The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (38 page)

Such legislation has a parallel in the Muslim city of Damascus (Syria), where “the reciting of the Qur’an is strictly prohibited on the radio, or by any person in a public place, particularly restaurants, night clubs and places of amusement.”

Noise in Language
     In the days when Christianity was a ruling force, the church proscribed some sounds of its own. Blasphemy was rewarded with dire penalties. This notion has often been carried over to civil noise by-laws, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. In Canada such prohibitions exist in laws in Rimouski and Laval (Quebec) and in Brandon (Manitoba). Similar articles are found in the by-laws of Adelaide (Australia), and in those of such American cities as Buffalo (New York) and Sioux City (Iowa). Usually the by-law refers merely to “obscene or profane language,” but that of Oklahoma City puts the matter more explicitly: “It shall be unlawful and an offence for any person … to wantonly utter … reproach or profane ridicule on God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Scripture, or the Christian or any other religion calculated, or where the natural consequence is, to cause a breach of the peace or an assault.” That such by-laws are still operative, at least in some quarters of the Anglo-Saxon world, is proven by the fact that in Salisbury (Rhodesia), 1,788 prosecutions were obtained for swearing in the street in 1972.

In Wellington (New Zealand), an interesting legal anomaly existed (until it was overcome by new legislation in 1973) which draws our attention to the conflict between physical and acoustic space. For a prosecution against foul language to be possible, both the offender and the complainant had to be in a public place. “A person using obscene language in the street could not be prosecuted by the police if the complainant said he heard the language while he was standing in private property (e.g. his garden) or while inside his house. The complainant would have to move out into the street for a case to be made out.” Some day a philologist will write the international history of four-letter words. What appears to happen is that with time certain sacred words are debased to become expressions of public vociferation. It was, for instance, during the decade 1960-70 that the sacred words “Christ,” “God” and “Jesus” found their way in North America into public conversation as expletives. The release of sacred words as expletives into the conversational soundscape has one purpose: to hock. And shock they do, at least until habit mollifies them or they are transformed euphemistically. (In parenthesis one might remark that many sacred words lend themselves well to such harsh usage, for they are often phonetically percussive or jarring. “Jesus” and “Christ” are not exempt from this; the first word scrapes and the second cracks crisply over the tongue.)

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.