The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (5 page)

The destruction of the quiet northern winter by the jamming of snow-plows and snowmobiles is one of the greatest transmogrifications of the twentieth-century soundscape, for such instruments are destroying the “idea of North” that has shaped the temperament of all northern peoples and has germinated a substantial mythology for the world. The idea of North, at once austere, spacious and lonely, could easily throw fear into the heart (had not Dante refrigerated the center of his Hell?) but it could evoke intense awe, for it was pure, temptationless and silent. The technocrats of progress do not realize that by cracking into the North with their machinery, they are chopping up the integrity of their own minds, blacking the awe-inspiring mysteries with gas stations and reducing their legends to plastic dolls. As silence is chased from the world, powerful myths depart. That is to say, it becomes more difficult to appreciate the Eddas and sagas, and much that is at the center of Russian, Scandinavian and Eskimo literature and art.

The traditional winter of the North is remarkable for its stillness, but the spring is violent. At first there is a determined grinding of ice, then suddenly a whole river will rip down the center with a cannon shot and spring water will hurtle the ice downstream. When asked what he most loved about Russia, Stravinsky said, “The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.”

Voices of the Wind
     Among the ancients, the wind, like the sea, was deified. In
Theogony
, Hesiod tells how Typhoeus, the god of the winds, fought with Zeus, lost, and was banished to Tartaros, in the bowels of the earth. Typhoeus was a devious god. He possessed a hundred snake heads,

and inside each one of these horrible heads

there were voices

that threw out every sort of horrible sound,

for sometimes

it was speech such as the gods

could understand, but at other

times, the sound of a bellowing bull,

proud-eyed and furious

beyond holding, or again like a lion

shameless in cruelty,

or again it was like the barking of dogs,

a wonder to listen to,

or again he would whistle

so the tall mountains re-echoed to it.

The story is remarkable because it touches on one of the most interesting aural illusions. The wind, like the sea, possesses an infinite number of vocal variations. Both are broad-band sounds and within the breadth of their frequencies other sounds seem to be heard. The deceptiveness of the wind is also the subject of a tempestuous description by Victor Hugo. You must read this aloud in the original to feel the pressure of the language.

Le vaste trouble des solitudes a une gamme; crescendo redoutable: le grain, la rafale, la bourrasque, l’orage, la tourmente, la tempête, la trombe: les sept cordes de la lyre des vents, les sept notes de l’a-bîme. … Les vents courent, volent, s’abattent, finissent, recommencent, planent, sifflent, mugissent, rient; frénétiques, lascifs, effrénés, prenant leurs aises sur la vague irascible. Ces hurleurs ont une harmonic Ils font tout le ciel sonore. Ils soufflent dans la nuée comme dans un cuivre, ils embouchent l’espace, et ils chantent dans l’infini, avec toutes les voix amalgamées des clairons, des buccins, des oliphants, des bugles et des trompettes, une sorte de fanfare pro-méthéenne. Qui les entend écoute Pan.

The wind is an element that grasps the ears forcefully. The sensation is tactile as well as aural. How curious and almost supernatural it is to hear the wind in the distance without feeling it, as one does on a calm day in the Swiss Alps, where the faint, soft whistling of the wind over a glacier miles away can be heard across the intervening stillness of the valleys.

On the dry Saskatchewan prairie the wind is keen and steady.

The wind could be heard in a more persistent song now, and out along the road separating the town from the prairie it fluted gently along the wires that ran down the highway. … The night wind had two voices; one that keened along the pulsing wires, the prairie one that throated long and deep.

Treeless and open, the prairies are an enormous wind harp, vibrating incessantly with “the swarming hum of the telephone wires.” In the more sheltered English countryside, the wind sets the leaves shimmering in diverse tonalities.

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

Sometimes I ask students to identify moving sounds in the soundscape. “The wind,” say some. “Trees,” say others. But without objects in its path, the wind betrays no apparent movement. It hovers in the ears, energetic but directionless. Of all objects, trees give the best cues, shaking their leaves now on one side, now on the other as the wind brushes them.

Each type of forest produces its own keynote. Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity—a circumstance which, according to Oswald Spengler, drove the northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion. The lack of undergrowth or openings into clearings keeps the British Columbia forests unusually free of animal, bird and insect life, a circumstance which produced an awesome, even sinister impression on the first white settlers. Emily Carr again:

The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. If you spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror. It seemed as if the forest were so full of silence that there was no room for sounds. The birds who lived there were birds of prey—eagles, hawks, owls. Had a song bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. Sober-coloured, silent little birds were the first to follow settlers into the West. Gulls there had always been; they began with the sea and had always cried over it. The vast sky spaces above, hungry for noise, steadily lapped up their cries. The forest was different—she brooded over silence and secrecy.

The uneasiness of the early settlers with the forest, and their desire for space and sunlight, soon produced another keynote sound: the noise of lumbering. At first it was the woodsman’s axe that was heard just beyond the ever-widening clearing. Later it was the cross-saw, and today it is the snarl of the chainsaw that resounds throughout the diminishing forest communities of North America.

Once, much of the world was covered with forest. The great forest is foreign and appalling, quite inimical to intruding life. The few references to nature in the early epics, the sagas and Anglo-Saxon poetry testify to this fact; they are either brief or dwell on its horrors. Even as late as Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) the forest was a place of darkness and evil, and his opera
Der Freischutz
is a celebration of goodness over the forces of evil, whose home is the forest. The hunting horn, which Weber used so brilliantly in his score, became the acoustic symbol by which the gloom of the forest was transpierced.

When man was fearful of the dangers of an unexplored environment, the whole body was an ear. In the virgin forests of North America, where vision was restricted to a few feet, hearing was the most important sense. The Leatherstocking Tales of Fenimore Cooper are full of beautiful and terrifying surprises.

… for, though the quiet deep of solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues, in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water rippled, and, at places, even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch, or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body When he desired his companions, however, to cease talking, in the manner just mentioned, his vigilant ear had caught the peculiar sound that is made by the parting of a dried branch of a tree, and which, if his senses did not deceive him, came from the western shore. All who are accustomed to that particular sound will understand how readily the ear receives it, and how easy it is to distinguish the tread which breaks the branch from every other noise of the forest. … “Can the accursed Iroquois have crossed the river, already, with their arms, without a boat?”

The Miraculous Land
     “What is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it?” asks a student who has studied philosophy. It would be unimaginative to reply that it sounds merely like a tree falling in the woods, or even that it makes no sound at all. As a matter of fact, when a tree crashes in a forest and knows that it is alone, it sounds like anything it wishes—a hurricane, a cuckoo, a wolf, the voice of Immanuel Kant or Charles Kingsley, the overture to
Don Giovanni
or a delicate air blown on a Maori nose-flute. Anything it wishes, from past or distant future. It is even free to produce those secret sounds which man will never hear because they belong to other worlds. …

The demystification of the elements, to which many modern sciences have contributed, has turned much poetry into prose. Before the birth of the earth sciences, man lived on an enchanted earth. From a third-century
Treatise on Rivers and Mountains
, perhaps by Plutarch, we learn of a stone in Lydia called argrophylax which looks like silver:

It is rather difficult to recognize it because it is intimately intermixed with the little spangles of gold which are found in the sands of the river. It has one very strange property. The rich Lydians place it under the threshold of their treasurehouses, and thus protect their stores of gold. For whenever any robbers come near the place, the stone gives forth a sound like a trumpet and the would-be thieves, believing themselves to be pursued, flee and fall over precipices and thus come to a violent death.

In earlier times, all natural events were explained as miracles. An earthquake or a storm was a drama between the gods. When Sigurd killed the dragon Fafner, “the earth tremors were so violent that all the land round about shook.” When the Giants stole Donner’s thundering hammer

his hair stood upright, his beard shook with wrath,

wild for his weapon the god groped around.

There was bound to be a mighty storm. When Zeus led the Greek gods against the Titans

… the infinite great sea

moaned terribly

and the earth crashed aloud,

and the wide sky resounded. …

Now Zeus no longer held in his strength,

but here his heart filled

deep with fury, and now he showed

his violence entire

and indiscriminately. Out of the sky

and off Olympos

he moved flashing his fires incessantly,

and the thunderbolts,

the crashing of them and the blaze

together came flying, one after

another, from his ponderous hand,

and spinning whirls of inhuman

flame, and with it the earth,

the giver of life, cried out

aloud as she burned, and the vast forests

in the fire screamed. …

Donner and Zeus are still comprehensible gods even today. Thunder and lightning are among the most feared forces in nature. The sound is of great intensity and extreme frequency range, well outside the human scale of soundmaking. The gulf between men and the gods is great and often it has seemed as if a mighty noise was necessary to bridge it. Such a noise was that of the eruption of Vesuvius in
AD
. 79 when, according to Dion Cassius’s account, “the frightened people thought the Gyants were making war against heaven, and fansied they see the shapes and images of Gyants in the smoke, and heard the sound of their trumpets.” The event was one of the soundmarks of Roman history.

Then the Earth began to tremble and quake, and the Concussions were so great that the ground seem’d to rise and boyl up in some places, and in others the tops of the mountains sunk in or tumbled down. At the same time were great noises and sounds heard, some were subterraneous, like thunder within the Earth; others above ground, like groans or bellowings. The Sea roar’d, The heavens ratled with a fearful noise, and then came a sudden and mighty crack, as if the frame of Nature had broke, or all the mountains of the Earth had fain down at once. …

Unique Tones
     Every natural soundscape has its own unique tones •and often these are so original as to constitute soundmarks. The most striking geographical soundmark I have ever heard is in New Zealand. At Tikitere, Rotorua, great fields of boiling sulphur, spread over acres of ground, are accompanied by strange underground rumblings and gurglings. The place is a pustular sore on the skin of the earth with infernal sound effects boiling up through the vents.