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

by R. Murray Schafer

  The grass cut with a juicy sound, and was at once laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides, brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one another on to the sound of rattling tin boxes and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the whetstones sharpening them, and happy shouts.

  Returning from the fields, the rhythms of the day’s work were extended into song.

  The peasant women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the cart. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong, healthy voices of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing in unison … the whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the measures of this wild, merry song with its shouts and whistles and clapping.

  Russia is, of course, not the only place where the rhythms of work have been carved into folk song, but folk song suggested by work always carries a heavy stress. This becomes clear if we compare the music of the farm laborer with the levity of the shepherd’s pipes. I do not think it would be going too far to suggest that man only discovers lilt and lyricism in music to the extent that he frees himself from physical labor.

  Noise in the Rural Soundscape The rural soundscape was quiet, but it experienced two profound acoustic interruptions: the noise of war and the “noise” of religion.

  Virgil, whose life was frequently interrupted by the Roman wars, laments these intrusions into the pastoral life.

  Such was the life that golden Saturn

  lived upon earth:

  Mankind had not yet heard the bugle

  bellow for war,

  Nor yet heard the clank of the sword

  on the hard anvil. …

  To Virgil the sounds of war were brass and iron, and the acoustic image remains intact to this day, though to it must be added the explosions of gunpowder from the fourteenth century onward.

  The world’s literature is full of battles. Poets and chroniclers seem always to have been amazed at the noise they made. The Persian epic poet Ferdowsi is typical.

  At the shouts of the Divs and the noise made by the black dust rising, the thunder of drums and the neighing of war-horses, the mountains were rent and the earth cleft asunder. So fierce a combat had been seen by no man before. Loud was the clash of the battle-axes and the clatter of swords and of arrows; the warriors’ blood turned the plain into marsh, the earth resembled a sea of pitch whose waves were formed of swords, axes and arrows.

  Armies decorated for battle presented a visual spectacle, but the battle itself was acoustic. To the actual noise of clashing metal, each army added its battlecries and drumming in an attempt to frighten the enemy. Noise was a deliberate military stratagem; the ancient Greek generals advocated it: “One should send the army into battle shouting, and sometimes on the run, because their appearance and shouts and the clash of arms confound the hearts of the enemy.” From Tacitus comes an interesting description of a German war chant called baritus:

  By the rendering of this they not only kindle their courage, but, merely by listening to the sound, they can forecast the issue of an approaching engagement. For they either terrify their foes or themselves become frightened, according to the character of the noise they make upon the battlefield; and they regard it not merely as so many voices chanting together but as a unison of valour. What they particularly aim at is a harshly intermittent roar; and they hold their shields in front of their mouths, so that the sound is amplified into a deeper crescendo by the reverberation.

  When the Moors attacked the Castilians in 1085, they employed African drummers who, according to the Poema del Cid, had never before been heard in Europe. The noise terrified the Christians but “the good Cid Campeador” pacified his army, promising to capture the drums and deliver them to the Church. The association of noise with both warfare and religion was not fortuitous, and we shall frequently find reason throughout this book for coupling them together. Both activities are eschatological, and undoubtedly an awareness of this fact lies behind the peculiar bending of the Latin word helium (war) into the Low German and Old English bell(e) (meaning “to make a loud noise") before its final imprint on the instrument which gave Christianity its acoustic signal.

  One further example will reinforce the relationship between religion, warfare and noise, for it is a description of a religious battle which seems to have been fought by sound alone.

  It was at three o’clock on August 14th, 1431, that the crusaders, who were encamped in the plain between Domazlice and Horsuv Tyn, received the news that the Hussites, under the leadership of Prokop the Great, were approaching. Though the Bohemians were still four miles off, the rattle of their war-wagons and the song, “All ye warriors of God,” which their whole host was chanting, could already be heard. The enthusiasm of the crusaders evaporated with astounding rapidity. … The German camp was in utter confusion. Horsemen were streaming off in every direction, and the clatter of empty wagons being driven off almost drowned the sound of that terrible singing… So ended the Bohemian crusade.

  The point I am trying to make with the diverse descriptions of these pages is that while the original soundscape was generally quiet, it was deliberately punctuated by the aberrational noises of war. The other occasion for loud noise was religious celebration. It was then that the rattles and drums and sacred bones were brought out and sounded vigorously to produce what for elementary man was certainly the biggest acoustic event of civil life. There is no doubt that these activities were a direct imitation of the frightening sounds of nature already studied, for they too had divine origins. Thunder was created by Thor or Zeus, storms were divine combats, cataclysms were divine punishments. We recall that the word of God originally came to man through the ear, not the eye. By gathering his instruments and making an impressive noise, man hoped in his turn to catch the ear of God.

  Sacred Noise and Secular Silence Throughout the several hundred pages of his Mythologiques II the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss has developed an argument for placing noise in parallel with the sacred and silence in the same relationship with the profane.e The Lévi-Strauss argument, regarded from the vantage point of the modern noise-riddled world, may appear obscure; but soundscape studies help to clarify it. The profane world was, if not silent, quiet. And if we think of “noise” in its less pejorative sense as any big sound, the coupling of noise and sacred is easier to interpret.

  Throughout this book we are going to discover that a certain type of noise, which we may now call Sacred Noise, was not only absent from the lists of proscripted sounds which societies from time to time drew up, but was, in fact, quite deliberately invoked as a break from the tedium of tranquility. Samuel Rosen confirmed this when he studied the acoustic climate of a quiet tribal village in the Sudan.

  In general, the sound level in the villages is below 40 db on the C scale of the sound level meter except occasionally at sunrise or soon thereafter when a domestic animal such as a rooster, lamb, cow or dove makes itself heard. During six months of the year, heavy rains occur about three times a week with one or two loud claps of thunder. A few men engage in some productive activities such as beating palm fronds with a wooden club. But the absence of hard reverberating surfaces, such as walls, ceilings, floors and hard furniture, etc., in the vicinity apparently accounts for the low intensity levels measured on the sound level meter: 73–74 db at the worker’s ear.

  The loudest noises (over 100 decibels) were encountered when the villagers were singing and dancing, which occurred for the most part “over a two-month period celebrating the spring harvest” (i.e. a religious festival).

  Throughout Christendom the divine was signaled by the church bell. It is a later development of the same clamorous urge, which had earlier been expressed in chanting and rattling. The interior of the church, too, reverberated with the most spectacular acoustic events, for to this place man brought not only his vo
ice, raised in song, but also the loudest machine he had till then produced—the organ. And it was all designed to make the deity listen.

  Aside from the spectacular celebrations of warfare and religion, rural and even town life was tranquil. There are many towns still, the world over, where life moves uneventfully, almost by stealth. Poor towns are quieter than prosperous towns. I have visited towns in Burgenland (Austria) where the only sound at midday is the flapping of storks in their chimney nests, or dusty towns in Iran where the only motion is the occasional swaying walk of a woman carrying water while the children sit mutely in the streets. Peasants and tribesmen the world over participate in a vast sharing of silence.

  FOUR

  From Town to City

  The two great turning points in human history were the change from nomadic to agrarian life, which occurred between ten and twelve thousand years ago, and the transition from rural to urban life, which has occupied the most recent centuries. As this later development has occurred, towns have grown into cities and cities have swollen out to cover much that was formerly rural land.

  In terms of the soundscape, a practical division of developing urbanization is, as in so many other matters as well, the Industrial Revolution. In the present chapter I will consider only the pre-industrial period, leaving the sequel to be taken up in Part Two of the book. A proper consideration of pre-industrial town and city life would need a much more thorough treatment than it can be given here. Town and city life diverged greatly before the Industrial and Electric revolutions began to level it, but I can only hope to hint at some of the variations, while dealing particularly with the European scene. There is a practical reason for this limitation: the accessibility of documentation.

  Looking at the profile of a medieval European city we at once note that the castle, the city wall and the church spire dominate the scene. In the modern city it is the high-rise apartment, the bank tower and the factory chimney which are the tallest structures. This tells us a good deal about the prominent social institutions of the two societies. In the soundscape also there are sounds that obtrude over the acoustic horizon: keynotes, signals and soundmarks; and these types of sounds must accordingly form the principal subject of our investigation.

  Making God Listen The most salient sound signal in the Christian community is the church bell. In a very real sense it defines the community, for the parish is an acoustic space, circumscribed by the range of the church bell. The church bell is a centripetal sound; it attracts and unifies the community in a social sense, just as it draws man and God together. At times in the past it took on a centrifugal force as well, when it served to frighten away evil spirits.

  Church bells appear to have been widespread in Europe by the eighth century. In England they were mentioned by The Venerable Bede at the close of the seventh century. Of their gigantic presence, Johan Huizinga writes in The Waning of the Middle Ages:

  One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity: the sound of bells. The bells were in daily life like good spirits, which by their familiar voices, now called upon the citizens to mourn and now to rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to piety. They were known by their names: big Jacqueline, or the bell Roland. Every one knew the difference in meaning of the various ways of ringing. However continuous the ringing of the bells, people would seem not to have become blunted to the effect of their sound.

  Throughout the famous judicial duel between two citizens of Valenciennes, in 1455, the big bell, “which is hideous to hear,” says Chastellain, never stopped ringing. What intoxication the pealing of the bells of all the churches, and of all the monasteries of Paris, must have produced, sounding from morning till evening, and even during the night, when a peace was concluded or a pope elected.

  Throngs of pitched bells or carillons were especially popular in the Netherlands, where they irritated Charles Burney on his European tours. “The great convenience of this kind of music,” Burney wrote, “is that it entertains the inhabitants of a whole town, without giving them the trouble of going to any particular spot to hear it.” At a suitable distance, however, church bells could be powerfully evocative, for the strident noises of the clappers are lost and they are given a legato phrasing which wind currents or water will modulate dynamically, so that even a few simple and not very good bells can provide hours of pleasant listening. Perhaps no sound benefits more from distance and atmosphere. Church bells form a sound complement to distant hills, wrapped in blue-gray mist. Traveling a similar route to that of Charles Burney, yet keeping to the rivers and canals and avoiding the cities, Robert Louis Stevenson experienced church bells transformed in this way.

  On the other side of the valley a group of red roofs and a belfry showed among the foliage. Thence some inspired bell-ringer made the afternoon musical on a chime of bells. There was something very sweet and taking in the air he played; and we thought we had never heard bells speak so intelligibly, or sing so melodiously, as these. … There is so often a threatening note, something blatant and metallic, in the voice of bells, that I believe we have fully more pain than pleasure from hearing them; but these, as they sounded abroad, now high, now low, now with a plaintive cadence that caught the ear like the burthen of a popular song, were always moderate and tunable, and seemed to fall in with the spirit of still, rustic places, like the noise of a waterfall or the babble of a rookery in spring.

  Wherever the missionaries took Christianity, the church bell was soon to follow, acoustically demarking the civilization of the parish from the wilderness beyond its earshot.f The bell was an acoustic calendar, announcing festivals, births, deaths, marriages, fires and revolts. In Salzburg, from a small ancient hotel room, I listened to the innumerable bells ring slowly, just a shade slower than what one would expect, producing little tensions in the mind as anticipation fell a fraction of a second short of reality. And at San Miguel de Allende in Mexico I remember watching the convicts in the belfry, putting the giant bells into motion by tugging at their rims with heavy, awkward movements.

  The Sound of Time It was during the fourteenth century that the church bell was wedded to a technical invention of great significance for European civilization: the mechanical clock. Together they became the most inescapable signals of the soundscape, for like the church bell, and with even more merciless punctuality, the clock measures the passing of time audibly. In this way it differs from all previous means of telling time—water clocks, sand clocks and sundials—which were silent.

  The church clock struck eleven. The air was so empty of other sounds that the whirr of the clock-work immediately before the strokes was distinct, and so was also the click of the same at their close. The notes flew forth with the usual blind obtuseness of inanimate things—flapping and rebounding among walls, undulating against the scattered clouds, spreading through their interstices into unexplored miles of space.

  The clock bell had a great advantage over the clock dial, for to see the dial one must face it, while the bell sends the sounds of time rolling out uniformly in all directions. No European town was without its many clocks.

  Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-maker’s shop joined in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the Sicilian Mariners’ Hymn; so that chronologists of the advanced school were appreciably on their way to the next hour before the whole business of the old one was satisfactorily wound up.

  Clocks regulated the movements of the town with militant imperious-ness. Occasionally they rose to the status of soundmarks. (How well I remember the erratic pentatonic descent of the clock bell in the Kremlin wall—the only whimsy about the place.) Affectionat
ely regarded by the inhabitants, some old clocks are even specifically exempted from anti-noise legislation, as is the case with the post office clock in Brantford (Ontario).

  The historian Oswald Spengler believed that it was the mechanical clock that gave Europe (and particularly Germany) its sense of historical destiny.

  Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is capable.

  The association of clocks and church bells was by no means fortuitous; for Christianity provided the rectilinear idea of the concept of time as progress, albeit spiritual progress, with a starting point (Creation), an indicator (Christ) and a fateful conclusion (the Apocalypse). Already in the seventh century it was decreed in a bull of Pope Sabinianus that the monastary bells should be rung seven times each day, and these punctuation points became known as the canonical hours. Time is always running out in the Christian system and the clock bell punctuates this fact. Its chimes are acoustic signals, but even at a subliminal level the incessant rhythm of its ticking forms a keynote of unavoidable significance in the life of Western Man. Clocks reach into the recesses of night to remind man of his mortality.