The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (29 page)

Time after time I have heard this item portrayed by a sudden welter of earth-shattering sound and ear-splitting screams. This is way off the mark. The earthquake effect is done in four separate parts, with a few seconds pause between each. Start with a low, shuddering rumble, bring up the gain slowly, hold for a second or two, then drop it back almost to zero. Make the sound itself by shaking two rubber balls around in a cardboard box and recording the sound at double-speed or, if you are able to do so, recording at 15 ips and playing back at 3¾ ips. Having recorded the first part of the “quake” (or “prelude” as it is known), follow on with one or two isolated crockery-smashes and mix-in once more to the rumbling effect, louder this time.

Now bring in a sudden sliding, crashing sound, with a tearing metallic “ring” about it. This can be achieved by dropping a quantity of small stones on to the sloping lid of a cardboard box. The lid should be held about a foot above the table surface with a glass jam-jar (lying on its side) at the lower end of the slope. The sound sequence, thus, is that the stones strike the lid of the box, slide down its surface and strike against the side of the jam-jar before coming to rest on the table top. Record the sound at absolute maximum gain. Double-speeding may improve the item still further by both lengthening the sound and giving it a “heavier” quality. Lastly, fade in the rumbling noises once more, hold, then fade to zero.

Incidentally, a most uncanny yet effective impression of brooding silence can be obtained between the individual portions of activity by recording
very
faintly, the sound of distant voices alone. “Panic” noises such as screaming and shouting, if desired, are best recorded
ehind
the third “falling-debris” section which may be superimposed over it.

I have often discovered in teaching that one of the best ways to press students into an examination of their perceptions is to set them similar exercises in sound synthesis using tape recorders. It is then that ignored or carelessly perceived features of a total sound complex become immediately conspicuous.

Music as the Key to Aural Perception
     Any investigator f the world soundscape would benefit from a knowledge of the history of music. It provides us with a large repertoire of sounds—in fact, the largest repertoire of past sounds (not excluding those of speech and literature, which are less trustworthy owing to the vagaries of orthography and phonetic changes in language). The study of contrasting musical styles could help to indicate how, during different periods or different musical cultures, people actually listened differently. For the experience of music shows us that different features or parameters seem to characterize each epoch or school: thus Arab music is noted for rhythm and melody, while that of Western Europe—at least over the last three hundred fifty years—has emphasized harmony and dynamics. To have a good ear, to have musicianship in any culture, means then to have proficiency in selected areas, and the ear training exercises of any musical culture determine what they will be.

A cross-cultural study of the relationship between musical expression and aural perception has never been undertaken, but it should not too long be delayed. It would be of great value in answering questions like these: how does a society regard the relationship between frequency, time and intensity? between continuity and interruption? between impact and steady-state sounds? between foreground and background? signal and noise? or noise and silence—which is to say, dynamism and rest?

Perspective and Dynamics
     I will give one example of the complementary development of musical expression and aural perception drawn from a single culture, and will try to show how it has developed into a concrete listening attitude. The dimension I want to consider is dynamics, which has an appropriate visual analogue in perspective. Perspective was introduced into European painting during the fifteenth century, and became the predominant style following the works of Masaccio and Uc-cello. There is only one ideal point from which a perspective painting may be viewed: viz., the point of view. Perspective fastens the viewer to a position directly before the window of the picture frame.

When Giovanni Gabrieli composed his
Sonata Pian
’
e Forte
(literally, to be sounded soft and loud), he introduced perspective thinking into Western music. Before this date we have no record of dynamic contrast in music, by which we must not infer that it did not exist, but may deduce hat it had not become an articulated desideratum of performance. Ga-brieli’s
piano
and
forte
were the first steps toward the quantification of sound level, just as the foot and furlong had earlier quantified space. Just as objects are rank-ordered in perspective painting, depending on their distance from the viewer, so musical sounds are rank-ordered by means of their dynamic emphasis in the virtual space of the soundscape. It is an equally deliberate illusion which centuries of training turned into a habit. The classical Western composer places sounds in high definition before the eye of the ear.

Just as perspective focusing is unique to Western art, the organization of music along various dynamic planes is special to Western music. In fact, it is surprising to learn how absent dynamic nuancing is in many musical cultures. Von Bekesy reports that, in his experiments on loudness discrimination,

… one of the subjects was a gypsy violinist. In the early part of the experiment his difference limens were enormous, far out of the range of the other subjects. His pitch limens, however, had about the usual values. After much probing it finally developed that he was paying little attention to loudness changes, and the reason for this was that in gypsy music only the pitch is considered an important variable and the loudness is kept relatively uniform. After this situation was understood by the subject, and deliberate training in loudness perception was carried out, his loudness limens fell to normal values.

The same thing was discovered by Catherine and Max Ellis in their work with Australian aborigines. When they were asked to play softer, they simply stopped playing.

By contrast, the exaggerated dynamic plane of Western music allows the composer metaphorically to move sound anywhere from the distant horizon to the immediate foreground. This implication of enormous space and infinite outreach achieved its most striking expressions in the works of Wagner and Debussy. But the important question now is: can we observe any equivalent to these advanced dynamic practices in Western perceptual habits of gathering the soundscape into perspective formations?

If the reader will re-read some of the quotations from the early parts of this book, he will discover an answer to this question. One further example will have to suffice here, though it is a compelling one, for it comes from a person who, in the course of his work, has had to give much thought to the sonic environment—the sound effects technician.

Faced with a bewildering medley of sounds, the problem is to select those which will illustrate the scene and the accompanying commentary or dialogue to the best advantage. To this end, I recommend what is known as the “three-stage plan.” In explanation it is apt to sound rather restrictive, but all it does, in fact, is to impose certain practical imits on the number of effects to be included, collectively, in any one scene and to decide the degree of prominence that each shall enjoy.

The “three-stage plan” divides the whole sound-scene (called “scenic") into three main parts. These are: The “Immediate,” the “Support,” and the “Background.” The chief thing to bear in mind is that the “Immediate” effect is to be
listened
to while the “Support” and the “Background” effects are merely to be heard. …

The “Support” effect refers to sounds taking place in the immediate vicinity which have a direct bearing on the subject in hand, leaving the “Background” effect to its normal job of setting the general scene.

Take, for example, the recording of a commentary at a fun-fair. The “Immediate” effect would be the commentator’s voice. Directly behind this would come the “Support” effects of whichever item of fairground amusement he happened to be referring to, backed, to a slightly lesser degree, by the “Background” effect of music and crowd noises.

The three-stage plan of the radio technician corresponds precisely to the classical layout of the orchestral score with soloist, concertino group and tutti accompaniment. And it corresponds to the dynamic listening plane from foreground to horizon which makes focused listening possible. Furthermore, though the point must be made cautiously, the three-stage plan bears a recognizable resemblance to the figure/ground/field division of the (Western) psychologist.

Many other societies never developed the habit of perspective viewing. The study of Eskimo, Chinese and Byzantine art shows how differently space was perceived by these peoples. The Chinese spread objects out over the entire drawing surface, suggesting broad peripheral vision—the opposite of perspective focusing. More curious is the Byzantine convention of reversed perspective, by which objects were frequently enlarged as they receded in space. The Eskimos, as Edmund Carpenter has shown, would often continue a drawing over the edge of the drawing surface onto the back of the material, considering it part of the same surface. Carpenter writes:

I know of no example of an Aivilik describing space primarily in visual terms. They don’t regard space as static and therefore measurable; hence they have no formal units of spatial measurement, just as they have no uniform divisions of time. The carver is indifferent to the demands of the optical eye; he lets each piece fill its own space, create its own world without reference to background or anything external to it Like sound, each carving creates its own space, its own identity; it imposes its own assumptions.

Carpenter feels the Eskimo’s space awareness is acoustic.

Auditory space has no favoured focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the hing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear, however, favours sound from any direction.

If Carpenter is right, Eskimo culture provides an example of the reverse situation from the European Renaissance; with the Eskimos acoustic space has influenced and even dominated visual space.

Gestures and Textures
     We have noted several times how focused listening with its implication of distance separating the listener from the sound event is disintegrating before the sound walls of the modern world. The modern lo-fi soundscape possesses no perspective; rather, sounds massage the listener with continual presence. As the population of sounds in the world increases, soloistic gestures are replaced by aggregate textures. Textures and crowds are correlatives. The daily sight of a swiftly moving crowd must have constituted an effect to which the senses had to adapt at first. Only after a new visual technique had been mastered did crowds cease to be confusing and the city-dweller learn to scan them leisurely for a chance display or an interesting figure. Many of Baudelaire’s poems reveal this perceptual habit, which was presumably new in his time. “Amid the deafening traffic of the town"—so begins Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante"—there arises by chance, out of a throng of pedestrians, a woman who snaps the poet’s senses to attention by her beauty.

This has happened to us all. We are not looking for anything and we find it. We are not listening to anything but suddenly, out of the commotion, a sound jumps forward to become a figure. It would be inappropriate to say that this type of “unfocused” listening did not exist in the past, but it is possible to say that the circumstances which encourage it are more present in the textures of the post-industrial soundscape.

The present-day increase in statistical exercises and probability theorizing of all kinds is also a reflection of this crowding, nor is it surprising that, precisely at this juncture in history, statistics has entered music as a technique for composition. Iannis Xenakis describes his theory of composition as stochastic. “Stochastics,” he explains, “studies and formulates the law of large numbers.” More to the point, Xenakis has drawn his inspiration directly from the observation of the contemporary soundscape. He writes:

But other paths also led to the same stochastic crossroads—first of all, natural events such as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mold of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws. If one then wishes to form a large mass of point-notes, such as string pizzicati, one must know these mathematical laws, which, in any case, are no more than a tight and concise expression of chains of logical reasoning. Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail, replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamor fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust, and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context are the same as those of the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.