But there is much more to the question of blasphemy than first meets the ear, for the fact is that taboo words will always exist in a society. No society has ever had the courage to expose all the dark regions of its psyche to the freedom of daylight and none ever will. Thus, as certain four-letter expressions are released into public garrulity, others take their place as unutterable shockers. The new four-letter words of the English language are “grace,” “virtue,” “virgin,” “tenderness.”
Taboo Sounds I have frequently stated throughout this book that the real value of anti-noise legislation is not the degree of its efficiency—for, at least since the Deluge, it has never been efficient—but rather that it affords us comparative catalogues of sound phobias from different societies and different times. Proscripted sounds thus have enormous symbolic resonance. Primitive peoples guarded their taboo sounds very carefully, and Sir James Frazer devotes a whole chapter of his monumental study The Golden Bough to the subject. There we learn that some tribes will not utter the names of certain people, of enemies or dead ancestors, for instance, out of sheer fright. Among other tribes the pronouncement of one’s own name may deprive the owner of vital powers. To breathe that most personal sound would be like extending one’s neck to the executioner.
Even more interesting, from the point of view of anti-noise enforcement, are customs observed by some tribes which restrict the production of certain noises to certain times out of fear of divine wrath.
Noises associated with the day are always forbidden at night: for instance, women may not pound grain after dusk. … Noisy work seems to bring the village into a dangerous relation with the forest, except on specified occasions. On ordinary days the spirits are sleeping in the farthest depths of the forest, and would not be disturbed, but on the day of rest they come out, and may be near the village. They would be angry to hear chopping sounds in the forest, or pounding in the village.
The Christian habit of observing silence on the Sabbath may have had a similar thought-basis.
Traditionally, taboo sounds, if inappropriately uttered, were always followed by death and destruction. This is true of the Hebrew word Jaweh, and it is also true of the Chinese Huang Chung (Yellow Bell) which, if sounded by the enemy, would be sufficient to cause the collapse of empire nd state. The Arabs, too, had many words for Allah which possessed the same terrible powers (breathe softly as you read them): Al-kabid, Al-Muthill, Al-Mumit, and ninety-nine others.
Where do we locate the taboo sounds in the contemporary world? One is certainly the civil defense siren, possessed by almost every modern city, held in reserve for that fatal day, then to be sounded once and followed by disaster.
There is a deep-bonded relationship between noise abatement and taboo which cannot be abandoned, for the moment we place a sound effectively on the proscription list we do it the ultimate honor of making it all-powerful. It is for this reason that the petty proscriptions of the community by-law will never succeed, indeed must never succeed. The final power then is—silence, just as the power of the gods is in their invisibility. This is the secret of the mystics and the monks; and it will form the final meditation of any proper study of sound.
PART FOUR
Toward Acoustic Design
FOURTEEN
Listening
Acoustic Ecology and Acoustic Design The most important revolution in aesthetic education in the twentieth century was that accomplished by the Bauhaus. Many famous painters taught at the Bau-haus, but the students did not become famous painters, for the purpose of the school was different. By bringing together the fine arts and the industrial crafts, the Bauhaus invented the whole new subject of industrial design.
An equivalent revolution is now called for among the various fields of sonic studies. This revolution will consist of a unification of those disciplines concerned with the science of sound and those concerned with the art of sound. The result will be the development of the interdisciplines acoustic ecology and acoustic design.
Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Acoustic ecology is therefore the study of sounds in relationship to life and society. This cannot be accomplished by remaining in the laboratory. It can only be accomplished by considering on location the effects of the acoustic environment on the creatures living in it. The whole of this book up to the present chapter has had acoustic ecology as its theme, for it is the basic study which must precede acoustic design.
The best way to comprehend what I mean by acoustic design is to regard the soundscape of the world as a huge musical composition, unfolding around us ceaselessly. We are simultaneously its audience, its performers and its composers. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will become conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us205 he resources for improving the orchestration of the soundscape. Acoustic design is not merely a matter for acoustic engineers. It is a task requiring the energies of many people: professionals, amateurs, young people—anyone with good ears; for the universal concert is always in progress, and seats in the auditorium are free.
Acoustic design should never become design control from above. It is rather a matter of the retrieval of a significant aural culture, and that is a task for everyone. Nevertheless, in provoking this design concern, certain figures have important roles to play. In particular, composers, who have too long remained aloof from society, must now return to give assistance to human navigation. Composers are architects of sounds. They have had the most experience devising effects to bring about specific listener responses, and the best of them are masters at modulating the flow of these effects to provide complex and variable experiences which some philosophers have described as a metaphor for the life-experience itself.
But composers are not yet ready to assume the leadership role in reorchestrating the world environment. Some are still devoting themselves with waspish bitterness to a Parnassus of two or three. Others, sensing the importance of the larger theme of environmental reconstruction, are fumbling ineptly with it, betrayed by inexperience or hedonism. I recall meeting a young Australian composer who told me he had given up writing music after becoming infatuated with the beauties of cricket song. But when asked how, when and why crickets sang, he couldn’t say; he just liked taping them and playing them back to large audiences. I told him: a composer owes it to the cricket to know such things. Craftsmanship is knowing all about the material one works with. Here is where the composer becomes biologist, physiologist—himself cricket.
The true acoustic designer must thoroughly understand the environment he is tackling; he must have training in acoustics, psychology, sociology, music, and a great deal more besides, as the occasion demands. There are no schools where such training is possible, but their creation cannot long be delayed, for as the soundscape slumps into a lo-fi state, the wired background music promoters are already commandeering acoustic design as a bellezza business.
The Modules for Acoustic Design A module is a basic unit to be used as a guide for measuring. In the human environment it is the human being who forms the basic module. When architects organize spaces for human habitation, they use the human anatomy as their guide. The doorframe accommodates the human frame, the stair the human foot, the ceiling the human stretch. To demonstrate the binding relationship between architectural space and the human beings for whom it is created, Le Corbusier made a man with an upstretched arm his modular symbol and imprinted it on all his buildings.
The basic modules for measuring the acoustic environment are the human ear and the human voice. Throughout this book I have been thumping the theory that the only way we can comprehend extrahuman sounds is in relationship to sensing and producing sounds of our own. To know the world by experience is the first desideratum. Beyond that lie the wonderful exercises of the imagination—the music of the stones, the music of the dead, the Music
of the Spheres—but they are only comprehensible by comparison with what we can hear or echo back ourselves.
We know a good deal about the behavior and tolerances of the ear and the voice. When, as today, environmental sound reaches such proportions that human vocal sounds are masked or overwhelmed, we have produced an inhuman environment. When sounds are forced on the ear which may endanger it physically or debilitate it psychologically, we have produced an inhuman environment.
There are few sounds in nature that interfere with our ability to communicate vocally and almost none that in any way pose a threat to the hearing apparatus. It is interesting to consider, for instance, that while the naked voice can be raised to quite a loud level (say about 80 decibels at a distance of a few feet), it cannot be raised in-normal human intercourse to a point where it might endanger the ear (over 90 decibels).ab In discriminating against low-frequency sounds, the human ear conveniently filters out deep body sounds such as brainwaves and the movement of blood in our veins. Also, the human hearing threshold has been set conveniently just beyond a level which would introduce a continuous recital of air molecules crashing together. The quiet efficiency of all body movements is another stroke of genius. And has anyone speculated on how inconvenient it would be if the ears, instead of being placed on the side of the head, had been placed next to the mouth, where they would have been subjected to close-quarter vocal garrulity and soup-slurping?
God was a first-rate acoustical engineer. We have been more inept in the design of our machines. For noise represents escaped energy. The perfect machine would be a silent machine: all energy used efficiently. The human anatomy, therefore, is the best machine we know and it ought to be our model in terms of engineering perfection.
Contrary to these simple lessons in acoustic ecology, we live in a time when human sound is often suppressed while mechanical jabberware is encouraged. While some of our students were measuring the noise of a downtown construction site in Vancouver, they were entertained by some members of the Hare Krishna sect, an Eastern movement dedicated to the worship of God with song in the streets. In 1971 this group was arrested under the noise abatement by-law, was convicted, appealed the conviction and lost the appeal. This by-law expressly excludes all noise made by construction and demolition equipment—though the students discovered that such noise often ran as high as 90 decibels at precisely the point where the Hare Krishna singers were arrested. True, singing or hawking in the streets is frequently annoying; but when it disappears, so does humanism.
Ear Cleaning The first task of the acoustic designer is to learn how to listen. Ear cleaning is the expression we use here. Many exercises can be devised to help cleanse the ears, but the most important at first are those which teach the listener to respect silence. This is especially important in a busy, nervous society. An exercise we often give our students is to declare a moratorium on speech for a full day. Stop making sounds for a while and eavesdrop on those made by others. It is a challenging and even frightening exercise and not everyone can accomplish it, but those who do speak of it afterward as a special event in their lives.
On other occasions we prepare for listening experiences with elaborate relaxation or concentration exercises. It may take an hour of preparation in order to be able to listen clairaudiently to the next.
Sometimes it is useful to seek out one sound with particular characteristics. For instance, try to find a sound with a rising starting pitch, or one that consists of a series of short nonperiodic bursts; try to find one that makes a dull thud followed by a high twitter; or one that combines a buzz and a squeak. Such sounds will not be found in every environment, of course, but the listener will be forced to inspect every sound carefully in the search. There are numerous other exercises like this in my music education booklets.ac
Sometimes it is useful to document only single sounds in the soundscape in order to get a better impression of their frequency and patterns of occurrence. Car horns, motorcycles, airplanes can be counted by anyone with ears, and it is surprising how discriminating one becomes when isolating one sound from many. Social surveys can also be conducted simultaneously in which citizens are asked to estimate the number of such sounds they imagine occur over a given time period. In repeated exercises of this sort, we have discovered that the imagined traffic is much below the actual volume—often as much as 90 percent. For instance, when we asked West Vancouverites to estimate the number of seaplane flights over their homes in 1969, the average estimate was 8 per day compared with an actual count of 65. In 1973 the same experiment was repeated in the same area. This time the average estimate had risen to 16, but the actual count had also risen to 106. Exercises like this extend ear cleaning to a wider public. To be reminded of a sound is to think about it; to miss it is to listen for it next time.
The tape recorder can be a useful adjunct to the ear. Trying to isolate a sound for high-fidelity recording always reminds the ear of details in the soundscape that have previously gone unnoticed. Sound events and soundscapes can be recorded for later analysis and if merited can be permanently stored for the future. It goes without saying that only the best tape recorders should be used for this purpose. When we record sounds we provide them with cards giving the following information:
No. ___________________Title: ____________________
Date recorded: _______ Name of recordist: _____________
Equipment used:_______ 7½ i.p.s. mono.______________
_______ 15 i.p.s. stereo_______________
_______ other quadraphonic__________
Place recorded:_______ Distance from source:____________
Atmospheric conditions:_________________ Intensity:_________dBA
_______dBB
_______dBC
Historical observations:___________________________________
Sociological observations:___________________________________
Additional observations:____________________________________
Names, ages, occupations and addresses of local people interviewed: _________________________________________________
Sounds threatened with extinction should be noted in particular and should be recorded before they disappear. The vanishing sound object should be treated as an important historical artifact, for a carefully recorded archive of disappearing sounds could one day be of great value. We are currently building such an archive. Our list is very extensive, but a few examples will suffice for illustration.
The ringing of old cash registers.
Clothes being washed on a washboard.
Butter being churned.
Razors being stropped.
Kerosene lamps.
The squeak of leather saddlebags.
Hand coffee grinders.
Rattling milk cans on horse-drawn vehicles.
Heavy doors being clanked shut and bolted.
School hand bells.
Wooden rocking chairs on wooden floors.
The quiet explosion of old cameras.
Hand-operated water pumps.
We train students in soundscape recording by giving them specific sounds to record: a factory whistle, a town clock, a frog, a swallow. It is not easy if the result is to be “clean,” without distracting interferences. How often has the novice recordist, sent out to record a “complete” passage of an aircraft, switched off the machine before the sound has dropped totally below the ambiance? Even the life of the more experienced recordist is often hazardous. On one occasion, for example, a small boy had watched our recording team setting up their sound level equipment and tape recorders to measure and record a particular noon whistle. Just as it began, the boy, who had been carelessly left next to a microphone, said: “Is that the whistle you want, mister?”
One of the recordist’s biggest problems is to devise ways of recording social settings without interrupting them. The equipment is conspicuous, and in many situations so is the recordist. Peter Huse catches this in a few lines from his poem Waves.
we stagger into a
lounge.
Bruce in my leather trenchcoat squeaks
and points the way with his goatee as I,
tweedpocket patched with tape,
floppy beret
wired with earphones, and gold-heavy
Nagra
digging into my shoulder,
cutting two tracks, I
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 25