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

by R. Murray Schafer

  Ultimately the throb of the machine began to intoxicate man everywhere with its incessant vibrations. D. H. Lawrence (1915): “As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain.”

  Eventually then the noises of modern industrial life swung the balance against those of nature, a fact which the futurist, Luigi Russolo, was the first to point out in his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). Writing on the eve of the First World War, Russolo excitedly proclaimed that the new sensibility of man depended on his appetite for noises, which would achieve their grandest opportunity for expression in mechanized warfare.

  Noise Equals Power We have gone far enough to show how the soundscape of both city and country was being transmogrified during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are now confronted by an enigma: despite the vast increase in noise that the new machines created, rarely do we find opposition to these noises.

  In England, the first criticism of working conditions in factories was that of Sadler’s Factory Investigating Committee of 1832. This pathetic seven-hundred-page document is filled with hideous descriptions of brutality and human degradation—shifts extending to thirty-five hours, children sleeping in the mills in order not to be late for work, workers collapsing into the machines from sheer fatigue, alcoholism among children—but nowhere is noise mentioned as a factor contributing to the tragedy of these environments. Only once or twice does one encounter there a reference to the “rumbling noise” of the machinery. When sound is noticed it is usually the screams of the workers when they are beaten.

  I happened to be at the other end of the room, talking; and I heard

  the blows, and I looked that way, and saw the spinner beating one of

  the girls severely with a large stick. Hearing the sound led me to look

  round, and to ask what was the matter, and they said it was “Nothing

  but—paying [beating] his ligger-on.”

  The only time the machines were ever stopped was to impress visitors, or during meal breaks, when the children had to clean them on their own time. Otherwise they rattled on undetected, and Sadler’s interviewees even spoke of the “silence” of the mills, by which they meant the “rule of silence.” “Is one part of the discipline of these mills profound silence?—Yes, they will not allow them to speak; if they chance to see two speaking, they are beaten with the strap.”

  The only people to criticize the “prodigious noise” of machinery were the writers, figures like Dickens and Zola. Dickens, in Hard Times (1854):

  Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured.

  Zola, in Germinal (1885):

  And now it had occurred to him to open the steam-cocks and let out the steam. The jets went off like gunshots and the five boilers blew off like hurricanes, with such a thunderous hissing that your ears seemed to be bleeding.

  Despite these attacks, it was still to be a hundred years before noise criteria would be established and enforced as part of hygiene programs in industry. Neither unions nor social reformers nor the medical profession caught the theme. Noise was certainly known to cause deafness as early as 1831 when Fosbroke described deafness occurring among blacksmiths, but this remained an isolated study until 1890 when Barr surveyed one hundred boilermakers and discovered that not one of them had normal hearing.g Hammering and riveting steel plates together produced an intense noise, resulting in a form of hearing impairment in which there is deafness to high frequencies. The term “boilermaker’s disease” came into use shortly afterward to refer to all kinds of industrial hearing loss, though its prevention only received serious consideration in most industrialized countries toward 1970.

  The inability to recognize noise during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution as a factor contributing to the multiplicatory toxicity of the new working environments is one of the strangest facts in the history of aural perception. We must try to determine the reason. It may be partly explained as a result of the inability to measure sounds quantitatively. A sound might be recognized as unpleasantly loud, but until Lord Rayleigh built the first practical precision instrument for the measurement of acoustic intensity in 1882, there was no way of knowing for certain whether a subjective impression had an objective basis. The decibel, as a means of establishing definite sound pressure levels, did not come into extended use until 1928.

  But I want to extend a thought which I had begun to develop in Part One. We have already noted how loud noises evoked fear and respect back to earliest times, and how they seemed to be the expression of divine power. We have also observed how this power was transferred from natural sounds (thunder, volcano, storm) to those of the church bell and pipe organ. I called this Sacred Noise to distinguish it from the other sort of noise (with a small letter), implying nuisance and requiring noise abatement legislation. This was always primarily the rowdy human voice. During the Industrial Revolution, Sacred Noise sprang across to the profane world. Now the industrialists held power and they were granted dispensation to make Noise by means of the steam engine and the blast furnace, just as previously the monks had been free to make Noise on the church bell or J. S. Bach to open out his preludes on the full organ.

  The association of Noise and power has never really been broken in the human imagination. It descends from God, to the priest, to the industrialist, and more recently to the broadcaster and the aviator. The important thing to realize is this: to have the Sacred Noise is not merely to make the biggest noise; rather it is a matter of having the authority to make it without censure.

  Wherever Noise is granted immunity from human intervention, there will be found a seat of power. The noisy clank of Watt’s original engine was maintained as a sign of power and efficiency, against his own desire to eliminate it, thus enabling the railroads to establish themselves more emphatically as the “conquerers” that I will, in a moment, let Charles Dickens describe. A glance at the sound output of any representative selection of modern machines is enough to indicate where the centers of power lie in the modern world.

  Steam engine 85 dBA

  Printing works 87 dBA

  Diesel-electric generator house 96 dBA

  Screw-heading machine 101 dBA

  Weaving shed 104 dBA

  Sawmill chipper 105 dBA

  Metalwork grinder 106 dBA

  Wood-planing machine 108 dBA

  Metal saw 110 dBA

  Rock band 115 dBA

  Boiler works, hammering 118 dBA

  Jet taking off 120 dBA

  Rocket launching 160 dBA

  Sound Imperialism The historian Oswald Spengler distinguishes two phases in the development of a social movement: the cultural phase, during which the main ideas are still maturing; and the civilization phase, during which the main ideas, having matured, are legalized and transmitted abroad. Imperialism is the word used to refer to the extension of an empire or ideology to parts of the world remote from the source. It is Europe and North America which have, in recent centuries, masterminded various schemes designed to dominate other peoples and value systems, and subjugation by Noise has played no small part in these schemes. Expansion took place first on land and sea (train, tank, battleship) and then in the air (planes, rocketry, radio). The moon probes are the most recent expression of the same heroic confidence that made Western Man a world colonial power.

  When sound power is sufficient to create a large acoustic profile, we may speak of it, too, as imperialistic. For instance, a man with a loudspeaker is more imperialistic than one without because he can dominate more acoustic space. A man with a shovel is not imperialistic, but a man with a jackhammer is because he has the power to interrupt and dominate other acoustic activities in the vicinity. (In this sense we note that outside workers were able to improve their posit
ion remarkably after they were in possession of tools to attract attention to themselves. No one listens to a ditchdigger.) Similarly, the growing importance of the international aviation industry can be easily assessed from the growth patterns of airport noise profiles. Western Man leaves his calling cards all over the world in the form of Western-made or Western-inspired machinery. As the factories and the airports of the world multiply, local culture is pulverized into the background. Everywhere one travels today one hears the evidence, though only in the more remote places is the incongruity immediately striking.

  Increase in the intensity of sound output is the most striking characteristic of the industrialized soundscape. Industry must grow; therefore its sounds must grow with it. That is the fixed theme of the past two hundred years. In fact, noise is so important as an attention-getter that if quiet machinery could have been developed, the success of industrialization might not have been so total. For emphasis let us put this more dramatically: if cannons had been silent, they would never have been used in warfare.

  The Flat Line in Sound The Industrial Revolution introduced another effect into the soundscape: the flat line. When sounds are projected visually on a graphic level recorder, they may be analyzed in terms of what is called their envelope or signature. The principal characteristics of a sound envelope are the attack, the body, the transients (or internal changes) and the decay. When the body of the sound is prolonged and unchanging, it is reproduced by the graphic level recorder as an extended horizontal line.

  Machines share this important feature, for they create low-information, high-redundancy sounds. They may be continuous drones (as in a generator); they may be rough-edged, possessing what Pierre Schaeffer calls a “grain” (as in mechanical sawing or filing); or they may be punctuated with rhythmic concatenations (as in weaving or threshing machines)—but in all cases it is the continuousness of the sound which is its predominating feature.

  The flat continuous line in sound is an artificial construction. Like the flat line in space, it is rarely found in nature. (The continuous stridulation of certain insects like cicadas is an exception.) Just as the Industrial Revolution’s sewing machine gave us back the long line in clothes, so the factories, which operated night and day nonstop, created the long line in sound. As roads and railroads and flat-surfaced buildings proliferated in space, so did their acoustic counterparts in time; and eventually flat lines in sound slipped out across the countryside also, as the whine of the transport truck and the airplane drone demonstrate.

  A few years ago, while listening to the stonemasons’ hammers on the Takht-e-Jamshid in Teheran, I suddenly realized that in all earlier societies the majority of sounds were discrete and interrupted, while today a large portion—perhaps the majority—are continuous. This new sound phenomenon, introduced by the Industrial Revolution and greatly extended by the Electric Revolution, today subjects us to permanent keynotes and swaths of broad-band noise, possessing little personality or sense of progression.

  Just as there is no perspective in the lo-fi soundscape (everything is present at once), similarly there is no sense of duration with the flat line in sound. It is suprabiological. We may speak of natural sounds as having biological existences. They are born, they flourish and they die. But the generator or the air-conditioner do not die; they receive transplants and live forever.

  The flat line in sound emerges as a result of an increased desire for speed. Rhythmic impulse plus speed equals pitch. Whenever impulses are speeded up beyond 20 occurrences or cycles per second, they are fused together and are perceived as a continuous contour. Increased efficiency in manufacturing, transportation and communication systems fused the im-pulses of older sounds into new sound energies of flat-line pitched noise. Man’s foot sped up to produce the automobile drone; horses’ hooves sped up to produce the railway and aircraft whine; the quill pen sped up to produce the radio carrier wave, and the abacus sped up to produce the whirr of computer peripherals.

  Graphic level recordings of typical flat-line and impact sounds.

  Henri Bergson once asked how we should know about it if some agent suddenly doubled the speed of all events in the universe? Quite simply, he replied, we should discern a great loss in the richness of experience. Even as Bergson wrote, this was happening, for as discrete sounds gave way to flat lines, the noise of the machine became “a narcotic to the brain,” and listlessness increased in modern life.

  The function of the drone has long been known in music. It is an anti-intellectual narcotic. It is also a point of focus for meditation, particularly in the East. Man listens differently in the presence of drones, and the importance of this change in perception is becoming evident in the West.

  The flat line in sound produces only one embellishment: the glissando—that is, as the revolutions increase the pitch gradually rises, and as they decrease the pitch descends. Then flat lines become curved lines. But they are still without sudden surprises. When flat lines become jerky or dotted or looping lines—the machinery is falling apart.

  Another type of curve produced by the flat line is the Doppler effect, which results when a sound is in motion at sufficient velocity to cause a bunching up of the sound waves as the sound approaches an observer (resulting in a rise in pitch) and an elongation of the sound waves as the sound recedes (resulting in a lowering of pitch). There are certainly Doppler effects in nature (the flight of a bee, for instance, or the galloping of horses) but only after the new speeds of the Industrial Revolution did the effect become conspicuous enough to be “discovered.” Christian Johann Doppler (1803–53) formulated the explanation of the effect to which he has bequeathed his name in a work entitled Über das Farbige Licht der Doppelsterne, where he applied the principle to light waves. But Doppler acknowledged that he worked by analogy from sound to light.

  Some sounds move in space, some do not; and we may move some sounds by carrying them with us. But which sound attracted Doppler’s ear? It could only have been the railway. Although he does not mention this, we do know trains were used to verify the Doppler effect. About 1845 “musically trained observers were stationed along the tracks of the Rhine Railroad between Utrecht and Maarsen in Holland and listened to trumpets played in a railway car as it sped past. From the known pitch of the trumpet and the apparent pitch of the approaching and receding tones, the speed of the railway car was estimated with fairly good accuracy.”

  The Lore of Trains The first railway was the Stockton and Darlington run in England (1825), designed to carry coal from the mines to the waterways. It proved so immediately successful that within a few years Britain was covered with a railway network. Dickens described the new sound in 1848:

  Night and day the conquering engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing smoothly to their journey’s end, and gliding like tame dragons into the allotted corners grooved out to the inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there, making the walls quake, as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers yet unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet achieved.

  From England the railway system fanned out quickly across Europe and the world. France had a railway by 1828 as did the U.S.A., Ireland by 1834, Germany by 1835, Canada by 1836, Russia by 1837, Italy by 1839, Spain by 1848, Norway and Australia by 1854, Sweden by 1856 and Japan by 1872.

  The train conquered the world with a minimum of opposition. Dickens didn’t like it: “Louder and louder yet, it shrieks and cries as it comes tearing on resistless to the goal.” Neither did Wagner, and although the Bavarian College of Medicine protested in 1838 that the speed with which trains traveled would undoubtedly cause brain damage, the trains remained and the tracks multiplied.

  Of all the sounds of the Industrial Revolution, those of trains seem across time to have taken on the most attractive sentimental associations. J. M. W. Turner’s celebrated painting Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), with its locomotive thrusting down diagonally on the spectator, was the first lyric inspired by the steam engi
ne. It was a painter, too, who caught the next change in the epic of the railroads. By 1920 the main lines of Europe (though not of England and North America) were being electrified, and the change is recorded in de Chirico’s wistful landscapes, where silent smoke-puffing trains pass out of sight in the extreme distance.

  By comparison with the sounds of modern transportation, those of the trains were rich and characteristic: the whistle, the bell, the slow chuffing of the engine at the start, accelerating suddenly as the wheels slipped, then slowing again, the sudden explosions of escaping steam, the squeaking of the wheels, the rattling of the coaches, the clatter of the tracks, the thwack against the window as another train passed in the opposite direction—these were all memorable noises.

  The sounds of travel have deep mysteries. Just as the post horn had once carried the imagination over the horizon, so also did its replacement, the train whistle. On European trains the whistle is high and piping: “Then the shrill whistle of the trains reechoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the far-off come near and imminent.”

  In North America, on the other hand, the whistle is low and powerful, the utterance of a big engine with a heavy load. On the prairies—so flat that one can see the full train from engine to caboose, spread out like a stick across the horizon—the periodic whistlings resound like low, haunting moans. “The Canadian train whistle sounds like a dejected monster. It wails, and the pitch descends, unlike that of our British trains which rises in a chirpy and optimistic manner. The Canadian whistle sounds as if it has travelled far and still has a long way to go.” Farmers knew how to interpret these sounds. “When the train’s whistle sounds hollow, the weather will turn colder,” runs an Ontario proverb. The train’s whistle was the most important sound in the frontier town, the solo announcement of contact with the outside world. It was the stop clock of the elementary community, as predictable and reassuring as the church bell. In those days trains spoke to the heart of every man, and small boys came to greet the panting engine.