The Miraculous Land “What is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it?” asks a student who has studied philosophy. It would be unimaginative to reply that it sounds merely like a tree falling in the woods, or even that it makes no sound at all. As a matter of fact, when a tree crashes in a forest and knows that it is alone, it sounds like anything it wishes—a hurricane, a cuckoo, a wolf, the voice of Immanuel Kant or Charles Kingsley, the overture to Don Giovanni or a delicate air blown on a Maori nose-flute. Anything it wishes, from past or distant future. It is even free to produce those secret sounds which man will never hear because they belong to other worlds. …
The demystification of the elements, to which many modern sciences have contributed, has turned much poetry into prose. Before the birth of the earth sciences, man lived on an enchanted earth. From a third-century Treatise on Rivers and Mountains, perhaps by Plutarch, we learn of a stone in Lydia called argrophylax which looks like silver:
It is rather difficult to recognize it because it is intimately intermixed with the little spangles of gold which are found in the sands of the river. It has one very strange property. The rich Lydians place it under the threshold of their treasurehouses, and thus protect their stores of gold. For whenever any robbers come near the place, the stone gives forth a sound like a trumpet and the would-be thieves, believing themselves to be pursued, flee and fall over precipices and thus come to a violent death.
In earlier times, all natural events were explained as miracles. An earthquake or a storm was a drama between the gods. When Sigurd killed the dragon Fafner, “the earth tremors were so violent that all the land round about shook.” When the Giants stole Donner’s thundering hammer
his hair stood upright, his beard shook with wrath,
wild for his weapon the god groped around.
There was bound to be a mighty storm. When Zeus led the Greek gods against the Titans
… the infinite great sea
moaned terribly
and the earth crashed aloud,
and the wide sky resounded. …
Now Zeus no longer held in his strength,
but here his heart filled
deep with fury, and now he showed
his violence entire
and indiscriminately. Out of the sky
and off Olympos
he moved flashing his fires incessantly,
and the thunderbolts,
the crashing of them and the blaze
together came flying, one after
another, from his ponderous hand,
and spinning whirls of inhuman
flame, and with it the earth,
the giver of life, cried out
aloud as she burned, and the vast forests
in the fire screamed. …
Donner and Zeus are still comprehensible gods even today. Thunder and lightning are among the most feared forces in nature. The sound is of great intensity and extreme frequency range, well outside the human scale of soundmaking. The gulf between men and the gods is great and often it has seemed as if a mighty noise was necessary to bridge it. Such a noise was that of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD. 79 when, according to Dion Cassius’s account, “the frightened people thought the Gyants were making war against heaven, and fansied they see the shapes and images of Gyants in the smoke, and heard the sound of their trumpets.” The event was one of the soundmarks of Roman history.
Then the Earth began to tremble and quake, and the Concussions were so great that the ground seem’d to rise and boyl up in some places, and in others the tops of the mountains sunk in or tumbled down. At the same time were great noises and sounds heard, some were subterraneous, like thunder within the Earth; others above ground, like groans or bellowings. The Sea roar’d, The heavens ratled with a fearful noise, and then came a sudden and mighty crack, as if the frame of Nature had broke, or all the mountains of the Earth had fain down at once. …
Unique Tones Every natural soundscape has its own unique tones •and often these are so original as to constitute soundmarks. The most striking geographical soundmark I have ever heard is in New Zealand. At Tikitere, Rotorua, great fields of boiling sulphur, spread over acres of ground, are accompanied by strange underground rumblings and gurglings. The place is a pustular sore on the skin of the earth with infernal sound effects boiling up through the vents.
The volcanoes of Iceland produce something of the same effect, but moving back from them one is surprised by the change of sound effects.
At the crater itself there are thunderous, explosive sounds and even near the crater you can feel the ground shaking. The fatal walls of lava (2–3 meters high) inch out killing everything in their path. They are almost silent, but not quite, for listening carefully you can hear delicate, brittle snaps in the crust—dry clicks, like the fracturing of glass, spread out over several miles. When it meets wet land the lava also hisses in a suffocating sort of way. Otherwise all is nearly silent.
Even where there is no life, there can be sound. The ice fields of the North, for instance, far from being silent, reverberate with spectacular sounds.
Within three or four miles of the glaciers you begin to hear the cracking of massive ice packs. It sounds like distant thunder and recurs every five or six minutes. As you get closer you can distinguish between the initial crack, like a huge pane of glass being cracked, followed by the rumble of falling ice, and then the whole is reverberated distantly in the mountains.
Rivers of glacier water form tunnels underneath the ice. The falling ice inside these tunnels, the running water and the movement of mud and rocks create a noise which is amplified many times by the hollow structure and hits the observer on the surface with great force.
Nor is it silent below the earth’s surface as Heinrich Heine discovered when he visited the mines of the Harz Mountains in 1824.
I did not reach the deepest section… the point I reached seemed deep enough,—a constant rumbling and roaring, sinister groaning of machinery, bubbling of subterranean springs, water trickling down, everywhere thick exhalations, and the miner’s lamp flickering ever more feebly in the lonesome night.
When Krakatoa exploded on the night of August 26,1883, the sound was reported heard over the area shaded here.
Apocalyptic Sounds Perhaps the universe was created silently. We do not know. The dynamics of the wonder which introduced our planet were without human ears to hear them. But the prophets exercised their imagination over the event. “In the beginning was the Word,” says John; God’s presence was first announced as a mighty vibration of cosmic sound. The prophets had a vision of the end also making a mighty noise. References are especially plentiful in Judaic and Muslim prophecies.
Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.
By the din of the drums of resurrection they have pressed tight their two ears in terror.
They put their fingers in their ears against the thunderclaps, fearful of death.
In the imagination of the prophets the end of the world was to be signaled by a mighty din, a din more ferocious than the loudest sound they could imagine: more ferocious than any known storm, more outrageous than any thunder.
The loudest noise heard on this earth within living memory was the explosion of the caldera Krakatoa in Indonesia on August 26 and 27,1883. The actual sounds were heard as far away as the island of Rodriguez, a distance of nearly 4,500 kilometers, where the chief of police reported: “Several times during the night … reports were heard coming from the eastward, like the distant roars of heavy guns. These reports continued at intervals of between three and four hours, until 3 p.m. on the 27th. …” On no other occasion have sounds been perceived at such great distances, and the area over which the sounds were heard on August 27 totaled slightly less than one-thirteenth of the entire surface of the globe.
It is as difficult for t
he human being to imagine an apocalyptic noise as it is for him to imagine a definitive silence. Both experiences exist in theory only for the living since they set limits to life itself, though they may become unconscious goals toward which the aspirations of different societies are drawn. Man has always tried to destroy his enemies with terrible noises. We shall encounter deliberate attempts to reproduce the apocalyptic noise throughout the history of warfare, from the clashing of shields and the beating of drums in ancient times right up to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs of the Second World War. Since that time worldwide destruction has been lessened perhaps, but sonic destruction has not, and it is disconcerting to realize that the ferocious acoustical environment produced by modern civilian life derives from the same eschatological urge.
TWO
The Sounds of Life
Bird-Song One of the most beautiful miracles in all literature and mythology occurs in the midst of the brutalities of the Saga of the Volsungs when Sigurd, after slaying the dragon Fafner and tasting his blood, suddenly understands the language of the birds—a moment which Wagner used to great advantage in his opera Siegfried.
The language and song of the birds has been a subject of much study, though still today it is highly debatable whether the birds “sing” or “converse,” in the customary sense of those terms. Nevertheless, no sound in nature has attached itself so affectionately to the human imagination as bird vocalizations. In tests in many countries we have asked listeners to identify the most pleasant sounds of their environment; bird-song appears repeatedly at or near the top of the list. And the history of effective bird imitations in music extends from Clement Janequin (d. c. 1560) to Olivier Messiaen (b. 1908).
Like birds themselves, bird vocalizations are of all types. A few are penetratingly loud. The call of the rufous scrubbird (Atrichornis rufescens) of Australia “is so intense that it leaves a sensation in one’s ears.” Other birds can at times dominate a soundscape because of their numbers. The bell minor bird (Manorina melanophrys) heard around Melbourne, with its persistent bell-like ring always sounding at approximately the same pitch (E –F -F#), gives rise to a soundscape as dense as that created by cicadas, but different in that it maintains a certain spatial perspective; for the bird sounds issue from recognizable points, unlike the stridulations of the cicadas, which create a continual presence, seemingly without foreground or background.
In most parts of the world, bird-song is rich and varied, without being imperialistically dominating. Thus, St. Francis of Assisi adopted birds as symbolic of gentleness in much the same manner as his Muslim contemporary Jalal-ud-din Rumi adopted the reed flute for his mystic sect as a symbol of humility and simplicity in opposition to the vulgarity and opulence of his time. The symbolic importance of bird-song for both music and the soundscape is a subject to be returned to later.
The vocalizations of birds have often been studied in musical terms. In the early days ornithologists constructed charming words in no man’s language to describe their sounds.
Hawfinch Deak … waree-ree-ree Tehee … tehee … tur-wee-wee
Greenfinch wah-wah-wah-wah-chow-chow-chow-chow-tu-we-we
Crossbill jibb … chip-chip-chip-gee-gee-gee-gee
Great Titmouse ze-too, ze-too, p’tsee-ée, tsoo-ée, tsoo-ée ching-see, ching-see, deeder-deeder-deeder, biple-be-wit-se-diddle
Pied Flycatcher Tchéetle, tchéetle, tchéetle diddle-diddle-dee; tzit-tzit-tzit, trui, trui, trui
Mistlethrush tre-wir-ri-o-ee; tre-wir-ri-o-ee-o; tre-we-o-wee-o-wee-o-wit
Corncrake crex-crex, krek-krek, rerp-rerp
Common Snipe tik-tik-tik-tuk-tik-tuk-tik-tuk-chip-it; chick-chuck; yuk-yuk
Musical notation was also used, and still is, by Olivier Messiaen, who has turned transcription into a complex art form. But despite the ingenuity of such work, bird vocalizations, with few exceptions, cannot be notated in musical terms. Many of the sounds uttered are not single tones but complex noises, and the high-frequency range and rapid tempo of many songs preclude their being transcribed in a notational system designed for the lower frequency ranges and slower tempi of human music. A more precise method of notation is that of the sound spectrograph and ornithologists are now using this method.
The structure of bird-song is often elaborate, for many birds are virtuoso performers. Some are also mimics. The Australian lyrebird is a superb mimic and its song often includes not only imitations of the songs of up to fifteen other species of birds, but also the neighing of horses, the sounds of cross-cut saws, car horns and factory whistles! The songs of many birds contain repetitive motifs, and though the function of the repetitions is often obscure, these melodic leitmotivs, variations and expansions show certain similarities to melodic devices in music, such as those employed by the troubadours, or by Haydn and Wagner. In some details, the affective language of certain birds has been shown to bear a relationship to the shapes of human vocal and musical expression. For instance, the distress notes of chicks are composed of descending frequencies only, while ascending frequencies predominate in pleasure calls. The same general contours are present in man’s expressions of sadness and pleasure.
A sound spectrograph distinguishes clearly among bird notes having different tonal qualities: (a) nightingale note, very pure, with harmonics; (b) white-throated sparrow, clear whistle; (c) marsh warbler, musical trill; (d) clay-colored sparrow, toneless buzz; (e) budgerigar, noisy flight squawk.
But despite these similarities, it is obvious that to whatever extent the birds are deliberately communicating, it is for their own benefit rather than ours that their vocalizations are designed. Some men may puzzle over their codes, but most will be content merely to listen to the extravagant and astonishing symphony of their voices. Birds, like poems, should not mean, but be.
Bird SymphonieS Of the World Each territory of the earth will have its own bird symphony, providing a vernacular keynote as characteristic as the language of the men who live there. In Paris, Victor Hugo listened to the birds in the Luxembourg Gardens during May, the month of mating.
The quincunxes and flower-beds sent balm and dazzlement into the light, and the branches, wild in the brilliancy of midday, seemed trying to embrace each other. There was in the sycamores a twittering of linnets, the sparrows were triumphal, and the woodpeckers crept along the chestnuts, gently tapping the holes in the bark …This magnificence was free from stain, and the grand silence of happy nature filled the garden,—a heavenly silence, compatible with a thousand strains of music, the fondling tones from the nests, the buzzing of the swarms, and the palpitations of the wind.
A sound spectrograph of the pleasure notes (above) and distress call (below) of a three-day-old chick.
Such rich polyphony is absent from the North American grasslands. On a plain near Pittsburgh a century ago, a German writer fourd “absolutely nothing. … Far and wide there was not a bird, nor a butterfly, nor the cry of an animal, not the hum of an insect.” In the grasslands, sounds evaporated as if they had never been uttered. In the Russian Steppes, bird-song was also often isolated: “Everything might be dead; only above in the heavenly depths a lark is trilling and from the airy heights the silvery notes drop down upon adoring earth, and from time to time the cry of a gull or the ringing note of a quail sounds in the steppe.” Occasionally only a single species is heard: “How enchanting this place was! Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration.” And in winter the birds blended with sleigh bells: “What could be more pleasant than to sit alone at the edge of a snowy field and listen to the chirping of the birds in the crystal silence of a winter’s day, while somewhere far away in the distance sounded the bells of a passing troika—that melancholy lark of the Russian winter.”
But in the jungles of Burma, such clarity was impossible to find, as Somerset Maugham discovered when he journeyed there. “The noise of the crickets and the frogs and the c
ries of the birds” produced a tremendous din, “so that till you become accustomed to it you may find it hard to sleep.” “There is no silence in the East,” Maugham concluded.
Ornithologists have not yet measured the statistical density of birds’ singing in different parts of the world in sufficient detail for us to make objective comparisons—comparisons that would be helpful in mapping the complex rhythms of the natural soundscape. But ornithologists have done a lot of work on another subject of interest to soundscape researchers by classifying the types and functions of bird-song. Basically these are distinguished as follows:
pleasure calls
distress calls
territorial-defense calls
alarm calls
flight calls
flock calls
nest calls
feeding calls
Equivalents for many of these can be found in human soundmaking. To take some obvious examples: the territorial calls of birds are reproduced in automobile horn blowing, their alarm calls are reproduced in police sirens and their pleasure calls in the beach-side radio. In the territorial calls of birds we encounter the genesis of the idea of acoustic space, with which we will be much concerned later. The definition of space by acoustic means is much more ancient than the establishment of property lines and fences; and as private property becomes increasingly threatened in the modern world, it may be that principles regulating the complex network of overlapping and interpenetrating acoustic spaces as observed by birds and animals will again have greater significance for the human community also.
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 4