Sound barriers

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1993 by R. Murray Schafer

IN the Tunisian restaurant in Montreal, the proprietor and his wife share a carafe of wine fitted with a spout from which they pour the wine directly into their mouths by raising and tipping it, in exactly the way the old wineskin would have worked. The sensation of drinking is entirely different when the liquid 's squirted into the mouth rather than sipped out of a glass or sucked through a straw, and so arc the accompanying sounds, on this occasion a bright burbling as the air seeks to replace the liquid through the twisted thin spout. Nothing touches the mouth but the liquid. It is probably the purest way to drink, yet it has been replaced by the glass as individual proprietorship has replaced tribal sharing. The glass, replacing more tuneful receptacles, is raised and chimed at the beginning of the meal, partly in compensation for mute consumption, an exercise denied its successor the plastic cup.

The soundscape of every society is conditioned by the predominant materials from which it is constructed. Thus we may speak of bamboo, wood, metal, glass or plastic cultures, meaning that these materials produce a repertoire of sounds of specific resonance when touched by active agents. Europe was a stone culture and to a large extent still is, particularly in its smaller, less-extent touched communities. North America was originally a wood culture, passing, like modern Europe, to cement and glass during the twentieth century.

The glazed window was an invention of great importance for the soundscape, framing external events in an unnatural, phantom-like "silence". The diminution of sound transmission, while not immediate and occurring only gradually with the thickening of glazing, not only created the notion of a "here" and a "there" or a "beyond", but also introduced a fission of the senses. Today one can look at one's environment, while hearing another, with a durable film separating the two. Plate glass shattered the sensorium, replacing it with contradictory visual and aural impressions.

In a study of fairy tales, Marie-Louise von Franz points out that glass "cuts you off, as far as your animal activity is concerned. . . . People very often say. |It feels as if there were a glass wall . . . between me and my surroundings.' That means: |I see perfectly well what 's going on, I can talk to people, but the animal and feeling contact, the warmth contact is cut off by a glass wall. . . . .'"[1] I The world of sounds and textures, the palpitating, kinetic world, is zoned out; we still watch it move, but from our (generally seated) position indoors our physical contact with it has ceased. The physical world is "there"; the world of reflection and speculation is "here".

When the space within is totally insulated it craves reorchestration: this is the era of background music and of the radio, a form of interior decoration, designed or absent-mindedly introduced to re-energize the space and render it more sensorially complete. Now the interior and exterior can become totally contradictory. The world seen through the window is like the world of a movie set with the radio as soundtrack. I recall travelling in the dome car of a train passing through the Rocky Mountains with schmaltzy music on the public address system and thinking: this is a travelogue movie about the Rocky Mountains--we are not here at all.

When the division between "here" and "there" is complete, the glass wall will become as impenetrable as the stone wall. Even thieves will respect it. Shattered glass is a trauma everyone is anxious to avoid. "He shall rule them with a rod of iron: as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers" is a potent acoustic image in the Bible (Revelation 2:27). A keynote of the Middle-Eastern soundscape under normal circumstances, crockery became a violent signal when broken. For us the same is true of glass. And yet one cannot help feeling that the mind-body split of the Western world will only be healed when some of the glass in which we have sheathed our lives is shattered, allowing us again to inhabit a world in which all the senses interact instead of being ranked in opposition.

ACOUSTIC TRADEMARKS AND SYMBOLIC SOUNDS

It is unnatural for our senses to be forcibly choked off, and when they are, they often reopen with a vengeance. One could study the suppression of the different senses in terms of the great culture revolutions in history. Right now we are being overwhelmed by the audio-visual media, which exclude other sensory stimulations. A measure of their inadequacy: everyone feels the compulsion to eat while watching movies.

Little by little the whole world is becoming mediatized, that is to say, it is driven by sound objects designed to manipulate or persuade. In this way it is different from the natural world we have left behind in which sounds stimulated us but rarely tried to control our behaviour. Think about this: there is scarcely a sound in modern life that has not been manufactured and is not owned by someone. The music we listen to is copyright-protected and licensed. Carhorns are the property of car drivers and often blowing them is the only conversation drivers make as they pass through the city streets.