Page 24 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1982 Ventilator Electrical Hum Diesel Engine Exhaust Combine Harvester Man Chopping Wood From: The Tuning of the World THE SOUND ENVIRONMENT By Steve Johnson I've attempted to write this article at least a half-dozen times over the last five years. Noise, and the seemingly God-given, or constitutionally-granted right of individuals to intrude on my private acoustic space has long been a pet peeve, but whenever I attempted to write about noise, or take my indignation about noise pollution to the citizen involvement level, I lost interest. With the entire biosphere threatened and nuclear war being proposed as a sane measure to protect our national or multinational corporate interests, noise pollution seemed a rather second-rate, unglamorous issue. We could probably all agree that noise is reaching alarming intensities and that excessive noise is one of the least pleasant aspects of city life. But isn't that, after all, just a matter of secondary effects? For example, if the internal combustion engine is the symbolic and dominant sound of our culture, then a more harmonic environment could grow out of finding transportation alternatives which, as a secondary achievement, reduced urban noise levels. As I thought about our attitude toward sound and how to describe it, I had this nagging sense that there was something deeper here, something we didn't fully understand or acknowledge. It wasn't until I became familiar with the works of Murray Schafer, author of The Tuning of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1977) that I began to put my finger on it. We've been going at it all wrong. Separating noise out from the other stuff of the world makes it seem like a frivolous issue. I realized that noise is a way of drawing attention to an unsightly blemish. The blemish indicates something is amiss. Noise is a symptom, and, as with certain narrow medical practices, if we only look at the symptom without considering the entire body, we cannot expect to cure the problem. We need, as Schafer says, an "acoustic ecology," a way of studying sounds as they reflect on an entire level of reality. NATURAL SOUNDSCAPE Sounds fill the space we call home — a thin ribbon of land, air and sea that covers a rocky planet hurting through space. Within this thin shell of life, the biosphere, sounds are orchestrated by the harmonious and disharmonious interactions of human, animal and other natural elements. The sound environment, or soundscape, can be observed and classified along with other qualities that distinguish one ecology or region from another. With fewer and fewer "natural" places on the planet it is difficult to observe the natural soundscape without consideration of human interferences. We have changed the sounds of rivers with our dams and encompassed the earth with electronically produced sounds. Even in remote regions of the earth our wonderful flying machines acoustically mow down the sounds unique to those regions. Traditionally, the natural sounds of a region defined for the inhabitants their sense of place as much as, or in some places and cultures, more than, the visual environment. The sounds of a place were learned and incorporated into the rituals and rhythms of life. Streams of the world speak their own languages. An old river flowing along a valley floor is nearly still, content to fill its soundscape with gentle lapping and the sounds of waterfowl and other animals. Thoreau described the Merrimack River as "whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went." The streams that rush down mountain sides, on the other hand, shout out youthful declarations about life in the fast lane, unaware of the slow and quiet life in store for them on the valley floor. Only the quickest animals dare call the environs of such streams home; the streams, like human highways, dominate the soundscape making it difficult to pick out important danger signals. The rains of different regions each have their own
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz