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

by R. Murray Schafer

  As the format of radio tightened, its tempo increased, substituting superficiality for prolonged acts of concentration. Heavyweight fare like the famous BBC Third Programme was dismissed to be replaced by material with more twist and appeal. Each station and each country has its own tempo of broadcasting, but in general it has been speeded up over the years, and its tone is moving from the sedate toward the slaphappy. (I am speaking here only of Western-style broadcasting; I am not sufficiently familiar with the monolithic cultures of Russia or China.) In the West, material is being increasingly pushed together, overlapped. In a World Soundscape Project in 1973 we counted the number of separate items on four Vancouver radio stations over a typical eighteen-hour day. Each item (announcement, commercial, weather report, etc.) represented a change of focus. The results ran as follows:

  STATION TOTAL NUMBER OF ITEMS HOURLY AVERAGE

  CBU 635 35.5

  CHQM 745 41.0

  CJOR 996 55.5

  CKLG 1097 61.0

  Stations broadcasting popular music are the fastest-paced. The duration of individual items of any kind rarely exceeds three minutes on North American pop stations. Here the recording industry discloses a secret. On the old ten-inch shellac disc, the recording duration was limited to slightly over three minutes. As this was the first vehicle for popular music, all pop songs were abbreviated to meet this technical limitation. But curiously, when the long-play disc was introduced in 1948, the length of the average pop song did not increase in proportion. This suggests that some mysterious law concerning average attention span may have been inadvertently discovered by the older technology.

  One acoustic effect is rarely heard on North American radios: silence. Only occasionally, during broadcasts of theater or classical music, do quiet and silence achieve their full potentiality. A graphic level recording of a popular station will show how the program material is made to ride at the maximum permissible level, a technique known as compression because the available dynamic range is compressed into very narrow limits. Such broadcasting shows no dynamic shadings or phrasing. It does not rest. It does not breathe. It has become a sound wall.

  Sound Walls Walls used to exist to delimit physical and acoustic space, to isolate private areas visually and to screen out acoustic interferences. Often this second function is unstressed, particularly in modern buildings. Confronted with this situation modern man has discovered what might be called audioanalgesia, that is, the use of sound as a painkiller, a distraction to dispel distractions. The use of audioanalgesia extends in modern life from its original use in the dental chair to wired background music in hotels, offices, restaurants and many other public and private places. Air-conditioners, which produce a continuous band of pink noise, are also instruments of audioanalgesia. It is important in this respect to realize that such masking sounds are not intended to be listened to consciously. Thus, the Moozak industry deliberately chooses music that is nobody’s favorite and subjects it to unvenomed and innocuous orchestrations in order to produce a wraparound of “pretty,” designed to mask unpleasant distractions in a manner that corresponds to the attractive packages of modern merchandising to disguise frequently cheesy contents.

  Walls used to exist to isolate sounds. Today sound walls exist to isolate. In the same way the intense amplification of popular music does not stimulate sociability so much as it expresses the desire to experience individuation … aloneness … disengagement. For modern man, the sound wall has become as much a fact as the wall in space. The teenager lives in the continual presence of his radio, the housewife in the presence of her television set, the worker in the presence of engineered music systems designed to increase production. From Nova Scotia comes word of the continuous use of background music in school classrooms. The principal is pleased with the results and pronounces the experiment a success. From Sacramento, California, comes news of another unusual development: a library wired for rock music in which patrons are encouraged to talk. On the walls are signs stating NO SILENCE. The result: circulation, especially among the young, is up.

  They never sup without music; and there is always fruit served up after the meat; while they are at table, some burn perfumes and sprinkle about fragrant ointments and sweet waters: in short, they want nothing that may cheer their spirits.

  Sir Thomas More, Utopia

  Moozak If the Christmas card angels offer any proof, Utopian creatures are forever smiling. Thus Moozak, the sound wall of paradise, never weeps. It is the honeyed antidote to hell on earth. Moozak starts out with the high motive of orchestrating paradise (it is often present in writings about Utopias) but it always ends up as the embalming fluid of earthly boredom. It is natural then that the testing-ground for the Moozak industry should have been the U.S.A., with its highly idealistic Constitution and the cruddy realities of its modern life styles. The service pages of the telephone directories beam out its advertisements to clients in every North American city.

  MUZAK IS MORE THAN MUSIC—PSYCHOLOGICALLY PLANNED—FOR TIME AND PLACE—JUST FUP THE SWITCH—NO MACHINES TO ATTEND/FRESH PROGRAMS EACH DAY—NO REPETITION—ADVISED BY BOARD OF SCIENTIFIC ADVISORS-OVER 30 YEARS OF RESEARCH—PAGING AND SOUND SERVICE—FAST ROUND-THE-CLOCK SERVICE-MUZAK BRAND EQUIPMENT—OFFICES-INDUSTRIAL PLANTS-BANKS—HOSPITALS-RETAIL STORES—HOTELS AND MOTELS—RESTAURANTS—PROFESSIONAL OFFICES—SPECIALISTS IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF MUSIC

  Facts on Moozak program design are elementary. The programs are selected and put together in several American cities for mass distribution. “… program specialists … assign values to the elements in a musical recording, i.e., tempo (number of beats per minute); rhythm (waltz, fox trot, march); instrumentation (brass, woodwinds, strings), and orchestra size (5 piece combo, 30 piece symphony, etc.).” There are few solo vocalists or instrumentalists to distract the listener. The same programs are played to both people and cows, but despite the happy claim that production has in both cases been increased, neither animal seems yet to have been elevated into the Elysian Fields. While the programs are constructed to give what the advertising calls “a progression of time"—that is, the illusion that time is dynamically and significantly passing—the implicit malaise behind the claim is that for most people time continues to hang heavily. “Each 15-minute segment of MUZAK contains a rising stimulus which provides a logical sense of forward movement. This affects boredom or monotony and fatigue.”

  Although no precise growth statistics have ever been published, there can be no doubt that these bovine sound slicks are spreading. This does not perhaps so much indicate a lack of public interest in silence as it demonstrates that there is more profit to be made out of sound, for another claim of the Mooze industry is that it provides a “relaxed background to profit.” When we interviewed 108 consumers and 25 employees in a Vancouver shopping mall, we discovered that while only 25 percent of the shoppers thought they spent more as a result of the background music, 60 percent of the employees thought they did.

  Against the slop and spawn of Moozak and broadcast music in public places a wave of protest is now clearly discernible. Most notable is a resolution unanimously passed by the General Assembly of the International Music Council of UNESCO in Paris in October, 1969.

  We denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and of the right of everyone to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded or broadcast music. We ask the Executive Committee of the International Music Council to initiate a study from all angles—medical, scientific and juridical—without overlooking its artistic and educational aspects, and with a view to proposing to UNESCO, and to the proper authorities everywhere, measures calculated to put an end to this abuse.

  There is a parallel to this resolution: when, in 1864, Michael Bass proposed his Bill to prohibit the sounds of street singing in the city of London, he drew substantial support from the musical profession itself. With the 1969 UNESCO resolution sonic overkill was apprehended by the musicians
of the world as a serious problem. For the first time in history an international organization involved primarily with the production of sounds suddenly turned its attention to their reduction. In The New Soundscape I had already warned music educators that they would now have to be as concerned about the prevention of sounds as about their creation, and I suggested that they should join noise abatement societies to familiarize themselves with this new theme for the music room.

  In any historical study of the soundscape, the researcher will repeatedly be struck by shifts in the perceptual habits of a society, instances where the figure and the ground exchange roles. The case of Moozak is one such instance. Throughout history music has existed as figure—a desirable collection of sounds to which the listener gives special attention. Moozak reduces music to ground. It is a deliberate concession to lo-fi-ism. It multiplies sounds. It reduces a sacred art to a slobber. Moozak is music that is not to be listened to.

  By creating a fuss about sounds we snap them back into focus as figures. The way to defeat Moozak is, therefore, quite simple: listen to it.

  Moozak resulted from the abuse of the radio. The abuse of Moozak has suggested another type of sound wall which is now rapidly becoming a fixture in all modern buildings: the screen of white noise, or as its proponents prefer to call it “acoustic perfume,” The hiss of the air-conditioner and the roar of the furnace have been exploited by the acoustical engineering profession to mask distracting sound, and where they are in themselves not sufficiently loud, they have been augmented by the installation of white noise generators. A desideratum from America’s most prominent firm of acoustical engineers to the head of a music department shows us that if music can be used to mask noise, noise can also be used to mask music. It ran: “Music Library: There should be enough mechanical noise to mask page turning and foot movement sounds.” The mask hides the face. Sound walls hide characteristic soundscapes under fictions.

  Prime Unity Or Tonal Center In the Indian anaháta and in the Westérn Music of the Spheres man has constantly sought some prime unity, some central sound against which all other vibrations may be measured. In diatonic or modal music it is the fundamental or tonic of the mode or scale that binds all other sounds into relationship. In China an artificial center of gravity was created in 239 B.C. when the Bureau of Weights and Measures established the Yellow Bell or Huang Chung as the tone from which all others were measured.

  It is, however, only in the electronic age that international tonal centers have been achieved; in countries operating on an alternating current of 60 cycles, it is this sound which now provides the resonant frequency, for it will be heard (together with its harmonics) in the operation of all electrical devices from lights and amplifiers to generators. Where C is tuned to 256 cycles, this resonant frequency is B natural. In ear training exercises I have discovered that students find B natural much the easiest pitch to retain and to recall spontaneously. Also during meditation exercises, after the whole body has been relaxed and students are asked to sing the tone of “prime unity"—the tone which seems to arise naturally from the center of their being—B natural is more frequent than any other. I have also experimented with this in Europe where the resonant electrical frequency of 50 cycles is approximately G sharp. At the Stuttgart Music High School I led a group of students in a series of relaxation exercises and then asked them to hum the tone of “prime unity.” They centered on G sharp.

  Electrical equipment will often produce resonant harmonics and in a quiet city at night a whole series of steady pitches may be heard from street lighting, signs or generators. When we were studying the soundscape of the Swedish village of Skruv in 1975, we encountered a large number of these and plotted their profiles and pitches on a map. We were surprised to find that together they produced a G-sharp major triad, which the F-sharp whistles of passing trains turned into a dominant seventh chord. As we moved about the streets on quiet evenings, the town played melodies.

  The Electric Revolution has thus given us new tonal centers of prime unity against which all other sounds are now balanced. Like mobiles, whose movements may be measured from the string on which they are suspended, the sound mobiles of the modern world are now interpretable by means of the thin line fixture of the operating electrical current.

  To relate all sounds to one sound that is continuously sounding (i.e., a drone) is a special way of listening. In respect to this development there is an interesting feature of Indian music which might bear further investigation in terms of its relevance for young people growing up in the electronic culture of today. Alain Danielou explains:

  The modal group of musical systems, to which practically all Indian music belongs, is based on the establishment of relations between a permanent sound fixed and invariable … the [drone], and successive sounds, the notes. … Indian music … is built on the independent relationship of each note to the tonic. The relationship to the tonic determines the meaning of any given sound. The tonic must therefore be constantly heard.

  Could this account for the recent popularity of Indian music among the young of the West? One of the key words in the vocabulary of young Americans during the early seventies was “vibrations,” i.e., a cosmic sound giving prime unity, a concentration or gathering point from which all other sounds are perceived tangentially.

  Interlude

  SEVEN

  Music, the Soundscape and Changing Perceptions

  Throughout the first two parts of this book I have made numerous references to music. In this interlude between soundscape description and soundscape analysis I want to examine the relationship between music and the soundscape in greater detail. Music forms the best permanent record of past sounds, so it will be useful as a guide to studying shifts in aural habits and perceptions. Europe has been the most dynamic continent over the past five hundred years, so it is in the shapes of European music that these changes can best be measured—at least until America begins to provide the dominating cultural influence in the twentieth century. This is a theme that has remained little explored, for historians and analysts have concentrated on showing how musicians have drawn forth music from the imagination or from other forms of music. But musicians also live in the real world and in various discernible ways the sounds and rhythms of different epochs and cultures have affected their work, both consciously and unconsciously.

  Music is of two kinds: absolute and programmatic. In absolute music, composers fashion ideal soundscapes of the mind. Programmatic music is imitative of the environment and, as its name indicates, it can be paraphrased verbally in the concert program. Absolute music is disengaged from the external environment and its highest forms (the sonata, the quartet, the symphony) are conceived for indoor performance. Indeed, they seem to gain importance in direct ratio to man’s disenchantment with the external soundscape. Music moves into concert halls when it can no longer be effectively heard out of doors. There, behind padded walls, concentrated listening becomes possible. That is to say, the string quartet and urban pandemonium are historically contemporaneous.

  The Concert Hall as a Substitute for Outdoor Life The concert hall simultaneously brought about absolute musical expression and also the most decisive imitations of nature. The conscientious imitation of landscape in music corresponds historically to the development of landscape painting, which seems to have been first cultivated by the Flemish painters of the Renaissance and developed into the principal genre of painting in the nineteenth century. Such developments are explicable only as a result of the displacement of the art gallery farther and farther from the natural landscape in the hearts of growing cities. Imitations of nature were then created to be exhibited in unnatural settings. Here they functioned as so many windows, releasing the spectator onto different scenes. An art gallery is a room with a thousand avenues of departure, so that once having entered, one loses the door back to the real world and must go on exploring. In the same way, a descriptive piece of music turns the walls of the concert hall into windows, exposed to
the country. By means of this metaphorical fenestration we break out of the confinements of the city to the free paysage beyond.

  This is certainly true of the nature descriptions of eighteenth-century composers such as Vivaldi, Handel or Haydn. Their landscapes are well populated with birds, animals and pastoral people—shepherds, villagers, hunters. Their descriptions are colorful, exact and benign. The music of Haydn is certainly not bereft of drama, but it is a music of happy endings, as we observe in The Seasons, where, following the storm, the clouds part to reveal the setting sun, while the cattle turn refreshed to the stable, the curfew bell sounds (the measures of the orchestration suggest that it is eight o’clock) and the world turns to that “soothing sleep that guileless heart and goodly health” ensures. For Haydn nature is the grand provider, and the pastoral people of his tableau enjoy an “easy and insatiable exploitation of the land and its creatures.”

  Given the differences in style, Handel’s landscapes are close in tone to those of Haydn. In a work like L’Allegro ed il Penseroso, adapted from Milton’s famous duet of poems, we are presented with all the familiar features (birds, gently rolling countryside, hounds and horns) but in one of the arias, for baritone and chorus, there is an uncommon description to the words

  Populous cities please me then,

  And the busy hum of men,

  for here oboes, trumpets and kettledrums join the orchestra and chorus in a rousing tribute to metropolitan life. Living in the city, Handel was one of the first composers to be influenced by the bustle of urban activity and is said to have derived inspiration from the singing and noises in the streets. Although he possessed an orthodox musical talent for nature description, there is nothing in musical literature to compare with Handel’s ear for urban acoustics until we approach the scores of Berlioz and Wagner.