The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (18 page)

Radio: Extended Acoustic Space
     
A
character in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories dreads mirrors because they multiply men. The same might be said of radios. By 1969, Americans were listening to 268,000,000 radios, that is, about one per citizen. Modern life has been ventriloquized. The domination of modern life by the radio did not take place unnoticed; but whereas opposition to the Industrial Revolution had come from the working classes, who feared the loss of their jobs, the principal opponents of the radio and the phonograph were the intellectuals. Emily Carr, who wrote and painted in the British Columbia wilderness, hated the radio when she first heard it in 1936.

When I go to houses where they are turned on full blast I feel as if I’d go mad. Inexplicable torment all over. I thought I ought to get used to them and one was put in my house on trial this morning. I feel as if bees had swarmed in my nervous system. Nerves all jangling. Such a feeling of angry resentment at that horrid metallic voice. After a second I have to clap it off. Can’t stand it. Maybe it’s my imperfect hearing? It’s one of the wonders of the age, simply marvelous. I know that but I
hate
it.

Hermann Hesse, in
Der Steppenwolf (1927)
, was disturbed by the poor fidelity of the new electroacoustical devices for the reproduction of music.

At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophones and radio sets are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music. I could distinguish the majestic structure and the deep wide breath and the full broad bowing of the strings.

But more than this, Hesse was revolted by the schizophonic incongruities of broadcasting.

It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be. … When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine … radio … projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into snug drawing-rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit.

Radio extended the outreach of sound to produce greatly expanded profiles, which were remarkable also because they formed interrupted acoustic spaces. Never before had sound disappeared across space to reappear again at a distance. The community, which had previously been defined by its bell or temple gong, was now defined by its local transmitter.

The Nazis were the first to use radio in the interests of totalitarianism, but they have not been the last; and little by little, in both East and West, radio has been employed more ruthlessly in culture-molding. Readers of Solzhenitsyn’s novel
Cancer Ward
will recall the “constant yawping” of the radio which greeted Vadim when he went to the hospital and the way he detested it. I recall, twenty years ago, hearing the same loudspeakers blaring out their cacophonies of patriotism and spleen on station platforms and in public squares throughout Eastern Europe. But broadcasting has now gone public in the West as well. It may be hard for younger readers to appreciate what has happened but, up until about a decade ago, one of the most salient differences between cities like London or Paris and Bucharest or Mexico City was that in the former there were no radios or music in public places, restaurants or shops. In those days, particularly during the summer months, BBC announcers would regularly request listeners to keep their radios at a low volume in order not to disturb the neighborhood. In a dramatic reversal of style, British Railways recently began beaming the BBC regional service throughout railway stations (I have heard it over loudspeakers in Brighton Railway Station, 1975). But they still have a long way to go to catch Australian Railways, which plays the ABC light program on trains from 7 a.m to 11 p.m. during the three-day run from Sydney to Perth. In my compartment in 1973 it was impossible to shut it off.

In the early days one listened to the radio selectively by studying the program schedule, but today programs are overlooked and are merely overheard. This change of habit prepared modern society to tolerate the walls of sound with which human engineering now orchestrates the modern environment.

The radio was the first sound wall, enclosing the individual with the familiar and excluding the enemy. In this sense it is related to the castle garden of the Middle Ages which, with its birds and fountains, contradicted the hostile environment of forest and wilderness. The radio has actually become the bird-song of modern life, the “natural” soundscape, excluding the inimical forces from outside. To serve this function sound need not be elaborately presented, any more than wallpaper has to be painted by Michelangelo to render the drawing room attractive. Thus, the development of greater fidelity in sound reproduction, which occupied the first half of the present century—and in a way may be thought of as analogous to the development of oil paints, which also rendered possible greater veracity in art—is now canceled by a tendency to return to simpler forms of expression. For instance, while the transition from mechanical to electrical recording (Harrison and Maxfield) extended the available bandwidth from three to seven octaves, the transistor radio reduced it again to something like its former state. The habit of listening to transistor radios outdoors in the presence of additional ambient noise, often in circumstances which reduce the signal-to-noise ratio to approximately one to one, has in turn suggested the inclusion of additional noise which, in some popular music, is now engineered right onto the disc, often in the form of electroacoustical feedback. This, in turn, leads to new evaluations of what is signal and what is noise in the whole constantly changing field of aural perception.

The Shapes of Broadcasting
     Radio programing needs to be analyzed in as much detail as an epic poem or musical composition, for in its themes and rhythms will be found the pulse of life. But detailed studies of this kind appear never to have been undertaken. The structural principles of such an analytical undertaking will be developed in the Rhythm and Tempo chapter of Part Four, but it will not be out of place here to make a few general comments.

At first radio broadcasts were isolated presentations, surrounded by extended (silent) station breaks. This occasional approach to broadcasting, now absent from domestic radio, can still to some extent be experienced with shortwave broadcasts, where station breaks are often several minutes long and are accompanied by short musical phrases or signature tunes. (This attractive practice is only slightly spoiled by the unlikely choice of instruments used on some stations: thus, the calls of Jordan and Kuwait are played on the clarinet, those of Jamaica and Iran on the vibraphone—that is, they are played on instruments so distinctly non-indigenous that one might suppose they were originally recorded in New York.)

During the 1930s and 1940s schedules were filled out until the whole day was looped together in unsettled connectivity. The modern radio schedule, a confection of material from various sources, joined in thoughtful, funny, ironic, absurd or provocative juxtapositions, has introduced many contradictions into modern life and has perhaps contributed more than anything else to the breakup of unified cultural systems and values. It is for this reason that the study of joins in broadcasting is of great importance. The montage was first employed in film because it was the first art form to be cut and spliced; but since the invention of magnetic tape and the compression of the schedule, the shapes of broadcasting have followed the editor’s scissors also.

The function of the montage is to make one plus one equal three. The film producer Eisenstein—one of the first to experiment with montage—defines the effect as consisting “in the fact that two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition.” The
non sequiturs
of the montage may be incomprehensible to the innocent though they are easily accommodated by the initiated. I recall one night in Chicago, at the height of the Vietnam War, listening to an on-the-spot report of the grisly affair, sponsored by Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, whose jingle at the time was “Chew your little cares away!” I mentioned the experience to a class of students at Northwestern University the next day. They were interested in my opposition to the war, but failed to see my point about the gum. For them the elements had been montaged as part of a way of life.

Since the advent of the singing commercial on North American radio, popular music and advertising have formed the main material of the radio montage, so that today, by means of quick cross-fades, direct cuts or “music under” techniques, songs and commercials follow one another in quick and smooth succession, producing a commercial life style that is entertaining ("buy baubles for your bippy") and musical entertainment that is profitable ("five million sold").

Radio introduced the surrealistic soundscape, but other electroacous-tical devices have had an influence in rendering it acceptable. The record collection, which one may observe in almost every house of the civilized world, is often equally eclectic and bizarre, containing stray items from different periods or countries, all of which may nevertheless be stacked on the same phonograph for successive replay.

I am trying to illustrate the irrationality of electroacoustic juxtapositioning in order that it might cease to be taken for granted. One last story. A friend was once on an aircraft that supplies a selection of recorded programs of different types for earphone listening. Choosing the program of classical music he settled back in his seat to listen to Wagner’s
Meister singer
. As the overture soared to a climax, the disturbed voice of the stewardess suddenly interrupted the music to announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, the toilets are plugged up and must be flushed with a glass of water.”

As the format of radio tightened, its tempo increased, substituting superficiality for prolonged acts of concentration. Heavyweight fare like the famous BBC Third Programme was dismissed to be replaced by material with more twist and appeal. Each station and each country has its own tempo of broadcasting, but in general it has been speeded up over the years, and its tone is moving from the sedate toward the slaphappy. (I am speaking here only of Western-style broadcasting; I am not sufficiently familiar with the monolithic cultures of Russia or China.) In the West, material is being increasingly pushed together, overlapped. In a World Soundscape Project in 1973 we counted the number of separate items on four Vancouver radio stations over a typical eighteen-hour day. Each item (announcement, commercial, weather report, etc.) represented a change of focus. The results ran as follows:

Stations broadcasting popular music are the fastest-paced. The duration of individual items of any kind rarely exceeds three minutes on North American pop stations. Here the recording industry discloses a secret. On the old ten-inch shellac disc, the recording duration was limited to slightly over three minutes. As this was the first vehicle for popular music, all pop songs were abbreviated to meet this technical limitation. But curiously, when the long-play disc was introduced in 1948, the length of the average pop song did not increase in proportion. This suggests that some mysterious law concerning average attention span may have been inadvertently discovered by the older technology.

One acoustic effect is rarely heard on North American radios: silence. Only occasionally, during broadcasts of theater or classical music, do quiet and silence achieve their full potentiality. A graphic level recording of a popular station will show how the program material is made to ride at the maximum permissible level, a technique known as compression because the available dynamic range is compressed into very narrow limits. Such broadcasting shows no dynamic shadings or phrasing. It does not rest. It does not breathe. It has become a sound wall.

Sound Walls
     Walls used to exist to delimit physical and acoustic space, to isolate private areas visually and to screen out acoustic interferences. Often this second function is unstressed, particularly in modern buildings. Confronted with this situation modern man has discovered what might be called
audioanalgesia
, that is, the use of sound as a painkiller, a distraction to dispel distractions. The use of audioanalgesia extends in modern life from its original use in the dental chair to wired background music in hotels, offices, restaurants and many other public and private places. Air-conditioners, which produce a continuous band of pink noise, are also instruments of audioanalgesia. It is important in this respect to realize that such masking sounds are not intended to be listened to consciously. Thus, the Moozak industry deliberately chooses music that is nobody’s favorite and subjects it to unvenomed and innocuous orchestrations in order to produce a wraparound of “pretty,” designed to mask unpleasant distractions in a manner that corresponds to the attractive packages of modern merchandising to disguise frequently cheesy contents.