The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World
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Pyotr Artamonov paced the building site, pulling absently at his ear, observing the work. A saw ate lusciously into wood; planes shuffled, wheezing, to and fro; axes tapped loud and clear; mortar splashed wetly onto masonry, and a whetstone sobbed against a dull axe edge. Carpenters, lifting a beam, struck up Dubinushka, and somewhere a young voice sang out lustily:
"Friend Zachary visited Mary,
Punched her mug to make her merry.”
Later, the workers would resign themselves spitefully to jeering at the mill. Then they would just
gather on the bank of the Vataraksha, nibbling at pumpkin and sunflower seeds and listening to the snorting and whining of the saws, the shuffling of the planes, the resounding blows of the sharp axes. They would speak in mocking tones of the fruitless building of the tower of Babel.
The industrial workshop killed singing. As Lewis Mumford put it in Technics and Civilization: “Labor was orchestrated by the number of revolutions per minute, rather than the rhythm of song or chant or tattoo.”
Street Criers But this came later. Before the Industrial Revolution the streets and workshops were full of voices, and the farther south one went in Europe the more boisterous they appeared to become.
Turn your eyes upward, myriads of windows and balconies, curtains swinging in the sun, and leaves and flowers and among them, people, just to confirm your illusion. Cries, screams, whipcracks deafen you, the light blinds you, your brain begins to feel dizzy and you gulp air. You feel drawn into becoming part of the enthusiastic demonstration, to applaud, to cry “Evvive"—but for what? What is there before your eyes is nothing exceptional or extraordinary. All is perfectly calm; no deep political passion is stirring in these people. They all mind their business and talk about normal things; it is just a day like any other. It is Naples’ life in its perfect normality, nothing more.
Why do the voices of South Europeans always seem louder than their northern neighbors? Is it because they spend more time outdoors where the ambient noise level is higher? We recall that the Berbers learned to shout because they had to shout over the cataracts of the Nile.
But the streets of all major European towns were seldom quiet in those days, for there were the constant voices of hawkers, street musicians and beggars. The beggars in particular plagued the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt when he visited Paris in 1802–3. “Usually they are not violent as they fall on one, but they hamper one and touch the heart all the more with their continuous beseeching cries and their miserable behavior.” The ubiquitous street cries were impossible to avoid. “The uproar of the street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous,” reported Virginia Woolf in Orlando; but this is too general. Actually each hawker had an uncounterfeiting cry. More than the words, it was the musical motif and the inflection of the voice, passed in the trade from father to son, that gave the cue, blocks away, to the profession of the singer. In the days when shops moved on wheels, ads were vocal displays. Street cries attracted the attention of composers and were incorporated into numerous vocal compositions, by Janequin in sixteenth-century France and by Weelkes, Gibbons and Dering in the England of Shakespeare’s time. The Fancies by the last three composers contain some one hundred fifty different cries and itinerant vendors’ songs. A catalogue of some of these gives a good idea of the variety of goods and services which were available in the towns of Elizabethan England:
13 different kinds of fish,
18 different kinds of fruit,
6 kinds of liquors and herbs,
11 vegetables,
14 kinds of food,
14 kinds of household stuff,
13 articles of clothing,
9 tradesmen’s cries,
19 tradesmen’s songs,
4 begging songs for prisoners,
5 watchman’s songs,
1 town crier.
The town crier preserved by Dering is clearly from before the days of the Puritan reforms. He begins with the traditional invocation “Oyez,” from the Norman French verb oüir, to hear.
Oyez, Oyez. If any man or woman, city or country, that can tell any tidings of a grey mare with a black tail, having three legs and both her eyes out, with a great hole in her arse, and there your snout, if there be any that can tell any tidings of this mare, let him bring word to the crier and he shall be well pleas’d for his labour.
The practice of maintaining town criers proceeded down to about 1880, or at least that is the time when their names disappear from the directories of cities like Leicester.
Public hawking was carried on also in the theaters and opera houses, as Johann Friedrich Reichardt reported from Paris.
Between the acts, hawkers enter bearing orangeade, lemonade, ice cream, fruit, and so forth, while others bring opera libretti, programs, evening newspapers and journals and still others advertise binoculars, all vying with one another and making such a commotion that one is driven to distraction. This is even worse on those days when the theatre, as is common in France, is so full that the musicians of the orchestra are forced out to accommodate extra spectators. Right after the last word of the tragedy, the hawkers push past the doors and bawl out “Orangeade, Lemonade, Glacés! marchand des lorgnettes!” and so forth, completely bereft of any music, lacerating the ears and feelings of all sensitive spectators.
Noise in the City It will be noticed, from several of the quotations of the last few pages, that street music was a continual subject of controversy. Intellectuals were irritated by it. Serious musicians were outraged—for frequently it appears that unmusical persons would engage in the practice, not at all to bring pleasure, but merely to have their silence bought off. But resistance moved to the middle class as well, as soon as it contemplated an elevation of life style. After art music moved indoors, street music became an object of increasing scorn, and a study of European noise abatement legislation between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries shows how increasing amounts of it were directed against this activity. In England, street music was suppressed by two Acts of Parliament during the reign of Elizabeth I, but it can hardly have been very effective. Hogarth’s well-known eighteenth-century print, The Enraged Musician, shows the conflict between indoor and outdoor music in full view. By the nineteenth century, a by-law in Weimar had forbidden the making of music unless conducted behind closed doors. The bourgeoisie was gaining the upper hand, on paper at least. In England the brewer and Member of Parliament, Michael T. Bass, published a book in 1864 entitled Street Music in the Metropolis, together with a proposed Bill, designed to put an end to the abuse. Bass received a great many letters and petitions supporting his Bill, including one signed by two hundred “leading composers and professors of music of the metropolis,” who complained vigorously of the way in which “our professional duties are seriously interrupted.” Another letter, signed by Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilkie Collins, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt, stated:
Your correspondents are, all, professors and practitioners of one or other of the arts or sciences. In their devotion to their pursuits—tending to the peace and comfort of mankind—they are daily interrupted, harassed, worried, wearied, driven nearly mad, by street musicians. They are even made especial objects of persecution by brazen performers on brazen instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, dashers of cymbals, worriers of fiddles, and bellowers of ballads; for, no sooner does it become known to those producers of horrible sounds that any of your correspondents have particular need of quiet in their own houses, than the said houses are beleaguered by discordant hosts seeking to be bought off.
A further communication received by Bass for his proposed bill was in the form of a detailed list of interruptions from Charles Babbage, the eminent mathematician and inventor of the calculating machine. Brass bands, organs and monkeys were the chief distractions, and Babbage came to the conclusion that “one-fourth part of my working power has been destroyed by the nuisance against which I have protested.”
By the 1930s Parisian citizens were lamenting the disappearance of street criers—si la chanson française ne doit pas mourir ce sont les chanteurs des rues qui doivent la perpetuer; but Professor Beauty was by that time in his padded cell, which is to say that the disappearance of street music has been largely a matter of indifference to aesthetes and collectors.
The study of noise legislation is interesting, not because anything is ever really accomplished by it, rather because it provides us with a concrete register of acoustic phobias and nuisances. Changes in legislation give us clues to changing social attitudes and perceptions, and these are important for the accurate treatment of sound symbolism.
Early noise abatement legislation was selective and qualitative, contrasting with that of the modern era, which has begun to fix quantitative limits in decibels for all sounds. While most of the legislation of the past was directed against the human voice (or rather the rougher voices of the lower classes), no piece of European legislation was ever directed against the far larger sound—if objectively measured—of the church bell, nor against the equally loud machine which filled the church’s inner vaults with music, sustaining the institution imperiously as the hub of community life—until its eventual displacement by the industrialized factory.
PART TWO
The Post-Industrial Soundscape
FIVE
The Industrial Revolution
The Lo-Fi Soundscape of the Industrial Revolution The lo-fi soundscape was introduced by the Industrial Revolution and was extended by the Electric Revolution which followed it. The lo-fi soundscape originates with sound congestion. The Industrial Revolution introduced a multitude of new sounds with unhappy consequences for many of the natural and human sounds which they tended to obscure; and this development was extended into a second phase when the Electric Revolution added new effects of its own and introduced devices for packaging sounds and transmitting them schizophonically across time and space to live amplified or multiplied existences.
Today the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds; there is so much acoustic information that little of it can emerge with clarity. In the ultimate lo-fi soundscape the signal-to-noise ratio is one-to-one and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to. This, in summary, is the transformation of the soundscape which we will study in the next chapters.
The Industrial Revolution in England, the country which, for a variety of reasons, became the first to mechanize, took place approximately between 1760 and 1840. The principal technological changes which affected the soundscape included the use of new metals such as cast iron and steel as well as new energy sources such as coal and steam.
The textile industry was the first to undergo industrialization. John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733), James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764–69) and Richard Arkwright’s waterframe (1769) led to the development of the power loom by 1785. Increased production of finished cotton goods led to a greater demand for raw cotton, a problem which was solved in the U.S.A. by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793). Other industries quickly followed, for as Alfred North Whitehead observed: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.” A list of some of the more outstanding eighteenth-century inventions will allow the imaginative reader to overhear the changes in the soundscape which were worked by the new materials under the impress of new energy sources and the relentless precision of new machinery.
1711: Sewing machine
1714: Typewriter
1738: Cast-iron rail tramway (at Whitehaven, England)
1740: Cast steel
1755: Iron wheels for coal cars
1756: Cement manufacture
1761: Air cylinders; piston worked by water wheel; more than tripled production of blast furnace
1765–69: Improved steam pumping engine with separate condenser
1767: Cast-iron rails (at Coalbrookdale)
1774: Boring machine
1775: Reciprocative engine with wheel
1776: Reverberatory furnace
1781–86: Steam engine as prime mover
1781: Steamboat
1785: First steam spinning mill (at Papplewick)
1785: Power loom
1785: Screw propeller
1787: Iron steamship
1788: Threshing machine
1790: Sewing machine first patented
1791: Gas engine
1793: Signal telegraph
1795–1809: Food canning
1796: Hydraulic press
1797: Screw-cutting lathe
The social concomitants to these changes were also profound. Agricultural workers were disfranchised and sent to the cities to seek work in the factories. Operated by steam engines, lighted by gas, the new factories could work nonstop day and night, and pauperized workers were forced to do the same. The working day was increased to sixteen hours or more, with a single hour off for dinner. Workers lived in squalid quarters near the factories, cut off from the countryside, with almost no recreational facilities except the public houses; and these, if we accept the evidence of numerous earwitnesses, became centers of much greater noise and rowdi-ness during the eighteenth century than before.
I have already mentioned how factories put an end to the unity of work and song. At a later date, after the reform work of men like Robert Owen, the urge for singing reappeared in the British choral societies, which flourished best in the factory towns of the North. Workmen who experienced the crucifixion of human culture then sang Messiah at Christmas in thousand-voice choirs.
The cacophonies of iron pushed out over the countryside first in the form of the railroad and the threshing machine. We can measure the phases of change as the new farming machinery moved out from England across Europe. While Tolstoy’s Russian peasants still continued to sing over their sickles, the heroine of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (contemporary of Anna Karenina) stands mutely over her work smothered by the concatenated roar of the threshing machine.
A hasty lunch was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple of hours brought them near to dinnertime; the inexorable wheels continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near the revolving wirecage.
The Sounds of Technology
Sweep Across Town and Country While the philosophy of utilitarianism was sufficient to condone the inhumanities of Coketown, the machine was immediately conspicuous when it was introduced into provincial life. It took time for the sounds of technology to rub their way across Europe. The following set of earwitness accounts by writers over several generations reveals how the new sounds were gradually accepted as inevitable.
French towns were upset at first by the new rhythms and aberrational noises of the machine, as Stendhal makes clear on one of the first pages of The Red and the Black (1830).
The little town of Verrières must be one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their steep, red tile roofs spread across a hillside,
the folds of which are outlined by clumps of thrifty chestnut trees. The Doubs flows a couple of hundred feet below the town’s fortifications, built long ago by the Spaniards and now fallen into ruins. …
Scarcely inside the town, one is stunned by the racket of a roaring machine, frightful in its appearance. Twenty ponderous hammers, falling with a crash which makes the street shudder, are lifted for each new stroke by the power of a water wheel. Every one of these hammers makes, every day, I don’t know how many thousand nails. Young, pretty, fresh-faced girls, slip little slivers of iron into place beneath the sledge hammers, which promptly transform them into nails.
By 1864 French towns were alive with factories, and were described with disdain by the Goncourts.
A vague, indeterminate smell of grease and sugar, mixed with the emanations from the water and the smell of tar, rose from the candle factories, the glue factories, the tanneries, the sugar refineries, which were scattered about on the quay amongst thin, dried-up grass. The noise of foundries and the screams of steamwhistles broke, at every moment, the silence of the river.
By the early twentieth century the sounds of technology became more acceptable to the urban ear, “blending” with the natural rhythms of antiquity. As Thomas Mann described it:
We are encompassed with a roaring like that of the sea; for we live almost directly on the swift-flowing river that foams over shallow ledges at no great distance from the poplar avenue. … There is a locomotive foundry a little way downstream. Its premises have been lately enlarged to meet increased demands, and light streams all night long from its lofty windows. Beautiful glittering new engines roll to and fro on trial runs; a steam whistle emits wailing head-tones from time to time; muffled thunderings of unspecified origin shatter the air. … Thus in our half-suburban, half-rural seclusion the voice of nature mingles with that of man, and over all lies the bright-eyed freshness of the new day.