One of the first products of the Electric Revolution, Morse’s telegraph (1838), unintentionally dramatized the contradiction between discrete and contoured sound which, as I have said, separates slow from fast-paced societies. Morse used the long line of the telegraph wire to transmit messages broken in binary code, which still relied on digital adroitness, thus maintaining in the telegrapher’s trained finger a skill that related him to the pianist and the scribe. Because the finger cannot be wiggled fast enough to produce the fused contour of sound, the telegraph ticks and stutters in the same way as its two contemporary inventions, Thurber’s typewriter and Gatling’s machine gun. As increased mobility and speed in communication continued to be desired, it was inevitable that, together with the act of letter-scratching, the telegraph should give way to the telephone.
The three most revolutionary sound mechanisms of the Electric Revolution were the telephone, the phonograph and the radio. With the telephone and the radio, sound was no longer tied to its original point in space; with the phonograph it was released from its original point in time. The dazzling removal of these restrictions has given modern man an exciting new power which modern technology has continually sought to render more effective.
The soundscape researcher is concerned with changes in perception and behavior. Let us, for instance, point up a couple of observable changes effected by the telephone, the first of the new instruments to be extensively marketed.
The telephone extended intimate listening across wide distances. As it is basically unnatural to be intimate at a distance, it has taken some time for humans to accustom themselves to the idea. Today North Americans raise their voices only on transcontinental or transoceanic calls; Europeans, however, still raise their voices to talk to the next town, and Asians shout at the telephone when talking to someone in the next street.
The capacity of the telephone to interrupt thought is more important, for it has undoubtedly contributed a good share to the abbreviation of written prose and the choppy speech of modern times. For instance, when Schopenhauer writes at the beginning of The World as Will and Idea that he wishes us to consider his entire book as one thought, we realize that he is about to make severe demands on himself and his readers. The real depreciation of concentration began after the advent of the telephone. Had Schopenhauer written his book in my office, he would have completed the first sentence and the telephone would have rung. Two thoughts.
The telephone had already been dreamed of when Moses and Zoroaster conversed with God, and the radio as an instrument for the transmission of divine messages was well imagined before that. The phonograph, too, has a long history in the imagination of man, for to catch and preserve the tissue of living sound was an ancient ambition. In Babylonian mythology there are hints of a specially constructed room in one of the ziggurats where whispers stayed forever. There is a similar room (still in existence) in the Ali Qapu in Isfahan, though in its present derelict state it is difficult to know how it was supposed to have worked. Presumably its highly polished walls and floor gave sounds an abnormal reverberation time. In an ancient Chinese legend a king has a secret black box into which he speaks his orders, then sends them around his kingdom, for his subjects to carry out, which I gloss to mean that there is authority in the magic of captured sound. With the invention of the telephone by Bell in 1876 and the phonograph by Charles Cros and Thomas Edison in 1877 the era of schizophonia was introduced.
Schizophonia The Greek prefix schizo means split, separated; and phone is Greek for voice. Schizophonia refers to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction. It is another twentieth-century development.
Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms that produced them. The human voice traveled only as far as one could shout. Every sound was uncounterfeitable, unique. Sounds bore resemblances to one another, such as the phonemes which go to make up the repetition of a word, but they were not identical. Tests have shown that it is physically impossible for nature’s most rational and calculating being to reproduce a single phoneme in his own name twice in exactly the same manner.
Since the invention of electroacoustical equipment for the transmission and storage of sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and shot around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations of the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions of holes in millions of public and private places around the world, or it may be stored to be reproduced at a later date, perhaps eventually hundreds of years after it was originally uttered. A record or tape collection may contain items from widely diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem, to a person from any century but our own, a meaningless and surrealistic juxtaposition.
The desire to dislocate sounds in time and space had been evident for some time in the history of Western music, so that the recent technological developments were merely the consequences of aspirations that had already been effectively imagined. The secret quomodo omnisgeneris instrument torum hAusica in remotissima spacia propagari possit (whereby all forms of instrumental music could be transmitted to remote places) was a special preoccupation of the musician-inventor Athanasius Kircher, who discussed the matter in detail in his Phonurgia Nova of 1673. In the practical sphere, the introduction of dynamics, echo effects, the splitting of resources, the separation of soloist from the ensemble and the incorporation of instruments with specific referential qualities (horn, anvil, bells, etc.)were all attempts to create virtual spaces which were larger or different from natural room acoustics; just as the search for exotic folk music and the breaking forward and backward to find new or renew old musical resources represents a desire to transcend the present tense.
When, following the Second World War, the tape recorder made incisions into recorded material possible, any sound object could be cut out and inserted into any new context desired. Most recently, the quadraphonic sound system has made possible a 360-degree soundscape of moving and stationary sound events which allows any sound environment to be simulated in time and space. This provides for the complete portability of acoustic space. Any sonic environment can now become any other sonic environment.
We know that the territorial expansion of post-industrial sounds complemented the imperialistic ambitions of the Western nations. The loudspeaker was also invented by an imperialist, for it responded to the desire to dominate others with one’s own sound. As the cry broadcasts distress, the loudspeaker communicates anxiety. “We should not have conquered Germany without … the loudspeaker,” wrote Hitler in 1938.
I coined the term schizophonia in The New Soundscape intending it to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I wanted it to convey the same sense of aberration and drama. Indeed, the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life.
Radio: Extended Acoustic Space A character in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories dreads mirrors because they multiply men. The same might be said of radios. By 1969, Americans were listening to 268,000,000 radios, that is, about one per citizen. Modern life has been ventriloquized. The domination of modern life by the radio did not take place unnoticed; but whereas opposition to the Industrial Revolution had come from the working classes, who feared the loss of their jobs, the principal opponents of the radio and the phonograph were the intellectuals. Emily Carr, who wrote and painted in the British Columbia wilderness, hated the radio when she first heard it in 1936.
When I go to houses where they are turned on full blas
t I feel as if I’d go mad. Inexplicable torment all over. I thought I ought to get used to them and one was put in my house on trial this morning. I feel as if bees had swarmed in my nervous system. Nerves all jangling. Such a feeling of angry resentment at that horrid metallic voice. After a second I have to clap it off. Can’t stand it. Maybe it’s my imperfect hearing? It’s one of the wonders of the age, simply marvelous. I know that but I hate it.
Hermann Hesse, in Der Steppenwolf (1927), was disturbed by the poor fidelity of the new electroacoustical devices for the reproduction of music.
At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophones and radio sets are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could distinguish the majestic structure and the deep wide breath and the full broad bowing of the strings.
But more than this, Hesse was revolted by the schizophonic incongruities of broadcasting.
It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be. … When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine … radio … projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into snug drawing-rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit.
Radio extended the outreach of sound to produce greatly expanded profiles, which were remarkable also because they formed interrupted acoustic spaces. Never before had sound disappeared across space to reappear again at a distance. The community, which had previously been defined by its bell or temple gong, was now defined by its local transmitter.
The Nazis were the first to use radio in the interests of totalitarianism, but they have not been the last; and little by little, in both East and West, radio has been employed more ruthlessly in culture-molding. Readers of Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward will recall the “constant yawping” of the radio which greeted Vadim when he went to the hospital and the way he detested it. I recall, twenty years ago, hearing the same loudspeakers blaring out their cacophonies of patriotism and spleen on station platforms and in public squares throughout Eastern Europe. But broadcasting has now gone public in the West as well. It may be hard for younger readers to appreciate what has happened but, up until about a decade ago, one of the most salient differences between cities like London or Paris and Bucharest or Mexico City was that in the former there were no radios or music in public places, restaurants or shops. In those days, particularly during the summer months, BBC announcers would regularly request listeners to keep their radios at a low volume in order not to disturb the neighborhood. In a dramatic reversal of style, British Railways recently began beaming the BBC regional service throughout railway stations (I have heard it over loudspeakers in Brighton Railway Station, 1975). But they still have a long way to go to catch Australian Railways, which plays the ABC light program on trains from 7 a.m to 11 p.m. during the three-day run from Sydney to Perth. In my compartment in 1973 it was impossible to shut it off.
In the early days one listened to the radio selectively by studying the program schedule, but today programs are overlooked and are merely overheard. This change of habit prepared modern society to tolerate the walls of sound with which human engineering now orchestrates the modern environment.
The radio was the first sound wall, enclosing the individual with the familiar and excluding the enemy. In this sense it is related to the castle garden of the Middle Ages which, with its birds and fountains, contradicted the hostile environment of forest and wilderness. The radio has actually become the bird-song of modern life, the “natural” soundscape, excluding the inimical forces from outside. To serve this function sound need not be elaborately presented, any more than wallpaper has to be painted by Michelangelo to render the drawing room attractive. Thus, the development of greater fidelity in sound reproduction, which occupied the first half of the present century—and in a way may be thought of as analogous to the development of oil paints, which also rendered possible greater veracity in art—is now canceled by a tendency to return to simpler forms of expression. For instance, while the transition from mechanical to electrical recording (Harrison and Maxfield) extended the available bandwidth from three to seven octaves, the transistor radio reduced it again to something like its former state. The habit of listening to transistor radios outdoors in the presence of additional ambient noise, often in circumstances which reduce the signal-to-noise ratio to approximately one to one, has in turn suggested the inclusion of additional noise which, in some popular music, is now engineered right onto the disc, often in the form of electroacoustical feedback. This, in turn, leads to new evaluations of what is signal and what is noise in the whole constantly changing field of aural perception.
The Shapes of Broadcasting Radio programing needs to be analyzed in as much detail as an epic poem or musical composition, for in its themes and rhythms will be found the pulse of life. But detailed studies of this kind appear never to have been undertaken. The structural principles of such an analytical undertaking will be developed in the Rhythm and Tempo chapter of Part Four, but it will not be out of place here to make a few general comments.
At first radio broadcasts were isolated presentations, surrounded by extended (silent) station breaks. This occasional approach to broadcasting, now absent from domestic radio, can still to some extent be experienced with shortwave broadcasts, where station breaks are often several minutes long and are accompanied by short musical phrases or signature tunes. (This attractive practice is only slightly spoiled by the unlikely choice of instruments used on some stations: thus, the calls of Jordan and Kuwait are played on the clarinet, those of Jamaica and Iran on the vibraphone—that is, they are played on instruments so distinctly non-indigenous that one might suppose they were originally recorded in New York.)
During the 1930s and 1940s schedules were filled out until the whole day was looped together in unsettled connectivity. The modern radio schedule, a confection of material from various sources, joined in thoughtful, funny, ironic, absurd or provocative juxtapositions, has introduced many contradictions into modern life and has perhaps contributed more than anything else to the breakup of unified cultural systems and values. It is for this reason that the study of joins in broadcasting is of great importance. The montage was first employed in film because it was the first art form to be cut and spliced; but since the invention of magnetic tape and the compression of the schedule, the shapes of broadcasting have followed the editor’s scissors also.
The function of the montage is to make one plus one equal three. The film producer Eisenstein—one of the first to experiment with montage—defines the effect as consisting “in the fact that two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition.” The non sequiturs of the montage may be incomprehensible to the innocent though they are easily accommodated by the initiated. I recall one night in Chicago, at the height of the Vietnam War, listening to an on-the-spot report of the grisly affair, sponsored by Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, whose jingle at the time was “Chew your little cares away!” I mentioned the experience to a class of students at Northwestern University the next day. They were interested in my opposition to the war, but failed to see my point about the gum. For them the elements had been montaged as part of a way of life.
Since the advent of the singing commercial on North American radio, popular music and advertising have formed the main material of the radio montage, so that today, by means of quick
cross-fades, direct cuts or “music under” techniques, songs and commercials follow one another in quick and smooth succession, producing a commercial life style that is entertaining ("buy baubles for your bippy") and musical entertainment that is profitable ("five million sold").
Radio introduced the surrealistic soundscape, but other electroacous-tical devices have had an influence in rendering it acceptable. The record collection, which one may observe in almost every house of the civilized world, is often equally eclectic and bizarre, containing stray items from different periods or countries, all of which may nevertheless be stacked on the same phonograph for successive replay.
I am trying to illustrate the irrationality of electroacoustic juxtapositioning in order that it might cease to be taken for granted. One last story. A friend was once on an aircraft that supplies a selection of recorded programs of different types for earphone listening. Choosing the program of classical music he settled back in his seat to listen to Wagner’s Meister singer. As the overture soared to a climax, the disturbed voice of the stewardess suddenly interrupted the music to announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, the toilets are plugged up and must be flushed with a glass of water.”
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 12