The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (10 page)

The post horn also employed a precise code of signals to indicate different types of mail (express, normal, local, packages) as well as calls for arrival, departure and distress, and indications for the number of carriages and horses—in order that the changing stations might receive advance warning. In Austria a recruit was given six months to learn the signals and if he failed, he was dismissed.

Through the narrow streets and across the country landscape the post horn was heard, in the villages and the alleys of cities, at the gates of castles above and by the monasteries below in the valleys—everywhere its echo was known, everywhere it was greeted joyfully. It touched all the strings of the human heart: hope, fear, longing and homesickness—it awakened all feelings with its magic.

Thus the symbolism of the post horn worked differently from that of the hunting horn. It did not draw the listener out into the landscape but, working in reverse, brought news from far away to home. It was centripetal rather than centrifugal in character and its tones were never more pleasant than when it approached the town and delivered its letters and parcels to the expectant.

Sounds of the Farm
     By comparison with the quiet life of the pasture and the shrill celebrations of the hunt, the soundscape of the farm provides a general turmoil of activities. Each of the animals has its own rhythm of sound and silence, of arousal and repose. The cock is the eternal alarm clock, and the dog’s bark is the original telegraph—for one learns when acreage has been invaded by a stranger from the dog’s barking, passed from farm to farm.

Many of the sounds of the farm are heavyweight, like the slow, tramping hooves of cattle and draft horses. The farmer’s feet, too, move slowly. Virgil tells us of “ponderous-moving wagons,” of threshers and “the immoderate weight of the harrow.” He also gives us an interesting acoustic picture of the Italian farmhouse after dark.

One farmer stays awake and splits up wood

For torches with his knife. And all the while

His wife relieves her lengthy task with song,

And runs the squeaky shuttle through the warp,

Or boils down sweetened wine-must over flame,

And skims with leaves the bubbling cauldron’s wave.

Some of the sounds of the farm have changed little over the centuries, particularly those suggesting the commotion of heavy work; and the voices of animals too have given a consistency of tone to the farm soundscape. But there are also vernaculars. From my own youth I recall a few. The first that comes to mind is the churning of butter. As the churn was pumped for half an hour or more, an almost imperceptible change in tone and texture occurred as the slopping cream gradually turned to butter. The hand-operated pump, also on the decline, now snaps into memory as a soundmark of my youth, though at the time I listened to it carelessly. There were others too, like the ubiquitous cackling of geese, or the swoosh and bang of the screen door. In the winter there was the heavy stamping of snow boots in the front hall, or the scream of sleigh runners over hard-packed country roads. In the silence of the winter night there might be a sudden crack as a nail sprang from a board in the intense cold. And there were the deep pedal tones that came again and again in the chimney flue during night winds. Then there were the regular rhythms like the gong which brought us in for dinner, or the whirring of the windmill, which the women put in motion at four o’clock each day to pump water for the returning cattle.

I have defined keynote as a regular sound underpinning other more fugitive or novel sound events. The keynotes of the farm were numerous, for farming is a life with little variation. Keynotes may influence the behavior of the people or set up rhythms that are carried over into other aspects of life. One example will have to suffice. In the Russia of Tolstoy, the peasants kept whetstones in little tin boxes strapped to their waists, and the rhythmic rattling of these boxes formed a vernacular keynote during the haying months.

The grass cut with a juicy sound, and was at once laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides, brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one another on to the sound of rattling tin boxes and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the whetstones sharpening them, and happy shouts.

Returning from the fields, the rhythms of the day’s work were extended into song.

The peasant women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the cart. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong, healthy voices of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing in unison … the whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the measures of this wild, merry song with its shouts and whistles and clapping.

Russia is, of course, not the only place where the rhythms of work have been carved into folk song, but folk song suggested by work always carries a heavy stress. This becomes clear if we compare the music of the farm laborer with the levity of the shepherd’s pipes. I do not think it would be going too far to suggest that man only discovers lilt and lyricism in music to the extent that he frees himself from physical labor.

Noise in the Rural Soundscape
     The rural soundscape was quiet, but it experienced two profound acoustic interruptions: the noise of war and the “noise” of religion.

Virgil, whose life was frequently interrupted by the Roman wars, laments these intrusions into the pastoral life.

Such was the life that golden Saturn

lived upon earth:

Mankind had not yet heard the bugle

bellow for war,

Nor yet heard the clank of the sword

on the hard anvil. …

To Virgil the sounds of war were brass and iron, and the acoustic image remains intact to this day, though to it must be added the explosions of gunpowder from the fourteenth century onward.

The world’s literature is full of battles. Poets and chroniclers seem always to have been amazed at the noise they made. The Persian epic poet Ferdowsi is typical.

At the shouts of the Divs and the noise made by the black dust rising, the thunder of drums and the neighing of war-horses, the mountains were rent and the earth cleft asunder. So fierce a combat had been seen by no man before. Loud was the clash of the battle-axes and the clatter of swords and of arrows; the warriors’ blood turned the plain into marsh, the earth resembled a sea of pitch whose waves were formed of swords, axes and arrows.

Armies decorated for battle presented a visual spectacle, but the battle itself was acoustic. To the actual noise of clashing metal, each army added its battlecries and drumming in an attempt to frighten the enemy. Noise was a deliberate military stratagem; the ancient Greek generals advocated it: “One should send the army into battle shouting, and sometimes on the run, because their appearance and shouts and the clash of arms confound the hearts of the enemy.” From Tacitus comes an interesting description of a German war chant called
baritus:

By the rendering of this they not only kindle their courage, but, merely by listening to the sound, they can forecast the issue of an approaching engagement. For they either terrify their foes or themselves become frightened, according to the character of the noise they make upon the battlefield; and they regard it not merely as so many voices chanting together but as a unison of valour. What they particularly aim at is a harshly intermittent roar; and they hold their shields in front of their mouths, so that the sound is amplified into a deeper crescendo by the reverberation.

When the Moors attacked the Castilians in 1085, they employed African drummers who, according to the
Poema del Cid
, had never before been heard in Europe. The noise terrified the Christians but “the good Cid Campeador” pacified his army, promising to capture the drums and deliver them to the Church. The association of noise with both warfare and religion was not fortuitous, and we shall frequently find reason throughout this book for coupling them together. Both activities are eschatological, and undoubtedly an awareness of this fact lies behind the peculiar bending of the Latin word
helium
(war) into the Low German and Old English
bell(e)
(meaning “to make a loud noise") before its final imprint on the instrument which gave Christianity its acoustic signal.

One further example will reinforce the relationship between religion, warfare and noise, for it is a description of a religious battle which seems to have been fought by sound alone.

It was at three o’clock on August 14th, 1431, that the crusaders, who were encamped in the plain between Domazlice and Horsuv Tyn, received the news that the Hussites, under the leadership of Prokop the Great, were approaching. Though the Bohemians were still four miles off, the rattle of their war-wagons and the song, “All ye warriors of God,” which their whole host was chanting, could already be heard. The enthusiasm of the crusaders evaporated with astounding rapidity. … The German camp was in utter confusion. Horsemen were streaming off in every direction, and the clatter of empty wagons being driven off almost drowned the sound of that terrible singing… So ended the Bohemian crusade.

The point I am trying to make with the diverse descriptions of these pages is that while the original soundscape was generally quiet, it was deliberately punctuated by the aberrational noises of war. The
other
occasion for loud noise was religious celebration. It was then that the rattles and drums and sacred bones were brought out and sounded vigorously to produce what for elementary man was certainly the biggest acoustic event of civil life. There is no doubt that these activities were a direct imitation of the frightening sounds of nature already studied, for they too had divine origins. Thunder was created by Thor or Zeus, storms were divine combats, cataclysms were divine punishments. We recall that the word of God originally came to man through the ear, not the eye. By gathering his instruments and making an impressive noise, man hoped in his turn to catch the ear of God.

Sacred Noise and Secular Silence
     Throughout the several hundred pages of his
Mythologiques II
the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss has developed an argument for placing noise in parallel with the sacred and silence in the same relationship with the profane.
^e
The Lévi-Strauss argument, regarded from the vantage point of the modern noise-riddled world, may appear obscure; but soundscape studies help to clarify it. The profane world was, if not silent, quiet. And if we think of “noise” in its less pejorative sense as any big sound, the coupling of noise and sacred is easier to interpret.

Throughout this book we are going to discover that a certain type of noise, which we may now call Sacred Noise, was not only absent from the lists of proscripted sounds which societies from time to time drew up, but was, in fact, quite deliberately invoked as a break from the tedium of tranquility. Samuel Rosen confirmed this when he studied the acoustic climate of a quiet tribal village in the Sudan.

In general, the sound level in the villages is below 40 db on the C scale of the sound level meter except occasionally at sunrise or soon thereafter when a domestic animal such as a rooster, lamb, cow or dove makes itself heard. During six months of the year, heavy rains occur about three times a week with one or two loud claps of thunder. A few men engage in some productive activities such as beating palm fronds with a wooden club. But the absence of hard reverberating surfaces, such as walls, ceilings, floors and hard furniture, etc., in the vicinity apparently accounts for the low intensity levels measured on the sound level meter: 73–74 db at the worker’s ear.

The loudest noises (over 100 decibels) were encountered when the villagers were singing and dancing, which occurred for the most part “over a two-month period celebrating the spring harvest” (i.e. a religious festival).

Throughout Christendom the divine was signaled by the church bell. It is a later development of the same clamorous urge, which had earlier been expressed in chanting and rattling. The interior of the church, too, reverberated with the most spectacular acoustic events, for to this place man brought not only his voice, raised in song, but also the loudest machine he had till then produced—the organ. And it was all designed to make the deity listen.

Aside from the spectacular celebrations of warfare and religion, rural and even town life was tranquil. There are many towns still, the world over, where life moves uneventfully, almost by stealth. Poor towns are quieter than prosperous towns. I have visited towns in Burgenland (Austria) where the only sound at midday is the flapping of storks in their chimney nests, or dusty towns in Iran where the only motion is the occasional swaying walk of a woman carrying water while the children sit mutely in the streets. Peasants and tribesmen the world over participate in a vast sharing of silence.

FOUR