The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (4 page)

Waves whipped into surf, pelting the first rocks as the amphibian ascends from the sea. And although he may occasionally turn his back on the waves, he will never escape their atavistic charm. “The wise man delights in water,” says Lao-tzu. The roads of man all lead to water. It is the fundamental of the original soundscape and the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transformations.

At Oostende the strand is wide, with a scarcely perceptible rake across to the hotels, so that standing there one has the impression that the sea in the distance is higher than the beach and that sooner or later everything will be lifted away to oblivion by an enormous soft tidal wave. Totally otherwise is the Adriatic at Trieste, where the mountains leap into the ocean with an angular energy and the angry fists of the waves bounce noisily off rocks like India rubber balls. At Oostende the nexus of land is gentle in both vista and tone.

There are no rocks on which to sit at Oostende and so one walks along for miles, south with the waves in the right ear, and north with the waves in the left ear, filling an atavistic consciousness with the full-frequencied throb of water. All roads lead to water. Given the chance, probably all men would live at the edge of the element, within earshot of its moods night and day. We wander from it but the departure is temporary.

Day after day one walks along the strand, listening to the indolent splashing of the wavelets, gauging the gradual crescendo to the heavier treading and on to the organized warfare of the breakers. The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall. Each drop tinkles at a different pitch; each wave sets a different filtering on an inexhaustible supply of white noise. Some sounds are discrete, others continuous. In the sea the two fuse in primordial unity. The rhythms of the sea are many: infrabio-logical—for the water changes pitch and timbre faster than the ear’s resolving power to catch its changes; biological—the waves rhyme with the patterns of heart and lung and the tides with night and day; and suprabio-logical—the eternal inextinguishable presence of water. “Observe measures,” says Hesiod in
Works and Days;
“I will show you the measures of the much-thundering sea.”

para thina polyphloisboio thalassēs

says Homer
(Iliad
, 1:34), catching onomatopoeically the splendid armies of waves on the sea beach and their recession.
Canto II
of Ezra Pound begins,

And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,

Ear, ear for the sea-surge …

The love of ocean has profound sources and they are recorded in a vast maritime literature of East and West. When water watches the history of the tribe, fingers of ocean grasp the epic. The prime material over which the
Odyssey
is strung is the ocean. The agrarian Hesiod, living in Boeotia, “far away from the sea and its tossing waters,” cannot avoid the lure of the ocean.

For fifty days, after the turn of the summer solstice,

when the wearisome season of the hot weather goes to its conclusion

then is the timely season for men to voyage.

The Norsemen knew the ferocity of the ocean. When they sailed, “waves roared against the sides of the ship, it sounded just as if boulders were being clashed together.” The alliterative verse of the Eddas is poetry for oarsmen. The repeated consonants of each half-line pin the accents of the verse to each stroke and return of the oar.

Splashing oars raced iron rattled

shield rang on shield as the Vikings rowed,

cutting the waves at the King’s command,

farther and farther the fleet sped on.

When the crested waves of Kolga’s sister

crashed on the keels the sound that came

was the boom of surf that breaks on rocks.

Across the world, in tropical northern Australia, the waves were more gentle.

Waves coming up: high waves coming up against the rocks,

Breaking, shi! shi!

When the moon is high with light upon the waters:

Spring tide; tide flowing to the grass,

Breaking, shi! shi!

In its rough waters, the young girls bathe.

Hear the sound they make with their hands as they play!

Any visitor to the seashore will find the recital of the waves remarkable, but only the maritime poet, with the ostinato of the sea in his ear from birth to grave, can measure precisely the systole and diastole of waves and tides. Ezra Pound spent much of his life moving from one coast of the Italian peninsula to the other—from Rapallo to Venice. His
Cantos
open on the sea, play out much of their dialectic at its edge, move away and then return. Where Scott Fitzgerald, a visitor to the Mediterranean, had heard merely “the small exhausted
wa-waa
of the waves,” Pound gives us the fluctuations of the water with instinctive authority.

Lithe turning of water,

sinews of Poseidon,

Black azure and hyaline,

glass wave over Tyro,

Close cover, unstillness,

bright welter of wave-cords,

Then quiet water,

quiet in the buff sands,

Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints,

splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows

In the wave-runs by the half-dune;

Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,

pallor of Hesperus,

Grey peak of the wave,

wave, colour of grape’s pulp,

Olive grey in the near,

far, smoke grey of the rock-slide,

Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk

cast grey shadows in water,

The tower like a one-eyed great goose

cranes up out of the olive-grove,

And we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus

in the smell of hay under the olive-trees,

And the frogs singing against the fauns

in the half-light.

And …

The sea is the keynote sound of all maritime civilizations. It is also a fertile sonic archetype. All roads lead back to water. We shall return to the sea.

The Transformations of Water
     Water never dies. It lives forever reincarnated as rain, as bubbling brooks, as waterfalls and fountains, as swirling rivers and deep sulking rivers.

A mountain stream is a chord of many notes strung out stereophonically across the path of the attentive listener. The continuous sound of water from Swiss mountain streams can be heard miles across a silent valley. When a stream leaps down a hundred-meter cascade in the Rocky Mountains, there is tense quietness, almost like fear, followed by noisy excitement when it strikes the rocks below. The water of the English moors has none of this virtuosity; its arrangements are more subtle.

The wanderer in this direction who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Hole they hissed.

The rivers of the world speak their own languages. The gentle murmur of the Merrimack River, “whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went,” was a sleeping pill for Thoreau. For James Fenimore Cooper, the rivers of upstate New York often moved sluggishly into rocky caverns “producing a hollow sound, that resembled the concussions of a distant gun.”

How different are the furious cataracts of the Nile at Atbara and Berber.

For the noise of battle cannot but arise when the river, among a thousand islands and rocks, forges its way onward in mile-long rapids. A Roman writer declared that the inhabitants emigrated because they lost their hearing, but the mighty voices of the Berbers prove to us today that necessity strengthens any organ, for their call carries over the rushing river from bank to bank, while white men can hardly hear each other at ten paces’ distance.
^b

By contrast, on the still rivers of Siam, Somerset Maugham found a “sensation of exquisite peace,” only occasionally broken by “the soft splash of a paddle as someone silently passed on his way home. When I awoke in the night I felt a faint motion as the houseboat rocked a little and heard a little gurgle of water, like the ghost of an Eastern music travelling not through space but through time.” In Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
the wasted and mournful waters of the canals form a tragic leitmotiv: “Water slapped gurgling against wood and stone. The gondolier’s cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth.”

Water never dies and the wise man rejoices in it. No two raindrops sound alike, as the attentive ear will detect. Is then the sound of Persian rain like that of the Azores? In Fiji a summer rainstorm whips past in an enormous swirl taking less than sixty seconds, while in London it drones on as boring as a businessman’s story. In parts of Australia it does not rain for two or more years. When it does, young children are sometimes frightened by the sound. On the Pacific coast of North America it rains gently but continuously on an average of 148 days each year. The Canadian painter Emily Can* describes it well:

The rain drops hit the roof with smacking little clicks, uneven and stabbing. Through the open windows the sound of the rain on the leaves is not like that. It is more like a continuous sigh, a breath always spending with no fresh intake. The roof rain rattles over our room’s hollowness, strikes and is finished.

The tranquil timpani of West Coast rain is ambitionless, quite unlike the violent thunderstorms of the plains of Russia and central North America. In South Africa the rain is torrential: “… the thunder boomed out overhead, and they could hear the rain rushing across the fields. In a moment it was drumming on the iron roof, with a deafening noise.”

Geography and climate provide vernacular keynotes to the soundscape. In the vast northern areas of the earth the sound of winter is that of frozen water—of ice and snow. During the winter 30 to 50 percent of the surface of the earth is covered by snow for some length of time, and 20 to 30 percent of the land surface is snow covered for more than six months annually. Ice and snow form the keynotes of the northern hinterland as surely as the sea is the keynote of maritime life.

Ice and snow are tuned by the temperature. Virginia Woolf at Black-friars heard the snow “slither and flop to the ground.” But in Scandinavia, when the giant Hymir of
The Elder Edda
returned from hunting:

Icicles clattered,

falling off his frozen beard.

In his poem
Orfano
, Giovanni Pascoli describes the slow flaking snow of Italy:

Lenta la neva fiocca, fiocca, fiocca
.

The sound of snow in barely freezing Italy is very different from that at 30 degrees below zero in Manitoba or Siberia. As one moves to the interiors of the great northern continents the soft padded step begins to crunch, then to squeak—even painfully. Boris Pasternak in
Doctor Zhivago
tells how felt boots in the Russian winter make “the snow screech angrily at each step.”

While seascapes have enriched the languages of maritime peoples, cold-climate civilizations have invented different expressions, of which the numerous Eskimo words for snow is the most celebrated though by no means the only instance.
The Illustrated Glossary of Snow and Ice
contains 154 terms for snow and ice in English and matches them with terms in Danish, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Russian, French-Canadian and Argentinian Spanish. Many of the expressions—for instance,
permafrost icebound, pack ice—
are absent from the vocabularies of other languages.

Snow absorbs sound and northern literature is full of descriptions of the silence of winter.

In wintertime, the stillness, the absence of life or sound, is weird and oppressive. When the snow is on the ground, you may perceive indeed the footprints of animals, of birds, of deer, or occasionally of a bear, but you hear no sound, not a cry, not a whisper, not a rustle of a leaf. Sit down upon a fallen tree, and the silence becomes oppressive, almost painful. It is a relief even to hear at last the sough of the fall of the snow from the boughs of the cypress, the pine, or the yew, which stretch like dark horse-plumes high overhead.

When the snow is fresh and soft, even the traditional creaking of the runners of a sleigh are mute. “… we glided along over virgin snow which had come soft-footedly over night, in a motion, so smooth and silent as to suggest that wingless flight …” Even the cities were quiet.

Nor is anything quite like the silence of a northern city at dawn on a winter morning. Occasionally there was a hiss of whisper and a brushing against the windows and I knew it was snow, but generally there was nothing but a throbbing stillness until the street cars began running up Côte des Neiges and I heard them as though they were winds blowing through old drains.