created by its geography and climate: water, wind, forests, plains, birds, insects and animals. Many of these sounds may possess archetypal significance; that is, they may have imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment. They may even affect the behavior or life style of a society, though for a discussion of this we will wait until the reader is more acquainted with the matter.

  Signals are foreground sounds and they are listened to consciously. In terms of the psychologist, they are figure rather than ground. Any sound can be listened to consciously, and so any sound can become a figure or signal, but for the purposes of our community-oriented study we will confine ourselves to mentioning some of those signals which must be listened to because they constitute acoustic warning devices: bells, whistles, horns and sirens. Sound signals may often be organized into quite elaborate codes permitting messages of considerable complexity to be transmitted to those who can interpret them. Such, for instance, is the case with the cor de chasse, or train and ship whistles, as we shall discover.

  The term soundmark is derived from landmark and refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique. This is a subject to be taken up in Part Four of the book, where the principles of acoustic design will be discussed.

  I will try to explain all other soundscape terminology as it is introduced. At the end of the book there is a short glossary of terms which are either neologistic or have been used idiosyncratically, in case doubt exists at any point in the text. I have tried not to use too many complex acoustical terms, though a knowledge of the fundamentals of acoustics and a familiarity with both musical theory and history is presupposed.

  Ears and Clairaudience We will not argue for the priority of the ear. In the West the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information about the time of the Renaissance, with the development of the printing press and perspective painting. One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously he had been conceived as sound or vibration. In the Zoroastrian religion, the priest Srosh (representing the genius of hearing) stands between man and the pantheon of the gods, listening for the divine messages, which he transmits to humanity. Samā is the Sufi word for audition or listening. The followers of Jalal-ud-din Rumi worked themselves into a mystical trance by chanting and whirling in slow gyrations. Their dance is thought by some scholars to have represented the solar system, recalling also the deep-rooted mystical belief in an extraterrestrial music, a Music of the Spheres, which the attuned soul may at times hear. But these exceptional powers of hearing, what I have called clairaudience, were not attained effortlessly. The poet Saadi says in one of his lyric poems:

  I will not say, my brothers, what samā is

  Before
I know who the listener is.

  Before the days of writing, in the days of prophets and epics, the sense of hearing was more vital than the sense of sight. The word of God, the history of the tribe and all other important information was heard, not seen. In parts of the world, the aural sense still tends to predominate.

  … rural Africans live largely in a world of sound—a world loaded with direct personal significance for the hearer—whereas the western European lives much more in a visual world which is on the whole indifferent to him. … Sounds lose much of this significance in western Europe, where man often develops, and must develop, a remarkable ability to disregard them. Whereas for Europeans, in general, “seeing is believing,” for rural Africans reality seems to reside far more in what is heard and what is said. … Indeed, one is constrained to believe that the eye is regarded by many Africans less as a receiving organ than as an instrument of the will, the ear being the main receiving organ.

  Marshall McLuhan has suggested that since the advent of electric culture we may be moving back to such a state again, and I think he is right. The very emergence of noise pollution as a topic of public concern testifies to the fact that modern man is at last becoming concerned to clean the sludge out of his ears and regain the talent for clairaudience—clean hearing.

  A Special Sense Touch is the most personal of the senses. Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is a way of touching at a distance and the intimacy of the first sense is fused with sociability whenever people gather together to hear something special. Reading that sentence an ethnomusicologist noted: “All the ethnic groups I know well have in common their physical closeness and an incredible sense of rhythm. These two features seem to co-exist.”

  The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to write: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society for in it everything affects everything all the time.”

  The ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable. The eye points outward; the ear draws inward. It soaks up information. Wagner said: “To the eye appeals the outer man, the inner to the ear.” The ear is also an erotic orifice. Listening to beautiful sounds, for instance the sounds of music, is like the tongue of a lover in your ear. Of its own nature then, the ear demands that insouciant and distracting sounds would be stopped in order that it may concentrate on those which truly matter.

  Ultimately, this book is about sounds that matter. In order to reveal them it may be necessary to rage against those which don’t. In Parts One and Two I will take the reader on a long excursion of soundscapes through history, with a heavy concentration on those of the Western world, though I will try to incorporate material from other parts of the world whenever it has been obtainable. In Part Three the soundscape will be subjected to critical analysis in preparation for Part Four, where the principles of acoustic design will be outlined—at least as far as they can be determined at the moment.

  All research into sound must conclude with silence—a thought which must await its development in the final chapters. But the reader will clearly sense that this idea also links the first part of the book to the last, thus uniting an undertaking that is above all lyrical in character.

  One final warning. Although I will at times be treating aural perception and acoustics as if they were abstractable disciplines, I do not wish to forget that the ear is but one sense receptor among many. The time has come to move out of the laboratory into the field of the living environment. Soundscape studies do this. But even they must be integrated into that wider study of the total environment in this not yet best of all possible worlds.

  PART ONE

  First Soundscapes

  In those days men’s ears heard sounds

  whose angelic purity cannot be conjured

  up again by any amount of science or magic.

  HERMAN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game

  ONE

  The Natural Soundscape

  Voices of the Sea What was the first sound heard? It was the caress of the waters. Proust called the sea “the plaintive ancestress of the earth pursuing, as in the days when no living creature existed, its lunatic immemorial agitation.” The Greek myths tell how man arose from the sea: “Some say that all gods and all living creatures originated in the stream of Oceanus which girdles the world, and that Tethys was the mother of all his children.”

  The ocean of our ancestors is reproduced in the watery womb of our mother and is chemically related to it. Ocean and Mother. In the dark liquid of ocean the relentless masses of water pushed past the first sonar ear. As the ear of the fetus turns in its amniotic fluid, it too is tuned to the lap and gurgle of water. At first it is the submarine resonance of the sea, not yet the splash of wave. But then …

  …the waters little by little began to move, and at the movement of the waters the great fish and the scaly creatures were disturbed, and the waves began to roll in double breakers, and the beings that dwell in the waters were seized with fear and as the breakers rushed together in pairs the roar of the ocean grew loud, and the spray was lashed into fury, and garlands of foam arose, and the great ocean opened to its depths, and the waters rushed hither and thither, the furious crests of their waves meeting this way and that.

  Waves whipped into surf, pelting the first rocks as the amphibian ascends from the sea. And although he may occasionally turn his back on the waves, he will never escape their atavistic charm. “The wise man delights in water,” says Lao-tzu. The roads of man all lead to water. It is the fundamental of the original soundscape and the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transformations.

  At Oostende the strand is wide, with a scarcely perceptible rake across to the hotels, so that standing there one has the impression that the sea in the distance is higher than the beach and that sooner or later everything will be lifted away to oblivion by an enormous soft tidal wave. Totally otherwise is the Adriatic at Trieste, where the mountains leap into the ocean with an angular energy and the angry fists of the waves bounce noisily off rocks like India rubber balls. At Oostende the nexus of land is gentle in both vista and tone.

  There are no rocks on which to sit at Oostende and so one walks along for miles, south with the waves in the right ear, and north with the waves in the left ear, filling an atavistic consciousness with the full-frequencied throb of water. All roads lead to water. Given the chance, probably all men would live at the edge of the element, within earshot of its moods night and day. We wander from it but the departure is temporary.

  Day after day one walks along the strand, listening to the indolent splashing of the wavelets, gauging the gradual crescendo to the heavier treading and on to the organized warfare of the breakers. The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall. Each drop tinkles at a different pitch; each wave sets a different filtering on an inexhaustible supply of white noise. Some sounds are discrete, others continuous. In the sea the two fuse in primordial unity. The rhythms of the sea are many: infrabio-logical—for the water changes pitch and timbre faster than the ear’s resolving power to catch its changes; biological—the waves rhyme with the patterns of heart and lung and the tides with night and day; and suprabio-logical—the eternal inextinguishable presence of water. “Observe measures,” says Hesiod in Works and Days; “I will show you the measures of the much-thundering sea.”

  para thina polyphloisboio thalassēs

  says Homer (Iliad, 1:34), catching onomatopoeically the splendid armies of waves on the sea beach and their recession. Canto II of Ezra Pound begins,

  And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,

  Ear, ear for the sea-surge �
��

  The love of ocean has profound sources and they are recorded in a vast maritime literature of East and West. When water watches the history of the tribe, fingers of ocean grasp the epic. The prime material over which the Odyssey is strung is the ocean. The agrarian Hesiod, living in Boeotia, “far away from the sea and its tossing waters,” cannot avoid the lure of the ocean.

  For fifty days, after the turn of the summer solstice,

  when the wearisome season of the hot weather goes to its conclusion

  then is the timely season for men to voyage.

  The Norsemen knew the ferocity of the ocean. When they sailed, “waves roared against the sides of the ship, it sounded just as if boulders were being clashed together.” The alliterative verse of the Eddas is poetry for oarsmen. The repeated consonants of each half-line pin the accents of the verse to each stroke and return of the oar.

  Splashing oars raced iron rattled

  shield rang on shield as the Vikings rowed,

  cutting the waves at the King’s command,

  farther and farther the fleet sped on.

  When the crested waves of Kolga’s sister

  crashed on the keels the sound that came