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

by R. Murray Schafer

  This blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music. In any case, these developments have inescapable consequences for music education. A musician used to be one who listened with seismographic delicacy in the music room, but who put on ear flaps when he left. If there is a noise pollution problem in the world today it is certainly partly and maybe largely owing to the fact that music educators have failed to give the public a total schooling in soundscape awareness, which has, since 1913, ceased to be divisible into musical and nonmusical kingdoms.

  Reactions Marshall McLuhan somewhere says that man only discovered nature after he had wrecked it. So it was at the very time when the natural soundscape was being overrun, it stimulated a whole wave of sensitive reactions in the music of composers as different as Debussy, Ives or Messiaen. There are moments, too, when Bartók’s music steams and rustles with all kinds of primordial buzzings suggesting a microcosmic life as close to the grass as was Goethe’s ear when he wrote poetry or is the entomologist’s microphone when he records the grasshopper’s clicking. Just as the microscope revealed a whole new landscape beyond the human eye, so the microphone in a sense revealed new delights missed by the average ear. As a skilled recordist of folk songs Bartok knew this and the evidence is in his quartets and concertos.

  Charles Ives, who “glorified America at the same time as he saw it going to hell” (Henry Brant), also reflected a great deal on the dilemma of disappearing nature. Note his songs on the phonograph and the railroad: very ugly sounds. His song about the Indians goes, “Alas, for them their day is o’er … the pale man’s axe rings through their woods.” Ives’s heart was with the landscape and in the village, and his uncompleted Universe Symphony was designed to be performed outdoors on the hills and in the valleys.

  Olivier Messiaen, like Ives, is an ecological composer. In his music, man is not the supreme triumph of nature but rather an element in a supreme activity called life. How different is the impact of even his large orchestral works, like the Turangalila Symphony—so full of birds and the respirating forest—from other orchestral efforts, typified by Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (The Life of a Hero). How very different, too, is this music from Respighi’s Pines of Rome, where, for the first time, recorded music (bird-song) was coupled with the symphony orchestra. That was in 1924. Two years earlier Paul Klee had celebrated the mechanical bird in his satirical painting The Twittering Machine.

  Perhaps the retreat from the commotion of city life had already begun in the nineteenth century (remember that Mahler composed in the country) so that the physical separation of the artist from his public had much to do with his eventual social alienation; but we must turn at this point and give some examples of the interaction between art and the new technology.

  Interactions Throughout the history of soundmaking, music and the environment have bequeathed numerous effects to one another, and the modern era provides striking examples. For instance, while the internal combustion engine gave music the long line of low-information sound, music gave the automobile industry the pitched horn, tuned (in North America) to the major or minor third.h

  The development of the Alberti bass of the eighteenth century from galloping horses is another example of environmental influence on art. Consider, for instance, two composers, one living in that century and one living in our own. The former travels everywhere in a carriage. He can’t get horses’ hooves off his brain and his tunes all go clippety-clop to the opera shop. The latter travels everywhere in his sports car. His music is remarkable for its drones, clusters and whirring effects. Penderecki’s music, for example, leaves the impression that it was conceived somewhere between the airstrip and the Autobahn—I am not criticizing, just pinning down a fact.i

  It ought to be obvious also that one of the latest enthusiasms in modern music, phase shifting, has its origin in the machine, or more especially in the machine that employs belts as well as cogs. The cogged machine produces an unvarying clatter, but wherever belts are employed there is slippage giving rise to gradual rhythmic transformations or phase shifts. Such types of machines have been around for some time (the prairie combine is a good example) and they have no doubt infected the minds of numerous young composers who are now engaged in transposing the effect into music. One might argue that the technique was first suggested by the tape recorder rather than the combine, for the first pieces exploiting the effect were composed on tape recorders. No matter, they are both belted machines.

  My colleague, Howard Broomfield, also believes that railroads had an important influence on the development of jazz. He claims blue notes (slides from major to minor thirds and sevenths) can be heard in the wail of the old steam whistles. Also the similarity between the clickety-clack of wheels over track ends and the drumbeats (particularly the flam, the ruff and the paradiddle) of jazz and rock music is too obvious to go unnoticed, at least in the clever tape mixes Broomfield has made to prove the point. Since the wheel trucks of different coaches are mounted in different positions (see drawing below), the rhythm of their passage over track ends will vary. By calculating these distances one could notate the precise rhythms produced, and these could be compared with those of different popular bands.

  The recording of music on disc and tape has affected composition. All ordered language systems require redundancy. Music is one such system and its redundancy consists in the repetition and recapitulation of principal material. When Mozart repeated a theme six or eight times, it was to help the memory store it for later recall. I do not think it was accidental, therefore, that Schoenberg and his followers sought to achieve a musical style which was athematic (i.e., without repetitions and recapitulation) about 1910, at the same time as recording became commercially successful. From then on the recapitulation was on the disc. In fact, the function of the recording industry in providing redundancy and therefore stability in life at a time when the future seems uncertain should not be overlooked, and if the success of radio stations which play the same tunes over and over is any indication, human beings are by no means ignorant of this value. At first it seems paradoxical that in a dynamic and revolutionary era most people should prefer the music of the past, until we realize that for the vast majority of humans today music no longer functions as the antennae of the spirit but as a sensory anchor and stabilizer against future-shock.

  Sacred Noise in Search of a New Custodian Just as the Electric Revolution extended the imperialistic power motive of the Industrial Revolution, but with greater finesse, so the amplifier replaced the orchestra as the ultimate weapon for dominating acoustic space. We have recorded the sound level in the orchestra during a rehearsal of Stravinsky’s Sucre du Printemps (last section) at 108 decibel peaks, but numerous pop groups have exceeded this volume with a fraction of the manpower. The orchestra ceased growing with the invention of the amplifier—which was first used successfully for a political rally when Woodrow Wilson addressed the League of Nations on September 20,1919. By this time serious composers had already begun to write works on a smaller scale, works which were especially suitable for the dry acoustics of the broadcasting studio; but popular music, which was frequently performed outdoors, ultimately turned the amplifier into a lethal weapon by pushing sound production up to the threshold of pain. While during the 1960s workmen’s compensation boards were introducing limits for noisy industrial environments (85 to 90 decibels is recommended for continuous noise), rock bands were producing peaks of 120 decibels, with the result that when audiolo-gists finally settled down to the task of assessing the damage, they discovered the obvious: rock fans, mostly teenagers, were suffering from “boilermaker’s disease.”

  Now, we will recall that the vibratory effects of high-intensity, low-frequency noise, which have the power to “touch” listeners, had first been experienced in thunder, then in the church, where the bombardon of the organ had made the pews wobble under the Christians, and finally had been transferred to
the cacophonies of the eighteenth-century factory. Thus, the “good vibes” of the sixties, which promised an alternative life style, traveled a well-known road, which finally led from Leeds to Liverpool; for what was happening was that the new counterculture, typified by Beatlemania, was actually stealing the Sacred Noise from the camp of the industrialists and setting it up in the hearts and communes of the hippies.

  At the Frontiers of Aural Space We speak of aural space when we plot intensity against frequency on a graph. Time is the third dimension to this space, but for the moment I want to consider the first two in isolation. Aural space is merely a notational convention and should not be confused with acoustic space, which is an expression of the profile of a sound over the landscape. We know that aural space is limited on three sides by thresholds of the audible and on one by a threshold of the bearable. Thus, man may hear sounds from approximately 20 hertz (below which the sense of hearing fuses with that of touch) to 15 or 20 kilohertz, and from zero decibels to approximately 130 decibels (where sound sensation is converted to pain). This is speaking very generally. Actually the shape of aural space is by no means regular, as the outer rim of the graph below indicates.

  The growth in intensity of Western music is paralleled by a growth in frequency range. Throughout the past several hundred years new instruments have been designed to push the tonal range out toward the limits of audibility in both directions, until, with contemporary electronic music and hi-fi reproduction equipment, a complete range from approximately 30 hertz to 20,000 hertz is available to the composer and performer. Speaking approximately, we may say that while up to the Renaissance or even up to the eighteenth century, music occupied an area in intensity and frequency range such as that shown in the core of the graph, since that time it has progressively pushed out so that it is practically coincidental with the shape representing the total area of the humanly audible.

  Since no sound can be present at all places at once, aural space is to be regarded merely as potential. Within it are set up tensions of opposites. Thus, as the intensity of the modern soundscape or of modern music increases, tranquility diminishes. Sounds are similarly distinguished in their frequency distributions. The popular music we have been considering has, in its choice of instruments, shown a distinct preference for low-frequency or bass effects, and young people listening to this music generally emphasize this effect by boosting the bass response of their record players. This is interesting because the longer wavelengths of low-frequency sounds have more carrying power (as the foghorn demonstrates), and as they are less influenced by diffraction, they are able to proceed around obstacles and fill space more completely. Localization of the sound source is more difficult with low-frequency sounds, and music stressing such sounds is both darker in quality and more directionless in space. Instead of facing the sound source the listener seems immersed in it.

  Increased Bass Response in Music and the Soundscape The boost in bass effects in contemporary popular music has its parallel and has perhaps even received a stimulus from the general increase in low-frequency environmental sounds. This matter is perceptively discussed by Michel P. Philippot in an article in New Patterns of Musical Behaviour.

  It is recorded, for instance, that in the 17th century the noise in Paris was literally unbearable. The same reports inform us about the nature of this noise: shouting, carts and carriages, horses, bells, artisans at work, etc. From this we may infer that the average sound level must have shown marked fluctuations, that its envelope must have had peaks and lows so that it was actually “cut up.” Besides, the spectrum must have been very poor in low frequencies, as all the noises enumerated above belong to the medium and medium-high frequency ranges. In the mechanical age and—if we talk of the noise in big cities—with the invention of the automobile, the noise became more continuous and the lower frequencies were strongly increasing (the deep rumbling of urban traffic, the continuous noise of cars that are driving by, the broad spectrum and long envelope of approaching and departing planes). The “modern” ambient noise might be briefly characterised as heavy and continuous, with slow fluctuations that are difficult to identify and to locate, as this kind of noise tends to encompass us. “I stop talking,” said the aged d’Alembert, “when a car drives by.” … This means that he could still enjoy moments of silence between two cars, a blessing of which the victims of the low and continuous noise in big towns have meanwhile been deprived.

  In stressing low-frequency sound popular music seeks blend and diffusion rather than clarity and focus, which had been the aim of previous music and was achieved by separating performers and listeners in counterpoised groups, usually facing one another. As may be suspected, this type of music tends to stress higher frequency sounds to make its directionality clear. Such is the music of the classical concert and its high points are the chamber music of Bach and Mozart. In such music distance is important, and the real space of the concert hall is extended in the virtual space of dynamics—by which effects may be brought into the foreground (forte) or allowed to drift back toward the acoustic horizon (piano). The formal dress of such concerts helps also to put social space between the participants, for such music belongs to eras of class distinction, to the society of the highland the lowborn, the master and the apprentice, the virtuoso and the listener. Such music also demands great concentration. This is why silence is observed at concerts where it is performed. Each piece is affectionately placed in a container of silence to make detailed investigation possible.

  Thus, the concert hall made concentrated listening possible, just as the art gallery encouraged focused and selective viewing. It was a unique period in the history of listening and it produced the most intellectual music ever created. It contrasts vividly with music designed for outdoor performance, such as folk music, which does not demand great attention to detail, but brings into play what we might call peripheral hearing, similar to the way the eye drifts over an interesting landscape. As the transistor radio revives interest in the outdoor concert and the guitar returns to orchestrate the baraque de foire of the rock concert, we may accordingly expect to witness a deterioration of manners at concert halls, as concentrated listening gives way to impressionism.

  The Return to the Submarine Home Another type of listening is produced in the indoor concert from which distance and directionality are absent, i.e., that of much contemporary and popular music as well as that of the living room stereo set. In this case the listener finds himself at the center of the sound; he is massaged by it, flooded by it. Such listening conditions are those of a classless society, a society seeking unification and integrity. It is by no means a new impulse to seek this kind of sound space, and in fact it was once beautifully achieved in the singing of Gregorian chants in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The stone walls and floors of Norman and Gothic cathedrals produced not only an abnormally long reverberation time (six seconds or more) but also reflected sounds of low and medium frequencies as well, discriminating against high frequencies above 2,000 hertz owing to the greater absorption of the walls and air in that range. Anyone who has heard monks chanting plainsong in one of these old buildings will never forget the effect: the voices seem to issue from no point but suffuse the building like perfume. In an excellent study of this subject, the Viennese music sociologist Kurt Blaukopf concluded:

  The sound in Norman and Gothic churches, surrounding the audience, strengthens the link between the individual and the community. The loss of high frequencies and the resulting impossibility of localising the sound makes the believer part of a world of sound. He does not face the sound in “enjoyment"—he is wrapped up by it.

  The experience of immersion rather than concentration forms one of the strongest links between modern and medieval man. But we can look back farther still to determine a common origin. Where then is the dark and fluid space from which such listening experiences spring? It is the ocean-womb of our first ancestors: the exaggerated echo and feedback effects of modern electronic and popular mu
sic re-create for us the echoing vaults, the dark depths of ocean.

  Toward the Integrity of Inner Space Thus, we have a polarity between two types of listening which, to some extent at least, seems to result from sounds positioned in different frequency bands. We can now appreciate the dichotomy which seems to separate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps we can even appreciate McLuhan’s claim that electricity unites men together again.

  High frequency Low frequency

  Sound from a distance Wraparound sound

  Perspective Presence

  Dynamics Sound wall

  Orchestra Electroacoustics

  Concentration Immersion

  Air (?) Ocean-womb

  Sound is in more intimate proximity to the listener in the right-hand column. Let us move the sound source closer still. The ultimate private acoustic space is produced with headphone listening, for messages received on earphones are always private property. “Head-space” is a popular expression with the young, referring to the geography of the mind, which can be reached by no telescope. Drugs and music are the means of invoking entry. In the head-space of earphone listening, the sounds not only circulate around the listener, they literally seem to emanate from points in the cranium itself, as if the archetypes of the unconscious were in conversation. There is a clear resemblance here to the functioning of Nada Yoga in which interiorized sound (vibration) removes the individual from this world and elevates him toward higher spheres of existence. When the yogi recites his mantra, he feels the sound surge through his body. His nose rattles. He vibrates with dark, narcotic powers. Similarly, when sound is conducted directly through the skull of the headphone listener, he is no longer regarding events on the acoustic horizon; no longer is he surrounded by a sphere of moving elements. He is the sphere. He is the universe.