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

by R. Murray Schafer

  How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

  In the icy air of night!

  While the stars that oversprinkle

  All the heavens seem to twinkle

  With a crystalline delight,

  Keeping time, time, time,

  In a sort of Runic rhyme,

  To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

  from the bells, bells, bells,

  bells, bells, bells, bells,

  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells!

  Such bells were an adornment to the soundscape in many parts of the world, until the internal combustion engine eliminated them. In some places their demise was also assisted by regulations. A Saskatchewan bylaw (No. 10, 1901) stated: “Horses and cows shall not carry bells within the limits of Prince Albert.” And from Russia we recall how the eccentric Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky of Tolstoy’s War and Peace had all the animal bells on his estate tied up and stuffed with paper.

  The church bell originally maintained both a centripetal and centrifugal function, for it was designed both to frighten away evil spirits and also to attract the ear of God and the attention of the faithful. In ancient times church bells were accorded rich symbolism by numerous Christian commentators.

  The bell denotes the preacher’s mouth, according to the words of St. Paul: “I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” The hardness of the metal signifies the fortitude of the preacher’s mind according to the passage, “I have given thee a forehead more hard than their forehead.” The clapper of iron which, by striking on both sides maketh the sound, doth denote the tongue of the preacher, the which with the adornment of learning doth cause both Testaments to resound. The striking of the bell denoteth the preacher ought first of all o strike at the vices in himself for correction, and then advance to blame those of others. The link by which the clapper is joined or bound to the bell is meditation; the hand that ties the clapper, denotes the moderation of the tongue. The wood of the frame upon which the bell hangeth doth signify the wood of our Lord’s Cross. The iron that ties it to the wood denotes the charity of the preacher, who, being inseparably connected with the Cross exclaims: “Far be it from me to glory, except in the Cross of the Lord.” The pegs by which the wooden frame is joined together are the oracles of the prophets. The hammer affixed to the frame by which the bell is struck signifieth the right mind of the preacher by which he himself holding fast to the Divine commands, doth by frequent striking inculcate the same to the ears of the faithful.

  Here is another explanation of the bell, no less heartfelt but quite different, from a time nearer to our own:

  The whole air seemed alive. It was as if the tongues of those great cold, hard metal things had become flesh and joy. They burst into being screaming with delight and the city vibrated. Some wordless thing they said touched something so deep inside you that they made tears come. Some of them were given in memory of dead people. That’s a splendid living memorial, live voices speaking for the dead. If someone were to die and you were permitted either to see or hear them, I think it would be best to hear their voice.

  While the contemporary church bell may remain important as a community signal or even a soundmark, its precise association with Christian symbolism has diminished or ceased; and it has accordingly experienced a weakening of its original purpose.

  Bells and gongs differ in important respects which must now be explained. To a considerable extent these differences correspond to a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western cultures. A bell is a hollow cup-shaped body of cast metal, usually bronze. Chinese bells are struck on the outside, often with wooden mallets, but the European bell is struck by a metal clapper hung inside. In fact, the Europeans developed the clapper to great size, its weight sometimes reaching 1,500 pounds, as is the case with the great bell of Cologne Cathedral. Since it takes some time for the blow of the clapper to overcome the inertia of the metal, it embraces within its signature a sharp attack followed by a rounded orb of swelling sound. A gong is made of hammered, malleable metal, flat, or approximately so, and is usually struck with a soft mallet. As with Chinese bells, the sharp attack of the clapper is absent from the oriental gong. The sound of a gong is therefore more mellow, more diffused, though if the instrument is thin the metal will shiver, producing a rich transient distortion of full-frequency noise. The sounds of the two instruments may be approximately compared in the following graphs.

  The sounds of the very words bell and gong suggest something of the difference. The bell usually has a harder attack, b, and shorter decay, ell; the gong has a more subdued attack, g, and longer duration, ong. Gong is a Malay word of onomatopoeic origin, but bell derives from the Anglo-Saxon bellam, meaning to bellow. Kindred words are the Icelandic belja and the German bellen, meaning to bark. There is more aggression in the bell. If it did not actually provoke Western offensiveness, it is at least related to it, for Western history has witnessed a continual recasting of the same bronze from bells into cannons and back. During 1940, for instance, the Nazis confiscated 33,000 bells from churches in Germany and Eastern Europe for conversion into arms; and following the Second World War numerous churches and cathedrals (viz., St. Stefan’s, Vienna) received back bells cast from cannons. The connection between these two seemingly antagonistic devices is emphatic and long-standing in European history.

  Nevertheless, we are left with the fascinating fact that for a significant number of people, many of whom no longer find explicitly Christian associations in the church bell, the sound continues to evoke some deep and mysterious response in the psyche which finds its visual correspondence in the integrity of the circle or mandala. This is clear from tests we conducted in which subjects were asked to draw their impressions of sounds played to them on tape recordings. The sound of church bells frequently stimulated circular drawings. According to the psychologist C. G. Jung, the mandala symbolizes wholeness, completeness or perfection. One day perhaps we will be able to run a test similar to that with the church bell among oriental people, employing the gong as the test sound. With its less abrupt attack it would seem to be even more suitable to evoke the mandala image.u

  As the ambient noise of the modern city rises, the acoustic outreach of the church bell recedes. Drowned by merciless traffic, bells still possess a certain stammering grandeur, but the parish to which they now announce their messages has shriveled to a fraction of its once formidable size. By comparing earwitness accounts of the area over which church bells were once heard with the contemporary profile they create, this recession can be measured quite accurately. We have made such comparisons for the bells of Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver and also for those in the village of Bissingen in Germany. By another method we verified the disappearance of church bells in the city of Stockholm. One evening in May, 1879, August Strindberg climbed the Mosebacke and wrote a detailed account of the sights and sounds of the city. Among the sounds, he gave particular attention to the city’s seven church bells, describing their rings quite precisely. One evening nearly a hundred years later, a team of recordists from the World Soundscape Project climbed the Mosebacke and recorded the sounds of modern Stockholm from the same place. There were three church bells on the recording, one of them almost inaudible.

  In many parts of Christendom, church bells are being eliminated altogether. While in the English city of Bath (population 100,000) there are 60 churches with 109 bells, our research has also revealed that of the 211 churches in Vancouver (population 1,000,000) 156 no longer have bells. Of those with bells, only 11 still ring them, though 20 have electric carillons or play recorded music. Significantly enough, the reason for silencing several of them was the complaint that they were contributing to noise pollution.

  Horns and Sirens As the bell declines, it is being replaced by the horn and the siren. One of the fundamental differences between the bell and the horn is that while the former radiates sound uniformly in all directions, the latter focuses or points it in a specific direction. The form
of each instrument follows its function perfectly, for while the most effective acoustic shape for the horn is the logarithmic curve, which projects to infinity without ever turning back on itself, the shape of the bell resembles the normal or Gaussian distribution curve. Thus, the shape of the bell suggests community while that of the horn implies the outered projection of authority. It is the Oliphant of Roland, the bugle of the army or the whistle of the factory.

  Long before the horn evolved into a family of musical instruments, it was employed as a kind of magical device, used by early men to frighten off evil demons. It was an aggressive, hideous-sounding instrument with supernatural capabilities. From the very beginnings it represented the power of good over evil. Thus, while it remained a commanding instrument of persuasion, it embodied also the blessings of victory and fulfillment. Contained within its broad masculine assertion of tone and curved flare is a feminine counterpart: the dark receding center of the bell.

  We do not know who invented the horn, but the siren was invented by Seebeck during the first half of the nineteenth century. Operating on the principle of the perforated disc, the siren, like the bell, radiates energy in all directions uniformly. Indeed it might have taken on the same numinosity had it not been put to quite different uses, for the siren broadcasts distress. It is a centrifugal sound, designed to scatter people in its path.

  In Greek mythology the Sirens were nymphs who destroyed those who passed their island by means of their singing, at once piercing yet dulcet as honey. Circe warned Odysseus of the Sirens and so enabled him to elude their fatal song by plugging the ears of his men with wax and having himself bound to the mast of his ship. The Sirens thus signify mortal danger to man and this danger is broadcast by means of their singing. There is good evidence that the Greek word siren may be etymo-logically related to the words for wasp and bee. Modern man has reiden-tified the concept of danger with the wasp’s song. There is an obvious similarity also between the glissando wail of the original siren and the human cry of pain or grief, diminished, however, since the introduction of the yelp siren with its sudden switch-on-switch-off technique.

  Sirens and church bells belong to the same class of sounds: they are community signals. As such they must be loud enough to emerge clearly out of the ambient noise of the community. But while the church bell sets a protective spell on the community, the siren speaks of disharmony from within.

  Symbolism in Transition All acoustic symbolism, even that associated with archetypes, is slowly but steadily undergoing modification. Modern man has sought to escape both the wind and the sea by encapsulating himself in artificial environments. And just as he has sought to control the sea in the fountain, he has sought to tame the wind in the air-conditioner, for the ventilation systems of modern buildings are nothing more than techniques for getting the wind to blow in the right direction at the right force. Transformations such as these will undoubtedly change the symbolism of such archetypes. This is evidenced by the fact that while ore ancient descriptions of the sea and the wind always stress their terrible aspect, in aesthetic preference tests today, both these natural elements appear as sound romances rather than sound phobias—except in places experiencing sudden, violent storms, such as Jamaica.

  In his book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford has pointed out how many inventions were first developed in the mines (elevator, escalator, railroad, artificial light, ventilation systems), and later were brought up to the surface to be put to wider use. Another chapter could now be added to this theme; for as modern man again sinks underground in his artificial and windowless environments, it is interesting to observe how many outdoor effects he contrives to take with him in their new synthetic guises. The list is long; it only begins with the fountain and the air-conditioner … and continues with plastic trees and stuffed flamingos … but no one yet knows where it may end.

  Other natural sounds, rich in symbolism, have also undergone transformations. Thus thunder, the original vox dei and Sacred Noise, migrated first to the cathedral, then to the factory and the rock band. And bird-song, having been brought into thematic unity with the medieval garden, where its purpose was to orchestrate love, finally became transformed into the transistor radio, by which the contemporary Tristan and Isolde could groove to the “top fifty” in the backyards and parks of suburbia.

  The sounds of machines took on a happy symbolism approximately two hundred years ago, when it was realized that they could release man from his immemorial bondage to the earth. Traditionally the machine symbolized two things: power and progress. Technology has given man unprecedented power in industry, transportation and war, power over nature and power over other men. Ever since the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution, Western Man has been infatuated with the machine’s speed, efficiency and regularity, and with the extensions of personal and corporate power it afforded; and this enthusiasm for technological noise is now nascent in the rest of the world as well.

  James Watt once stated that to most people, noise and power go hand in hand, though he did not like the idea. Today the hard-edged throb of motors can be heard around us continuously as the keynote of contemporary civilization, and whenever it has sprung into the foreground as figure, it has been glorified as the symbol of power and prosperity.

  But there are ominous signs. We are just beginning (at least in the West) to realize that the fallout from unrestrained technological exploitation of the earth’s resources is more frightening than first anticipated. As this idea gains more universal acceptance, we are discovering an unpleasant twist in the machine’s symbolism, as demonstrated by the changes now taking place in international noise abatement legislation and practice.

  For increasing numbers of people, the prevailing soundscape is that of city life. But the city itself is changing its tunes at an ever-increasing rate as the rage for new inventions increases. The effect is to push us into a ood of nostalgia for disappearing and lost sounds. At the age of forty I have many sound memories of the Canadian city which are no longer to be heard (milk bottles, steam whistles, bicycle bells, horseshoes being tossed against a metal spike). Everyone will have such a list. We listen back à la recherche du temps perdu and notice how much has slipped away unper-ceived. Where? Where are the museums for disappearing sounds? Even the most ordinary sounds will be affectionately remembered after they disappear. Their very ordinariness turns them into exceptional sound souvenirs.

  Trapped in the only nostalgic moment of his entire life, the prisoner of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger vividly recalls the sounds of his native city of Algiers.

  And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized, echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I’d loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particularly enjoyed. The shouts of newspaper-boys in the already languid air, the last calls of birds in the public garden, the cries of sandwich-vendors, the screech of trams at the steep corners of the upper town, and that faint rustling overhead as darkness sifted down upon the harbour … one incident stands out… I heard the tin trumpet of an ice-cream vendor in the street, a small, shrill sound cutting across the flow of words.

  Perhaps all sound memories turn into romances. And the more quickly new sounds are hurled at us the more we are thrust back into the wells of memory, attractively fictionalizing the sounds of the past, smoothing them out into peaceful fantasies.

  THIRTEEN

  Noise

  When I first discussed the outline of this book with several publishers they were quite enthusiastic. “A book about noise pollution would be very timely,” they said. I pointed out that I had already dealt with noise pollution in another publicationv and that anyway there were already a large number of good books on the subject. When I went on to discuss the book I wanted to write, they grew uneasy. I insisted that the only realistic way to approach the noise pollution problem was to study the total soundscape as a prelude to comprehensive acoustic design. They assumed my interest was academic. I furthe
r suggested that multitudes of citizens (preferably children) needed to be exposed to ear cleaning exercises in order to improve the sonological competence of total societies, and went on to describe how, if such an aural culture could be achieved, the problem of noise pollution would disappear. They concluded I was a dreamer. Nevertheless, after years of association with the noise pollution issue, I have come to the realization that there are only two ways to solve it: the way I have just described, or a worldwide energy crisis. The largest noises in the world today are technological; thus the crack-up of technology would eliminate them.

  Throughout this chapter I will draw extensively on a World Soundscape Project study in which we examined by-laws and antinoise procedures from over two hundred communities around the world. The help of countless municipal officials who sent copious information in reply to our inquiries is gratefully acknowledged. The purpose of the survey was not to draft a model by-law (though we could probably do that) but to study the question of what constitutes noise in as many varied cultures as possible. Noises possess a great deal of symbolic character as sound phobias; and, in fact, the test of a good noise by-law would seem to be whether the most displeasing sounds of a given locale are effectively dealt with in the law. Before introducing this survey, however, some preliminary questions must be discussed.

  The Evolving Definition of Noise The increase in sound in he modern world has given rise to a change in the meaning of the word noise. Etymologically the word can be traced back to the Old French word noyse and to the eleventh-century Provencal words noysa, nosa or nausa, but its origin is uncertain. The suggestion that it may have originated in either of the Latin words nausea or noxia has been rejected. Noise has a variety of meanings and shadings of meaning, the most important of which are the following: