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

by R. Murray Schafer

  There are times when one sound is heard; there are times when many things are heard. Gesture is the name we can give to the unique event, the solo, the specific, the noticeable; texture is then the generalized aggregate, the mottled effect, the imprecise anarchy of conflicting actions.

  A texture may be said to consist of countless inscrutable gestures. They are like the one-celled bacteria which are perceptible only in masses or cluster formations. Thus the sound events in a texture come to be considered statistically as they are in the countless number of sound level surveys being undertaken by so many modern cities in the modern world where noise pollution has broken out of control.

  But for the soundscape researcher, the aggregate should never be confused with the singular, for they are not at all the same thing. The soundscape researcher must always remember Zeno’s paradox: “If a bushel of corn turned out upon the floor makes a noise, each grain and each part of each grain must make a noise likewise, but, in fact, it is not so.”

  The aggregate sound of a texture is not merely a simple sum of a lot of individualistic sounds—it is something different. Why elaborate combinations of sound events do not become “sums” but “differences” is one of the most intriguing aural illusions.

  In the broad-band texture there is also another aural illusion, for in such a sound other sounds may often be heard. I remember when Bruce Davis and I were working on the composition Okeanos, which combines the natural polynoise of the sea with electronic sounds and voices reciting maritime poetry. After many hours of working with the tapes of waves, e often heard in them other parts of the program, submerged as it were, rising at moments to the level of perception, then being carried off again to oblivion by the cascading waters.

  Psychologists are aware of this type of aural illusion. In his fascinating little book Soundmaking, Peter Ostwald reports on the effects of playing a recording of a baby crying, masked nine decibels by white noise, to a group of patients in a mental hospital. The listeners heard the baby cry variously as

  "a voice shouting, a man’s voice trying to be heard, an agitated sound"

  "… someone yelling and echoing"

  "a noisy factory with somebody hammering"

  "tremendous machinery, dynamos and … people shouting at each other"

  "a high sound, ayee, ayee, like a trumpet."

  The polynoise of the sea resembles the white noise of the laboratory. Thus, no two waves are the same, and even the same wave, played over repeatedly on tape, will continue to yield up new secrets to the imagination at each listening. “You never go down to the same water twice,” says Heraclitus.

  Many other sounds also seem to have these miraculous powers. The wind, for instance, may even surpass the sea in mischievousness, and as witness we recall the contradictory voices of Typhoeus, the wind god of Hesiod’s Theogony, quoted in Chapter One. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci comments on “… the sound of bells, in whose strokes you may find every word which you can imagine.” The same thing has been found to exist in words repeated over and over until they hypnotize the mind, at which point they may give rise to new word-sounds. Such is the function of a mantra. Perhaps the reasons why certain sounds produce aural illusions will never be satisfactorily explained. And perhaps it is just as well that they should not be, for an explanation would reduce their rich attraction as sound symbols.

  ELEVEN

  Morphology

  Morphology is the study of forms and structures. It is a nineteenth-century word, first used by the evolutionists in studying the development of biological forms; but by 1869 it was also being employed by the philologists to refer to patterns of inflection and word formation.

  As I shall be using the term, I intend it to apply to the changing forms of sound across time or space. If typologies are systems for classifying sounds according to their various forms or functions, morphology allows us to gather together sounds with similar forms or functions in chronological or geographical sequence in order that variations or evolutionary changes might become clear. Thus morphology gives us the techniques for both depth-boring and cross-sectioning. In other words, we might use the morphological technique to study the evolution of, say, factory whistles—showing how the physical parameters of the sound were altered over time; or we might compare the factory whistle with alternatives employed in different societies for a similar purpose; that would also be a morphological study.q In a sense the whole first part of this book has been an essay in the general morphology of the soundscape, but for a true morphological investigation it is necessary to draw special groups of like sounds together in sharp relief.

  Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications, stumbled on a truth which his Gutenberg bias allowed him only partly to express: “Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone. … Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper.” He might better have substituted “less durable in character such as sounds,” for the true character of sound in shaping societies is in its spatial spread, as we will understand clearly when we come to study the acoustic profile as a delineator of the community; and the real paradox is that although sounds are pronounced in time, they are also erased by time. This is the difficulty when we approach the temporal axis of soundscape morphology. We have too few reliable sonic artifacts from the past. It is like visiting an instrument museum only to discover that all the instruments are broken or inoperative. Soundscape morphology—at least up to the invention of the tape recorder—will always be largely a matter of guesswork. But even though we lack a desirably large data base for a thorough morphological study, the technique can be outlined in a general way.r

  From Wood to Plastic The first thing to be considered is the material basis of different cultures and societies. Each geographic area of the earth has special materials in abundance which are used in the fabrication of dwellings, utensils and artifacts: wood, stone, bamboo or metals. And as these materials are chipped, scraped, sawed, hammered or broken they give off their own characteristic sounds. I have already noted that in Central Europe the original building material was wood; then as the land was cleared, it became stone; today it is the endless belt of raw concrete that unites house, street, city and nation together. By contrast, the North American West Coast is moving directly from the era of wood into gray modernity, without experiencing the “stone” age.

  Now how does man deal with wood? In his Georgics, Virgil has recorded a significant flash-point in the technology of wood dressing:

  Then came the rigid strength of steel and the shrill saw blade

  (For primitive man was wont to split his wood with wedges).

  The shrill saw blade was a relatively new sound in Virgil’s day (c. 70 B.C.) and the parenthetic thought of the second line expresses nostalgia for the older method of dealing with the material. Virgil’s contemporaries, Cicero and Lucretius, also disapproved of the sound quality of the saw. Cicero refers to the unpleasant noise of “stridor serrae,” and Lucretius records “the harsh grating of the strident saw.” The next development in wood dressing is also recorded by the critical ear of a modern poet, Ezra Pound, where he significantly embeds it in his war-maddened Canto XVII (c. 1930):

  And the first thing Dave lit on when he got there

  Was a buzz-saw,

  And he put it through an ebony log: whhssh, t ttt,

  Two days’ work in three minutes.

  I have already noted how the stonemasons’ hammers on the Takht-e-Jamshid in Teheran reminded me of a similar transition in dealing with stone, as the discrete impact sounds of chipping gave way to the steady-state growl of the cement mixer. (But the metallic clip of the hammer was revived when metal nails replaced the wooden dowel; and the jackhammer chisel became indispensable as soon as it was more economical to knock apertures in the poured concrete structure than to plan them in the first place.)

  A study of the introduction of metals would
tell us much about the morphology of sounding materials. For instance, about 5000–4000 B.C. copper and tin were fused to produce the important new sound of bronze, which later was to find its most heroic voice in cannons and church bells. Bronze was the original metal of Europe, the Middle East and China (from before the Shang dynasty, 1523–1027 B.C.). India, on the other hand, produced a different alloy: brass, a fusion of copper and zinc. The difference in the tone may be tested even today in the elaborate platters and bells produced in that subcontinent.

  When iron-smelting began, about 1000 B.C., it provided new sounds both in the making process and in the products. One of Charlemagne’s biographers becomes truly delirious on the subject of iron in a ringing description from the ninth century, which connects this masculine metal with the improved art of warfare.

  Then came in sight that man of iron, Charlemagne, topped with his iron helm, his fists in iron gloves, his iron chest and his Platonic shoulders clad in an iron cuirass. An iron spear raised high against the sky he gripped in his left hand, while in his right he held his still unconquered sword. For greater ease of riding other men keep their thighs bare of armour; Charlemagne’s were bound in plates of iron. As for his greaves, like those of all his army, they, too, were made of iron. His shield was all of iron. His horse gleamed iron-coloured and its very mettle was as if of iron. All those who rode before him, those who kept him company on either flank, those who followed after, wore the same armour, and their gear was as close a copy of his own as it is possible to imagine. Iron filled the fields and all the open spaces. The rays of the sun were thrown back by this battle-line of iron. This race of men harder than iron did homage to the very hardness of iron. The pallid face of the man in the condemned cell grew paler at the bright gleam of iron. “Oh! the iron! alas for the iron!” Such was the confused clamour of the citizens of Pavia. The strong walls shook at the touch of iron. The resolution of the young grew feeble before the iron of these older men.

  Glass provides another distinctive range of sounds. Glass had been introduced to Europe by the twelfth century, and by 1448 (according to Aeneas Sylvius de’ Piccolomini) half the houses of Vienna had glass in their windows. Glass provides the feminine counterpart to iron, and its dulcimer tones were to be heard in the touching of goblets, which provided the acoustic accent to complete the mixed-media experience of the wine-tasting ceremony; and in the soft shimmering tones of the glass harmonica, which romanticists like Jean Paul employed to evoke their pays de chiméres. And when glass is broken, it tears at the heart like the sob of a woman.

  Glass also had much to do with the disappearance of wood as a European keynote, for glass-making, along with metal-smelting, made it necessary to level enormous areas of forest.

  In the twentieth century glass began to be replaced, first by celluloid, and then by plastic—the all-purpose modern material of peerless pudency, with a voice like a thud.

  From Feet to Air Tires The sounds of transportation could be lined up for morphological investigation, and considering the amount of time every human being spends each day involved with this activity, the resulting keynotes could be lifted into the foreground so that their effects on our lives could begin to be appreciated. I have already touched on the various sounds of footsteps, from the bare foot to the different sounds of shoes—wooden, leather, cleated. … The sounds of feet are often used for ostentatious display both in walking and dancing. One thinks of the little ankle bells which Persians and Arabian women used to wear and which Mohammed warned against, or of the great bunches of leaves which the Australian aborigine men tie about their knees before dancing.s

  It is not in the heartbeat that the pulse of society is to be measured, but in the choreography of footsteps. The moderate movement of the Italian foot has given us the andante of music (andare, to walk). Contrast with this the nimble courante of the courtier or the rough and heavy pesante of the stooped and starving peasant. Yes, it is all here. To know the momentum of a society, measure the footsteps of its citizens. Are they purposeful? reckless? metallic? shuffling or clodhoppery? Sometimes footsteps may form a protest against the prevailing tempi of a society. In this respect, North Americans, who live in probably the fastest-paced society of all time, have become some of the world’s most sluggish pedestrians. In fact, the increased velocity of the car decreased the tempo of the American footstep.

  The discrete impact sounds of footsteps are united in the continuous line of the wheel. Imagine the first wheel—the lumbering sound it made over the uncleared ground. Then think of its transformation to the light spoked wheel, the wheel belted with metal stripping, the heavy iron wheel of the cannon or the snorting wheel of the steam engine—halfway between impulse and flat line—for it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine that rhythm was wholly disengaged from locomotion in the final speed-up to pitched noise. But even the air tire produces variations: the fizz of the wheels in rain or the heavier hum of snow tires and the clatter of studs.

  From Horn to Telegraph Communications systems have undergone striking acoustic metamorphoses. All acoustic communications systems have a common aim: to push man’s voice farther afield. They share another aim also: to improve and elaborate the messages sent over those distances. One of the first acoustic devices to give man an extended voice was the horn. The first horns were aggressive, hideous-sounding instruments, used to frighten off demons and wild animals; but even here we note the instrument’s benign character, representing the power of good over evil, a character which never deserted it, even when it began to be used as a signaling device in military campaigns. We know that the Greeks and Romans used various kinds of horns and trumpets in warfare, but we have no precise knowledge of how they were employed. The first dialoguing horn with which we are familiar is the alphorn; it was the first telephone in Europe.

  But in sheer sophistication the alphorn is surpassed by the telegraph drums of Africa. Two drums are used for this purpose (high and low) and although sometimes different types of strokes are used, more frequently the code employed is strictly binary. It might be supposed that such a limitation would make it impossible to communicate complex messages, but such is by no means the case. Whenever ambiguity might exist, redundancy is introduced to make the message clear. For instance, if the signal for moon and fowl is identical, consisting of two strokes on the high-pitched drum (as is the case with the Lokele tribe of the Congo), the meaning is made clear by adding an explanatory phrase to each word.

  The moon looks down at the earth

  songe li tange la manga

  H H LH H L LL L L

  The fowl, the little one which says kiokio

  koko olongo la bokiokio

  HH LHH L LHL HL

  Possessing both contour and impulse, the talking drums of Africa, which can be heard up to sixty miles on a quiet evening, fuse melody and rhythm together in what is probably the most elegant signaling system ever devised. By comparison, Roland’s mighty Oliphant was a piece of barbarism.

  Melody was elevated over rhythm in European communications systems with the introduction of the festive embellishments of the baroque cor de chasse and the Thurn and Taxis postal signals, only to be flattened ut again by the tickertalk of Morse’s telegraph. It was about 1930, just as the last postal horns were fading out in Germany, that radio substituted the indoor concert for outdoor, just as it also introduced the commercial to synchronize with the disappearance of the street crier’s movable market. (Yawping over long distance had, of course, already been possible via the telephone.)

  The introduction and dismissal of music in communications systems (or at least the preferences shown for rhythm against melody or vice versa) is a subject that should interest the acoustic designer, and it can only be studied when the various systems are hooked up in sequence.

  From Ratchet to Siren Just as one can make interesting deductions about the most important social institutions in varying communities merely by noting the tallest buildings, studying changes in the m
ost salient community signals could form an interesting theme for morphological research. For one thing, if the intensity of a historical set of community signals is measured, a pretty accurate idea of changes in the ambient noise level of the community can be obtained.t