was the boom of surf that breaks on rocks.
Across the world, in tropical northern Australia, the waves were more gentle.
Waves coming up: high waves coming up against the rocks,
Breaking, shi! shi!
When the moon is high with light upon the waters:
Spring tide; tide flowing to the grass,
Breaking, shi! shi!
In its rough waters, the young girls bathe.
Hear the sound they make with their hands as they play!
Any visitor to the seashore will find the recital of the waves remarkable, but only the maritime poet, with the ostinato of the sea in his ear from birth to grave, can measure precisely the systole and diastole of waves and tides. Ezra Pound spent much of his life moving from one coast of the Italian peninsula to the other—from Rapallo to Venice. His Cantos open on the sea, play out much of their dialectic at its edge, move away and then return. Where Scott Fitzgerald, a visitor to the Mediterranean, had heard merely “the small exhausted wa-waa of the waves,” Pound gives us the fluctuations of the water with instinctive authority.
Lithe turning of water,
sinews of Poseidon,
Black azure and hyaline,
glass wave over Tyro,
Close cover, unstillness,
bright welter of wave-cords,
Then quiet water,
quiet in the buff sands,
Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints,
splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows
In the wave-runs by the half-dune;
Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,
pallor of Hesperus,
Grey peak of the wave,
wave, colour of grape’s pulp,
Olive grey in the near,
far, smoke grey of the rock-slide,
Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk
cast grey shadows in water,
The tower like a one-eyed great goose
cranes up out of the olive-grove,
And we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus
in the smell of hay under the olive-trees,
And the frogs singing against the fauns
in the half-light.
And …
The sea is the keynote sound of all maritime civilizations. It is also a fertile sonic archetype. All roads lead back to water. We shall return to the sea.
The Transformations of Water Water never dies. It lives forever reincarnated as rain, as bubbling brooks, as waterfalls and fountains, as swirling rivers and deep sulking rivers.
A mountain stream is a chord of many notes strung out stereophonically across the path of the attentive listener. The continuous sound of water from Swiss mountain streams can be heard miles across a silent valley. When a stream leaps down a hundred-meter cascade in the Rocky Mountains, there is tense quietness, almost like fear, followed by noisy excitement when it strikes the rocks below. The water of the English moors has none of this virtuosity; its arrangements are more subtle.
The wanderer in this direction who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Hole they hissed.
The rivers of the world speak their own languages. The gentle murmur of the Merrimack River, “whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went,” was a sleeping pill for Thoreau. For James Fenimore Cooper, the rivers of upstate New York often moved sluggishly into rocky caverns “producing a hollow sound, that resembled the concussions of a distant gun.”
How different are the furious cataracts of the Nile at Atbara and Berber.
For the noise of battle cannot but arise when the river, among a thousand islands and rocks, forges its way onward in mile-long rapids. A Roman writer declared that the inhabitants emigrated because they lost their hearing, but the mighty voices of the Berbers prove to us today that necessity strengthens any organ, for their call carries over the rushing river from bank to bank, while white men can hardly hear each other at ten paces’ distance.b
By contrast, on the still rivers of Siam, Somerset Maugham found a “sensation of exquisite peace,” only occasionally broken by “the soft splash of a paddle as someone silently passed on his way home. When I awoke in the night I felt a faint motion as the houseboat rocked a little and heard a little gurgle of water, like the ghost of an Eastern music travelling not through space but through time.” In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice the wasted and mournful waters of the canals form a tragic leitmotiv: “Water slapped gurgling against wood and stone. The gondolier’s cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth.”
Water never dies and the wise man rejoices in it. No two raindrops sound alike, as the attentive ear will detect. Is then the sound of Persian rain like that of the Azores? In Fiji a summer rainstorm whips past in an enormous swirl taking less than sixty seconds, while in London it drones on as boring as a businessman’s story. In parts of Australia it does not rain for two or more years. When it does, young children are sometimes frightened by the sound. On the Pacific coast of North America it rains gently but continuously on an average of 148 days each year. The Canadian painter Emily Can* describes it well:
The rain drops hit the roof with smacking little clicks, uneven and stabbing. Through the open windows the sound of the rain on the leaves is not like that. It is more like a continuous sigh, a breath always spending with no fresh intake. The roof rain rattles over our room’s hollowness, strikes and is finished.
The tranquil timpani of West Coast rain is ambitionless, quite unlike the violent thunderstorms of the plains of Russia and central North America. In South Africa the rain is torrential: “… the thunder boomed out overhead, and they could hear the rain rushing across the fields. In a moment it was drumming on the iron roof, with a deafening noise.”
Geography and climate provide vernacular keynotes to the soundscape. In the vast northern areas of the earth the sound of winter is that of frozen water—of ice and snow. During the winter 30 to 50 percent of the surface of the earth is covered by snow for some length of time, and 20 to 30 percent of the land surface is snow covered for more than six months annually. Ice and snow form the keynotes of the northern hinterland as surely as the sea is the keynote of maritime life.
Ice and snow are tuned by the temperature. Virginia Woolf at Black-friars heard the snow “slither and flop to the ground.” But in Scandinavia, when the giant Hymir of The Elder Edda returned from hunting:
Icicles clattered,
falling off his frozen beard.
In his poem Orfano, Giovanni Pascoli describes the slow flaking snow of Italy:
Lenta la neva fiocca, fiocca, fiocca.
The sound of snow in barely freezing Italy is very different from that at 30 degrees below zero in Manitoba or Siberia. As one moves to the interiors of the great northern continents the soft padded step begins to crunch, then to squeak—even painfully. Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago tells how felt boots in the Russian winter make “the snow screech angrily at each step.”
While seascapes have enriched the languages of maritime peoples, cold-climate civilizations have invented different expressions, of which the numerous Eskimo words for snow is the most celebrated though by no means the only instance. The Illustrated Glossary of Snow and Ice contains 154 terms for snow and ice in English and matches them with terms in Danish, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Russian, French-Canadian and Argentinian Spanish. Many of the expressions—for instance, permafrost icebound, pack ice—are absent from the vocabularies of other languages.
Snow absorbs sound and northern literature is full of descriptions of the silence of winter.
In wintertime,
the stillness, the absence of life or sound, is weird and oppressive. When the snow is on the ground, you may perceive indeed the footprints of animals, of birds, of deer, or occasionally of a bear, but you hear no sound, not a cry, not a whisper, not a rustle of a leaf. Sit down upon a fallen tree, and the silence becomes oppressive, almost painful. It is a relief even to hear at last the sough of the fall of the snow from the boughs of the cypress, the pine, or the yew, which stretch like dark horse-plumes high overhead.
When the snow is fresh and soft, even the traditional creaking of the runners of a sleigh are mute. “… we glided along over virgin snow which had come soft-footedly over night, in a motion, so smooth and silent as to suggest that wingless flight …” Even the cities were quiet.
Nor is anything quite like the silence of a northern city at dawn on a winter morning. Occasionally there was a hiss of whisper and a brushing against the windows and I knew it was snow, but generally there was nothing but a throbbing stillness until the street cars began running up Côte des Neiges and I heard them as though they were winds blowing through old drains.
The destruction of the quiet northern winter by the jamming of snow-plows and snowmobiles is one of the greatest transmogrifications of the twentieth-century soundscape, for such instruments are destroying the “idea of North” that has shaped the temperament of all northern peoples and has germinated a substantial mythology for the world. The idea of North, at once austere, spacious and lonely, could easily throw fear into the heart (had not Dante refrigerated the center of his Hell?) but it could evoke intense awe, for it was pure, temptationless and silent. The technocrats of progress do not realize that by cracking into the North with their machinery, they are chopping up the integrity of their own minds, blacking the awe-inspiring mysteries with gas stations and reducing their legends to plastic dolls. As silence is chased from the world, powerful myths depart. That is to say, it becomes more difficult to appreciate the Eddas and sagas, and much that is at the center of Russian, Scandinavian and Eskimo literature and art.
The traditional winter of the North is remarkable for its stillness, but the spring is violent. At first there is a determined grinding of ice, then suddenly a whole river will rip down the center with a cannon shot and spring water will hurtle the ice downstream. When asked what he most loved about Russia, Stravinsky said, “The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.”
Voices of the Wind Among the ancients, the wind, like the sea, was deified. In Theogony, Hesiod tells how Typhoeus, the god of the winds, fought with Zeus, lost, and was banished to Tartaros, in the bowels of the earth. Typhoeus was a devious god. He possessed a hundred snake heads,
and inside each one of these horrible heads
there were voices
that threw out every sort of horrible sound,
for sometimes
it was speech such as the gods
could understand, but at other
times, the sound of a bellowing bull,
proud-eyed and furious
beyond holding, or again like a lion
shameless in cruelty,
or again it was like the barking of dogs,
a wonder to listen to,
or again he would whistle
so the tall mountains re-echoed to it.
The story is remarkable because it touches on one of the most interesting aural illusions. The wind, like the sea, possesses an infinite number of vocal variations. Both are broad-band sounds and within the breadth of their frequencies other sounds seem to be heard. The deceptiveness of the wind is also the subject of a tempestuous description by Victor Hugo. You must read this aloud in the original to feel the pressure of the language.
Le vaste trouble des solitudes a une gamme; crescendo redoutable: le grain, la rafale, la bourrasque, l’orage, la tourmente, la tempête, la trombe: les sept cordes de la lyre des vents, les sept notes de l’a-bîme. … Les vents courent, volent, s’abattent, finissent, recommencent, planent, sifflent, mugissent, rient; frénétiques, lascifs, effrénés, prenant leurs aises sur la vague irascible. Ces hurleurs ont une harmonic Ils font tout le ciel sonore. Ils soufflent dans la nuée comme dans un cuivre, ils embouchent l’espace, et ils chantent dans l’infini, avec toutes les voix amalgamées des clairons, des buccins, des oliphants, des bugles et des trompettes, une sorte de fanfare pro-méthéenne. Qui les entend écoute Pan.
The wind is an element that grasps the ears forcefully. The sensation is tactile as well as aural. How curious and almost supernatural it is to hear the wind in the distance without feeling it, as one does on a calm day in the Swiss Alps, where the faint, soft whistling of the wind over a glacier miles away can be heard across the intervening stillness of the valleys.
On the dry Saskatchewan prairie the wind is keen and steady.
The wind could be heard in a more persistent song now, and out along the road separating the town from the prairie it fluted gently along the wires that ran down the highway. … The night wind had two voices; one that keened along the pulsing wires, the prairie one that throated long and deep.
Treeless and open, the prairies are an enormous wind harp, vibrating incessantly with “the swarming hum of the telephone wires.” In the more sheltered English countryside, the wind sets the leaves shimmering in diverse tonalities.
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.
Sometimes I ask students to identify moving sounds in the soundscape. “The wind,” say some. “Trees,” say others. But without objects in its path, the wind betrays no apparent movement. It hovers in the ears, energetic but directionless. Of all objects, trees give the best cues, shaking their leaves now on one side, now on the other as the wind brushes them.
Each type of forest produces its own keynote. Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity—a circumstance which, according to Oswald Spengler, drove the northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion. The lack of undergrowth or openings into clearings keeps the British Columbia forests unusually free of animal, bird and insect life, a circumstance which produced an awesome, even sinister impression on the first white settlers. Emily Carr again:
The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. If you spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror. It seemed as if the forest were so full of silence that there was no room for sounds. The birds who lived there were birds of prey—eagles, hawks, owls. Had a song bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. Sober-coloured, silent little birds were the first to follow settlers into the West. Gulls there had always been; they began with the sea and had always cried over it. The vast sky spaces above, hungry for noise, steadily lapped up their cries. The forest was different—she brooded over silence and secrecy.
The uneasiness of the early settlers with the forest, and their desire for space and sunlight, soon produced another keynote sound: the noise of lumbering. At first it was the woodsman’s axe that was heard just beyond the ever-widening clearing. Later it was the cross-saw, and today it is the snarl of the chainsaw that resounds throughout the diminishing forest communities of North America.
Once, much of the world was covered with forest. The great forest is foreign and appalling, quite inimical to intru
ding life. The few references to nature in the early epics, the sagas and Anglo-Saxon poetry testify to this fact; they are either brief or dwell on its horrors. Even as late as Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) the forest was a place of darkness and evil, and his opera Der Freischutz is a celebration of goodness over the forces of evil, whose home is the forest. The hunting horn, which Weber used so brilliantly in his score, became the acoustic symbol by which the gloom of the forest was transpierced.
When man was fearful of the dangers of an unexplored environment, the whole body was an ear. In the virgin forests of North America, where vision was restricted to a few feet, hearing was the most important sense. The Leatherstocking Tales of Fenimore Cooper are full of beautiful and terrifying surprises.
… for, though the quiet deep of solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues, in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water rippled, and, at places, even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch, or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body When he desired his companions, however, to cease talking, in the manner just mentioned, his vigilant ear had caught the peculiar sound that is made by the parting of a dried branch of a tree, and which, if his senses did not deceive him, came from the western shore. All who are accustomed to that particular sound will understand how readily the ear receives it, and how easy it is to distinguish the tread which breaks the branch from every other noise of the forest. … “Can the accursed Iroquois have crossed the river, already, with their arms, without a boat?”
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 3