The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (17 page)

Let’s use the German word Ü
berschallknall
instead of sonic boom; its ugly syllabification seems more suitable. In addition to its startling noise, the heavier vibrations of the Ü
berschallknall
can cause serious property damage, smash windows, crack walls and ceilings. On the basis of trial runs of supersonic aircraft in the U.S.A. (the small fighter variety only) and the resulting damage suits filed, it has been estimated that each supersonic flight across that country would startle up to forty million people. In Chicago, test flights over the city resulted in 6,116 complaints and 2,964 damage claims.

As a result of these forecasts, and because in order for supersonic aircraft to be economically viable they must be flown at supersonic speeds as frequently as possible, the Americans in 1972 abandoned their plans to develop such aircraft for commercial purposes. Many countries of the world have banned the flight of supersonic aircraft over their territories, and while the British and French as well as the Russians have such planes, they are now beginning to look like the biggest white elephants of all time.

The supersonic aircraft was an attempt to outmaneuver sound. It failed.

The Deaf Ear of the Aviator
     Rather than assist in finding solutions to the problems of aircraft noise, the commercial airlines have turned a deaf ear. They have preferred instead to spend enormous sums of money to pretend that the problem does not exist. If planes make any sound at all, the advertising implies, they are happy sounds. Witness:

• Eastern Airlines “Whisper Jet Service"
  
• "Fly the Friendly Skies of United."
  
• "Trident-Two is fast, smooth, quiet and reliable.” (BEA)
  
• "Fly across the Atlantic on the Quiet.” (BOAC)
  
• "We have smart new DC-9 jets with engines quietly at the rear.” (Air Jamaica)
  
• "The DC-10 is a quiet plane that whispers its way through airports.” (KLM)
  
• "More and more people-pleasing 747s are bringing more and more big-jet comfort to more and more cities and towns.” (Boeing)
  

Big jets as people pleasers? Question: What obligation does an airline have to people outside or beneath its aircraft?

On the Acropolis in Athens there is a sign reading:

THIS IS A SACRED PLACE
.

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO SING OR

MAKE LOUD NOISES OF ANY KIND
.

When I was last there in 1969 the Acropolis was grazed by seventeen jets. Against this hypocrisy we offer the news that Christ and Buddha were also aviators, and wonder what kind of noise they made as they mounted up into the air.

Counter-Revolution
     Opposing the developments described in this chapter, there has been, over the past decade, a counter-revolution in many countries around the world. Technological noise is the target for increasing opposition and in a rapidly growing number of instances it is being met directly by noise abatement legislation. As the dangers of excessive noise have been known for at least one hundred fifty years, this sudden expression of interest in the subject, while welcome, raises the question:
Why only now?
Perhaps it is part of a general criticism of the direction in which reckless technology has been taking us. If this is so, the industrialist as God has fallen, and his divine license to make the Sacred Noises without prosecution has ended. I think, and I am merely testing an idea in this sentence, that what we are witnessing in the recent noise abatement campaigns is not so much an attempt to silence the world as an attempt to wrest Sacred Noise from industry as a prelude to the discovery of a more trustworthy proprietor to whom the power may be bequeathed.

SIX

The Electric Revolution

The Electric Revolution extended many of the themes of the Industrial Revolution and added some new effects of its own. Owing to the increased transmission speed of electricity, the flat-line effect was extended to give the pitched tone, thus harmonizing the world on center frequencies of 25 and 40, then 50 and 60 cycles per second. Other extensions of trends already noted were the multiplication of sound producers and their imperialistic out sweep by means of amplification.

Two new techniques were introduced: the discovery of packaging and storing techniques for sound and the splitting of sounds from their original contexts—which I call schizophonia. The benefits of the electroacoustic transmission and reproduction of sound are well enough celebrated, but they should not obscure the fact that precisely at the time hi-fi was being engineered, the world soundscape was slipping into an all-time lo-fi condition.

A good many of the fundamental discoveries of the Electric Revolution had already been made by 1850: the electric cell, the storage cell, the dynamo, the electric arc light. The detailed application of these inventions occupied the remainder of the nineteenth century. It was during this period that the electric power station, the telephone, the radio telegraph, the phonograph and the moving picture came into existence. At first their commercial applications were limited. It was not until the improvement of the dynamo by Werner Siemens (1856) and the alternator by Nikola Tesla (1887) that electrical power could become the generating force for the practical development of the discoveries.

One of the first products of the Electric Revolution, Morse’s telegraph (1838), unintentionally dramatized the contradiction between discrete and contoured sound which, as I have said, separates slow from fast-paced societies. Morse used the long line of the telegraph wire to transmit messages broken in binary code, which still relied on digital adroitness, thus maintaining in the telegrapher’s trained finger a skill that related him to the pianist and the scribe. Because the finger cannot be wiggled fast enough to produce the fused contour of sound, the telegraph ticks and stutters in the same way as its two contemporary inventions, Thurber’s typewriter and Gatling’s machine gun. As increased mobility and speed in communication continued to be desired, it was inevitable that, together with the act of letter-scratching, the telegraph should give way to the telephone.

The three most revolutionary sound mechanisms of the Electric Revolution were the telephone, the phonograph and the radio. With the telephone and the radio, sound was no longer tied to its original point in space; with the phonograph it was released from its original point in time. The dazzling removal of these restrictions has given modern man an exciting new power which modern technology has continually sought to render more effective.

The soundscape researcher is concerned with changes in perception and behavior. Let us, for instance, point up a couple of observable changes effected by the telephone, the first of the new instruments to be extensively marketed.

The telephone extended intimate listening across wide distances. As it is basically unnatural to be intimate at a distance, it has taken some time for humans to accustom themselves to the idea. Today North Americans raise their voices only on transcontinental or transoceanic calls; Europeans, however, still raise their voices to talk to the next town, and Asians shout at the telephone when talking to someone in the next street.

The capacity of the telephone to interrupt thought is more important, for it has undoubtedly contributed a good share to the abbreviation of written prose and the choppy speech of modern times. For instance, when Schopenhauer writes at the beginning of
The World as Will and Idea
that he wishes us to consider his entire book as one thought, we realize that he is about to make severe demands on himself and his readers. The real depreciation of concentration began after the advent of the telephone. Had Schopenhauer written his book in my office, he would have completed the first sentence and the telephone would have rung. Two thoughts.

The telephone had already been dreamed of when Moses and Zoroaster conversed with God, and the radio as an instrument for the transmission of divine messages was well imagined before that. The phonograph, too, has a long history in the imagination of man, for to catch and preserve the tissue of living sound was an ancient ambition. In Babylonian mythology there are hints of a specially constructed room in one of the ziggurats where whispers stayed forever. There is a similar room (still in existence) in the Ali Qapu in Isfahan, though in its present derelict state it is difficult to know how it was supposed to have worked. Presumably its highly polished walls and floor gave sounds an abnormal reverberation time. In an ancient Chinese legend a king has a secret black box into which he speaks his orders, then sends them around his kingdom, for his subjects to carry out, which I gloss to mean that there is
authority
in the magic of captured sound. With the invention of the telephone by Bell in 1876 and the phonograph by Charles Cros and Thomas Edison in 1877 the era of schizophonia was introduced.

Schizophonia
     The Greek prefix
schizo
means split, separated; and
phone
is Greek for voice.
Schizophonia
refers to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction. It is another twentieth-century development.

Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms that produced them. The human voice traveled only as far as one could shout. Every sound was uncounterfeitable, unique. Sounds bore resemblances to one another, such as the phonemes which go to make up the repetition of a word, but they were not identical. Tests have shown that it is physically impossible for nature’s most rational and calculating being to reproduce a single phoneme in his own name twice in exactly the same manner.

Since the invention of electroacoustical equipment for the transmission and storage of sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and shot around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations of the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions of holes in millions of public and private places around the world, or it may be stored to be reproduced at a later date, perhaps eventually hundreds of years after it was originally uttered. A record or tape collection may contain items from widely diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem, to a person from any century but our own, a meaningless and surrealistic juxtaposition.

The desire to dislocate sounds in time and space had been evident for some time in the history of Western music, so that the recent technological developments were merely the consequences of aspirations that had already been effectively imagined. The secret
quomodo omnisgeneris instrument torum hAusica in remotissima spacia propagari possit
(whereby all forms of instrumental music could be transmitted to remote places) was a special preoccupation of the musician-inventor Athanasius Kircher, who discussed the matter in detail in his
Phonurgia Nova
of 1673. In the practical sphere, the introduction of dynamics, echo effects, the splitting of resources, the separation of soloist from the ensemble and the incorporation of instruments with specific referential qualities (horn, anvil, bells, etc.)were all attempts to create virtual spaces which were larger or different from natural room acoustics; just as the search for exotic folk music and the breaking forward and backward to find new or renew old musical resources represents a desire to transcend the present tense.

When, following the Second World War, the tape recorder made incisions into recorded material possible, any sound object could be cut out and inserted into any new context desired. Most recently, the quadraphonic sound system has made possible a 360-degree soundscape of moving and stationary sound events which allows any sound environment to be simulated in time and space. This provides for the complete portability of acoustic space. Any sonic environment can now become any other sonic environment.

We know that the territorial expansion of post-industrial sounds complemented the imperialistic ambitions of the Western nations. The loudspeaker was also invented by an imperialist, for it responded to the desire to dominate others with one’s own sound. As the cry broadcasts distress, the loudspeaker communicates anxiety. “We should not have conquered Germany without … the loudspeaker,” wrote Hitler in 1938.

I coined the term schizophonia in
The New Soundscape
intending it to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I wanted it to convey the same sense of aberration and drama. Indeed, the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life.