The f ^y A window open on the world

CourierNovember 1976 (29th year) 2.80 French francs

EXPLORING

THE NEW

SOUNDSCAPE

TREASURES

OF

WORLD ART

Hungary

Siren-borne

candlestick

The siren, a fabulous creaturewoman, half birdori¬

ginating in ancient Orientalmythology, inspired a Hun¬garian craftsman to createthis graceful bronze candle¬stick (20 cm high) some 700years ago. Metalwork was aflourishing art in Hungary atthe beginning of the 1 1th cen¬tury A.D. and from then untilthe early 16th century Hun¬garian craftsmen working ingold, silver, bronze and copperwrought a profusion ofjewelry, plate and cult objects,bringing to perfection a tech¬nique of filigree enamellingthat came to be imitated all

over Europe.

Photo C Hungarian National MuseumBudapest

CourierNOVEMBER 1976 29TH YEAR

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Page

4 EXPLORING THE NEW SOUNDSCAPE

By R. Murray Schäfer

9 ROCK... POP... AND RISING DECIBELS

By Irmgard Bontinck and Desmond Mark

15 TUNING IN TO THE PAST

Can we recapture soundscapes of bygone days?

By David Lowenthal

18 ON INSECT 'WINGS OF SONG'

Photos

22 EARLY MAN GOES THROUGH

THE SPEECH BARRIER

By Aleksey A. Leontyev

24 MASKED VOICES AND SPOKEN SIGNATURES

Photo story

28 SOUNDS OF SOUND SCULPTURE

30 PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SOUND

By Peter Ostwald

33 UNESCO NEWSROOM

34 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

2 TREASURES OF WORLD ART

HUNGARY: Siren-borne candlestick

Cover

The scientific exploration of our acousticenvironmentthe "soundscape"hasrecently begun. Noise and sound areindeed as much a part of our lives asshapes and colours, although our modernworld of sound is very different fromthat of our ancestors. The "World

Soundscape Project" set up and directedby the Canadian composer R. MurraySchäfer is today studying the innumerablesounds in our acoustic environment

(see page 4). Here, child with a seashell listens intently for the sound ofwaves upon the sea-shore.

Photo O Roger Canessa, Toulon, France

Photo © Christian Dobbelaere, Brussels

EXPLORING

THE NEW

SOUNDSCAPE

Pioneer research into the globalacoustic environment

by R. Murray Schäfer

R. MURRAY SCHÄFER, internationally known Canadian composer, is founder anddirector of the World Soundscape Project in Vancouver. Until 1975 he was professorof Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia (Canada).A complete treatment of the subject of this anide is presented in his book The Tuningof the World, a study dealing with all aspects of the world soundscape which will bepublished shortly by Alfred A. Knopf In New York and McLelland and Stewart inToronto, Canada.

OST Europeans and NorthAmericans still believe

that the eye is the most importantreceiver of information. I have heard

psychologists say that as much as80 per cent of our vital informationcomes through this receiver. Veryfew people stop to consider that thismay not have been true in the past,or that it may not be true in the future,and that it may not even be true formuch of the world's population atpresent.

We are coming to believe thatdependence on the. eye as thegatherer and orderer of environmen¬tal information is directly related toliteracy and is therefore a habit thathas been learned by Westerners asfar back as late Greek civilization, but

that as the West begins to enter itspost-literate phase, the ear will returnas a primary sensing instrument, justas it still is in many parts of the world.

The fact that the Western World has

a noise pollution problem today andthat increasing numbers of peopleare aware of it is one clear sign thatwe have reached this change-point.

Technological civilization hasbrought sweeping changesto our acoustic environment

the "soundscape". Today the"harmonies of nature" are

seldom heard except in placesfar from the hubbub of modern

life: leaves rustle and water lapsbeneath the paddle (oppositepage) as a boat glides over thetranquil waters of a canal inKerala (India). But in mostcases "background noise" nowtends to be an all-pervasivecacophonous din. The roar ofjet engines inflicts intense strainon the nerves and eardrums of

people living near large airports(photo left).

The ears are crying out for greaterrespect. We can recognize whatthey are telling us or we can give upand resign ourselves to inevitabledeafness as the hurricane of noise

increases.

Soundscape is the term we use todescribe the acoustic environment.

You will not find it in any dictionary.We have derived it from landscapebut its properties are different. Consi¬der the number of people who havehelped to define the meaning of land¬scape for us: geologists have studiedits structures, geographers its surfaceformations, painters and poets havedescribed it, gardeners and engineershave shaped it, architects and plan¬ners have embellished it. As for the

soundscape, who has studied that?It is a discipline we must now learn,or rather relearn.

It is to this end that, a few yearsago, we set up the World SoundscapeProject. Perhaps the best I can do inthis short article is to describe some

of the approaches of our work andhope that they will suggest fresh orrelated studies elsewhere in the world.

To effectively know about the sound¬scape we must consider the past aswell as the present in order to makeintelligent recommendations for thefuture. How can we do this? We

can tape record and analyse sound-scapes of the present and we can talkto people who inhabit them to findout what they think. Still we can'tdelve into history with our micro¬phones and our analytical equipment.

Here history becomes geography.We can, for instance, study wilder¬ness environments . in northern

Canada or the deserts of Australia.

Or we can get some impression of thepast acoustic environments of a com¬plicated continent such as Europe byselecting and comparing remotevillages in different countries.

The first thing we notice whenwe study a wilderness soundscape oreven a rural or village soundscape isthat it is quieter than that of themodern city. Yet this is not becauseof the absence of life there. Rather

it seems that whatever sounds that

are present are subject to cycles ofactivity and rest. The sound pro

ducers seem to know when to speakup and when to shut up.

Different species of insects, animalsand birds complement each other indaily and seasonal rhythms of syn¬chronized beauty. For instance,during the months of June in BritishColumbia, frogs will leave off chirpingat precisely the moment when birdsbegin their dawn chorus and will onlyreturn as the last bird is fading atsunset. Geese will be heard onlya few days each year in Ontario asthey streak north in May and return inhuge honking flocks on their waysouth in October.

Such environments, uncluttered

by an overpopulation of competingsounds we call hi-fi. That is to say,the signal-to-noise ratio is favourable.Every sound is newsworthy. Each ismade for a purpose and is comple¬mentary to the others, like a goodconversation or a good orchestrationin music.

One learns to read such signs forvital clues about the environment, i

For instance, on my farm we know f

Photo c Kosidowski, Moscow

HORSE-POWER

WITHOUT THE HORSE

In a square of Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia (above) a horse leftfettered by its rider gives vent to its indignation with an outburstof bucking and neighing. Such a scene is uncommon in citiestoday, where the neighing of horses and clop-clop of their hooveshave been replaced by the din of motor traffic: horse-power withoutthe horse. From the start of the Industrial Revolution

in the 19th century workers in the metal industries had to put upwith a bedlam of noise (see engraving below) and in spiteof preventive measures taken in recent decades, deafness fromexcessive noise can still be an occupational hazard.

Engraving from Das Buch der Erfindungen. Gewerbe und Industrien(Discovery of Tools and Industries). Berlin 1874

,the ground has thawed in spring andis ready for ploughing when, lying inbed at night, we can hear animalsburrowing beneath the surface.

The same is true of village life.When we studied the mountain villageof Cembra in Northern Italy we foundthat life centred on^ annual and sea¬

sonal cycles of festivals and specialevents, each with its prominent acou¬stic soundmark.

Church bells were rung in differentways on different occasions, smallcannons or mortaretti were fired on

fixed days; there were certain dayswhen the goatherd's horn conductedthe sheep to summer pasture; therewere special days for folk songs andspecial horns that were blown whenyouths and girls were courting.

The whole village was enfolded inperiodic sound cycles that only beganto disintegrate when a new roadbrought mountain buses up toconnect the village with the cities inthe valley below.

The transition from rural to urban

life can be characterized generally asa passage from the hi-fi to the lo-fisoundscape. A lo-fi soundscape is

one in which trivial or conflictingacoustic information masks the sounds

we want or need to hear. For a

sound to catch one's attention at

all it must be monstrously loud orinsistent. Radios, the birdsong ofmodern life, do not go south in winter;bulldozers do not hibernate and traffic

does not sleep at night. . Everythingoperates simultaneously with muchwasted acoustic energy and attendantdestruction of nerves and eardrums.

The study of the natural sound¬scape suggests not only that thetotal volume of sound needs to be

reduced in order that diminutive or

message-bearing sounds can againbe clearly heard, but it also gives usthe clue as to how this might beachieved by the restoration of clearerrhythmic patterning.

Curfews on jet flights at night isone possibility, but this needs tobe augmented in other ways, forinstance by restrictions on construc¬tion equipment or loudspeakers inpublic places. Where they are anuisance, a neighbourhood mighteven consider restricting the opera¬tion of power lawnmowers to one or,two evenings a week.

Another difference between the

urban and rural environment is thatin the urban environment most sounds

are close by while in the natural en¬vironment many are distant. Theurban soundscape possesses pre¬sence while the natural soundscapepossesses both presence and an

CITY TUMULT

AND FOREST MURMURS

Like natural and man-made shapes such as the palm tree and the cityof Dakar, in Senegal (above), sounds have their own architecture,also modulated spontaneously by nature or drawn from the myriadnoises of human origin. Today research teams are analysing andmeasuring the volume of the innumerable noises formingthe "soundscape" in many parts of the world, under a projectdirected by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer.Diagram below pictures the cycle of the sounds of natureon Canada's Pacific coast.

CYCLES OF THE NATURAL SOUNDSCAPE OF THE WEST COASTOF BRITISH COLUMBIA BY RELATIVE VOLUME OF SOUNDS

**«<*"*

JAN ' EB ' MAR ' APR ' MAY ' JUNE ' JULY ' AUG ' SEPT ' OCT ' NOV ' DEC

lllllllll*t*t**t*t*** I

Tille#* Yv.1,

1 ',' Rain and Snow pj '7^1 Fl

Water and Ice jimmmtimim

^<m£k Grasshoppers

ioeo»e «ooû«e» "^3 Bees

Mosquitos + o i + ff + a

íes

Bird-song

Frog-song

Wolves

Elk

Diagram © R. Murray Schäfer, Vancouver

Photos © Hoa-Qui, Paris

acoustic horizon. Then news of in¬

vasion into the area is picked up bythe ear. A. dog on a distant farmsignals the arrival of a strange animalor a visitor to the neighbourhood.

Dependence on the ear was espe¬cially strong in the early days in NorthAmerica as Fenimore Cooper's novelsshow. Danger was then signalledby the snapping of a twig. In a deepforest vision is useless; one sees at

best a few metres in any direction.The ear is alert like that of an animal.

Curiously, the same dependence onthe ear is evident in the treeless

deserts of Australia today, where anaborigine can, by pressing his earto the ground, pick up footsteps asdistant vibrations. A car, for ins¬tance, can be heard 20 kilometres

away, first as a ground vibration.

Sometimes hearing at a distance isvital to the survival of a community.In the Breton fishing village of Les-conil we conducted a study whichillustrates this clearly. A daily on¬shore-offshore wind cycle carries acomplete circumference of distantsounds to the village, some as faraway as 12 kilometres. Bells fromdistant villages are heard, soundsfrom inland fields, buoys in differentlocations at sea, each appears at itsaopointed time. Any change in theaccustomed pattern indicates achange in the weather, a matterwhich each fisherman and fisher¬

man's wife picks up immediately iwith practiced ear. I

y Acoustic space is not visual orphysical space. It cannot be ownedor delimited on a map. It is sharedspace, a mutual possession fromwhich all inhabitants receive vital

signals. It can easily be destroyedby thoughtless soundmaking or im¬perialistic noises.

The modern world shows us manyexamples of mismanaged acousticspace. For instance, without expan¬ding its physical premises an airportmay require more and more acousticspace to accommodate increasedflights or newer and noisier aircraft.A citizen may then discover that heis sharing his bedroom or his gardenwith the international aviation in¬

dustry and yet he will get little reliefin modern law, which defines pro¬perty exclusively as a visual holding.

As we move into an acoustic era

such attitudes will change and even¬tually they must be expressed in newlegal conceptions also. Sound im¬perialism will then be considered asmuch an offence as breaking andentering.

Another way to learn about thechanging soundscape is through ear-witness accounts of people who havedescribed the sounds of their own

time and place; and so we have beencompiling a large catalogue of suchdescriptions from writers of all peri¬ods and nationalities with the hopethat it will enable us to discover more

about soundscape morphology andalso will tell us something about thechanging attitudes of listeners overthe centuries. ,': , .

We have cross-indexed this cata¬

logue by time, place and the soundobjects described, and an accompany¬ing computer programme enables usto make statistical comparisonsconcerning the appearance. and dis¬appearance of the different soundsin our index. It will be a long timebefore we have enough references tomake reliable deductions for all partsof the world, but we do have a largesampling of sounds from Europeanand American sources and we can

draw some interesting conclusionsfrom them.

For instance, we note that of all

sound quotes from 19th centuryEuropean literature 43 % referred tonatural sounds, while during the20th century mentions of naturalsounds had slipped to 20 %. Inter¬estingly enough this decline is notobserved in North America, where

just over 50 % of all quotes for bothcenturies refer to natural sounds! One

might assume that North Americansare still closer to the natural envi¬

ronment, or at least that they haveeasier access to it than Europeans,

for whom it definitely seems to bedisappearing.

We notice a decline also in the

number of times quiet and silenceare evoked in earwitness descriptions.Of all descriptions in our file for thedecades 1810-1830, 19% mention

quiet or silence; by 1870-1890 men¬tions had dropped to 14% and by1940-1 960 to 9%.

In going through the catalogueI am struck by the negative way inwhich silence is described by modernwriters. Here are some of the modi¬

fiers employed by the most recentgeneration: solemn, oppressive,deathlike, numb, weird, awful,

gloomy, brooding, eternal, painful,lonely, heavy, despairing, stark, sus-penseful, aching, alarming...

The quiet and silence evoked bythese worlds is rarely positive. It isnot the quiet of a contemplative walkin the countryside, it is not the quietone observes when listening to music,it is not the silence of fascination or

meditation, or even the silence of

sleep.

Does this mean that such qualities

are going to disappear from our planetforever, or does it mean rather that

our attitude towards them needs to

be revalued ?

The loudest and most continuous

sounds in the world today are thoseof modern technology. It is thesesounds which are destroying our hear¬ing, disrupting the natural rhythmsof our lives and pulverising the wordtranquility in every language. If weare to recover elegance and balancein the soundscape, it is machinery,that will have to be brought undercontrol first.

This is not a matter of passing theresponsibility over to acousticalengineers, whose livelihood, after all,is dependent on a perpetuation andeven an augmentation of the problem.It is rather a matter of larger groupsof citizens everywhere beginning tostudy all aspects of the soundscape,beginning to assess and criticize it,and ultimately beginning to think ofways to render it more beautiful.

I have often likened the soundscapeto a huge musical composition thatis unfolding around us ceaselessly.The question is: how can we improveits orchestration? The analogy ofthe acoustic environment to music

may seem strange to some but I havea special reason for suggesting it.

In music .sounds matter; the

musician doesn't fumble with them or

throw them about aimlessly. Theobject of music is to achieve balanceand harmony; the enemy of music iswaste energy, noise. It is important.

I feel, to keep the model of music inmind as we begin to design the worldsoundscape, for it reminds us that ourtask will be one of uniting scienceand art in the service of society.

Redesign the acousticenvironmentsof the world? What an arrogantand preposterous idea this will seemto some. All I can say is that it isalready being done, though oftenthoughtlessly or by people whosemotives are unaesthetic and anti¬

social.

Purveyors of background music arecreating sound walls which nobodyasked for in the interests of inducingworkers to produce more or consu¬mers to spend more. Generators forproducing white noise (a backgroundsound that is a blend of audible fre¬

quencies over a wide range) are nowbeing installed in modern office build¬ings in North America in order toprevent office workers from talking sothat they can type more letters fortheir bureaucratic bosses.

In Sweden the ringing of tele¬phones, nicely paced at ten-secondintervals, was sharply sped up to five-second intervals in 1975 in order to

.. force people to answer their receiversmore promptly. For a telephonecompany the less time a line is tied up,the more money that can be saved.Thus, for the saving of a few crowns awhole nation is going to be mademore jumpy.'

Examples of bad acoustic designcould be multiplied endlessly. Wecan only improve them when we be¬gin to consider other motives thanprofit and power in the .shaping ofsonic artifacts, when we learn how

to control loud or irritating sounds,when we learn how to reclaim quiet

groves and times in our lives, whenwe learn that there is a time to make

every sound and a time not to.

R. Murray Schäfer

8

ROCK...POP...

AND RISING DECIBELSby Irmgard Bontinckand Desmond Mark

Young lovers of yesteryear (see medieval engraving below)could meet in gardens orchestrated by birdsong and waterfountains. Today's Romeo and Juliet (above) must tryto whisper sweet nothings against the babel of the modern city.

TRY to imagine yourselves in thequiet countryside somewhere,

making your way towards a town.In order to get a better idea of thechanges in your acoustic environment,you close your eyes, and put your earsto work more sensitively. If we regu¬larly put our aural impressions downon paper at specific points in thissound-walk, then we shall have pro¬duced a kind of acoustic map whichwould ultimately allow us to recog¬nize by its typical features manyindividual parts of the globe.

Naturally enough, it is a much moredifficult business to prepare a map ofa soundscape than a geographicalmap, even more so since the methodsand terminology are only in the firststages of development. Sonographyand geography are still a very longway apart. The Canadian composerand music educator R. Murray Schäferhas become particularly fascinated bythis problem, and in the "WorldSoundscape Project" which he con¬ceived, he is setting out to research themultifaceted links which exist between

Man, the sound environment, and

music itself. (See article page 4)

How would the map of our sound¬scape look? In the rural, unurbanizedworld of sound, noises present them¬selves mainly one at a time, springingout of a deep surrounding silence, kEven the smallest sounds can ber

IRMGARD BONTINCK of Austria is

Assistant Director of Research at Mediacult

in Vienna (Austria) an international institute

founded with Unesco support to studycultural development with special regard tothe audio-visual media. Formerly known asthe International Institute for Music, Danceand Theatre in the Audio-visual Media,

Mediacult is directed by Kurt Blaukopf, amember of the Executive Board of Unesco.

Irmgard Bontinck is the author of La Cri¬tique de la Culture Établie (Critique of Esta¬blished Culture) a study prepared for Unesco,and editor of New Patterns of Musical Beha¬

viour of the Young Generation in IndustrialSocieties (Vienna, 1974).

DESMOND MARK of Austria is in chargeof research in acoustic sociology at theInstitute for Music Sociology (Vienna). Hehas published a number of papers on theacoustic environment and the modern sound¬

scape and is co-editor of a collection ofstudies, The Cultural Behaviour of Youth,Vienna 1976.

SOUND AND SUPERSOUND

Fascinated American audience listening through ear tubes to phonograph playing populartune's in the 1880s (below) is a far cry from mass events such as the Woodstockrock music festival in 1969 (far right) attended by 300,000 young spectators in Bethel,New York. The breakthrough in electro-acoustical devices has made masteryof the technology as important as mastery of the musical -instrument (right).Fears that mechanization of music might induce a passive musical attitude in young peopleare not borne out by a recent study on urbanization, modernity and musical behaviourof Indian youth by Dr. Manas Raychaudhuri, of Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta."The transistor radio", he reports, "has stimulated an active interest in traditionaland non-traditional music among young people in rural and semi-urban areas of India."

^ picked up, and tell their own clearstory to the countryman. From thelow tinkle of cow-bells, he can tell

where his cattle are, for example.Birdsong, the rush of a brook, humanvoicesall these aural events can be

told apart, clear one from another,and free of distortions and backgroundnoise.

The nearer we come to the town,the heavier becomes the noise of

cars, trains, aeroplanes, constructionmachinery, and so on, overlaying thenatural world of sound until it is

completely drowned out by the noiseof machines and traffic.

In this industrial sound-world singleacoustical signals are buried in abroad and deep bed of backgroundnoise; in order to make an individualsignal capable of being picked out, itmust be enormously amplifiedandthat also includes human forms of

communication, such as speech andmusic.

If we examine the development ofthis industrial sound-world in historical

terms, we arrive at much the sameconclusion as we did following our

earlier sound-walk. For many thou¬sands of years our ancestors lived ashunters and" foragers in the context

of an acoustic landscape overwhelm¬ingly composed of the sounds ofthe natural environment, with humansounds reduced to a very minor ele¬ment, and the noise of tools and man-

made instruments very rarely fallingon the ear.

It was only in the industrial epoch,which began in Europe during thefirst half of the 19th century, that thesoundscape underwent a radicalalteration. Today we live in industrialcentres producing a tidal wave ofnoise unthinkable in earlier times,

and whose power steadily exceedsthe power of the human organism towithstand it.

The human ear is a highly sensi¬tive instrument, able to measuresound intensities ranging from thesmallest perceptible physical intensityto an intensity a million times greater.The measurement of the strength ofsounds, however, is calculated accord¬ing to the logarithmic decibels scale.Each addition of 10 decibels (dB) inintensity denotes about a doubling ofsubjectively received sound. Bet¬ween the auditory threshold and theroar of a jet engine, which can causeactual physical pain, lies a range ofsome 120-1 30 decibels.

Jazz as seen by an American artist.Bob Gill (1963).

10

.2. O=> S

CE

a» »3 C

.9" o(/).' ,

Eu

The increasing noise of the environ¬ment must obviously have an effecton men and their music. In the

industrialized world people havebecome quite used to the fact that asone's age increases, the inevitableconsequence is a growing loss ofhearing. But studies carried out inthe area inhabited by the Mabaantribe in Sudan have turned up thesurprising fact that the tribe, living ina peaceful acoustic environment, hasalmost'no experience of hearing-lossconnected with increasing age.

A comparative study carried outwith the inhabitants of a Western in¬

dustrial country showed that thehearing capacity of an 80-year-oldCentral African was still as great asthat of an 18-year-old New Yorker.The obvious conclusion is that anynatural hearing-loss in the aged isradically modified by environmen¬tal factors.

Even more dramatic is the effect of

the new sound-world on the countries

of the developing world, where thetransition to the age of technologyand its accompanying acoustic infernois not reached in a steady, step-by-step, upward climb, but in one abruptburst.

the effects of this tidal wave of

noise can also be severely increasedby the climatic conditions; in areaswhere the ambient heat makes it ne¬

cessary, and part of the local custom,to keep doors and windows open formost of the yearsuch as the cities ofIndia, which have provided the basis fora report on the problemthe level ofnoise inside the dwelling can be asgreat as the level outside.

In the industrialized world, at leastit is not only the noise of machinerywhich is omnipresent; music can alsobe made available on a mass scale,thanks to the existence of loudspeak¬ers. One can hardly imagine a situa¬tion in which loudspeaker music is notreadily available: in supermarkets,aeroplanes, restaurants, cinemas,banks and in the homewe can hear

music everywhere.

This again is quite unknown toprevious generations in human history.While before, music and speech wereinextricably MnkeÖ to the physicalsource of the sound, whether instru¬ment or speaker, today any desirablesounds can be separated from theirsource by electro-acoustical means,and reproduced on records or tapes, tobe put out with the aid of loudspeak

ers at any time and in any place.

The significance of electro-acousti¬cal techniques, in fact, goes muchfurther than a simple reproductionand instant availability of music; italso allows a range of ways in whichoriginal live music can be alteredin terms of intensity, sound-tone,acoustic characteristics and so on.

It is in no way surprising that theattitude to music shown by youngpeopleparticularly open to changeand innovationhas been deeplyaffected by the new sound-worldaround them, or that they havebecome very accustomed to the ideaof music linked with technology.

With the breakthrough in" electro-acoustical devices (loudspeakers, am¬plifiers, mixers, and so on), the musicof young people is a completely newapproach. The use of technologicalmachinery has now been integratedinto the making of music, and themastery of the technology is now asimportant as the mastery of the musi¬cal instrument for performers. Neverbefore in the entire history of musichas the average musical performancebeen so dependent on technical .means as it is now. f

11

, The most striking technical mani¬pulation of music for young peoplelies in the area of musical dynamics:amplification. The level of amplifi¬cation to be experienced in pop orbeat concerts, in discothèque or beatcellars is one of the most character¬

istic signs of the changed acoustic-musical environment. Some exact

measurements have been taken in a

number of countries of this particularrelationship of youth to music, one inparticular from Switzerland.

During a pop concert in Lausannea technician checked the amplifica¬tion in various parts of the concerthall, and later described the possibleconsequences of the level of soundreceived by the audience: "Measure¬ments with the sonometer taken

during the Mahavishnu Orchestraconcert showed sound levels of

125 dB at a distance of three metres ¡from the loudspeakers, 110 dB inthe back stalls, and 118 dB in the >front row of the balcony. It is per¬fectly possible that 100-200 people-that is, some 10 per cent of the totalaudiencewould have sustained irre¬

versible damage to their eardrums;in other words, nerve-endings wouldhave been destroyed that cannot beregenerated."

For all that, there is no point inwringing one's hands over the entryof electro-acoustic devices into the

development of music and the exper¬ience of young people, or indeedas is often the caseshutting one'sears to. any discussion of such "deplor¬able" phenomena. To identify youthwith noise is hardly helpful to anunderstanding of the many-sidedproblems of where man and musicstand in the acoustical environment

of today; this is an area in which itseems particularly easy to confusecause and effect.

One must look deeper into this spe¬cific acoustical relationship, in thecontext of the general environment,in order to arrive at an understandingand so make it more possible foralternative measures to be taken

successfully. Musicians, teachers,technicians and sociologists have allarrived at explanations for the strik¬ingly high sound-levels of music foryoung peopleeach of them in some

ORCHESTRA OF BUZZERS AND HOWLERS

As early as 1913 the Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) hadthe revolutionary idea of using the everyday noises of the industrial age tocreate a truly modern form of music. Above, Russolo with some of the"buzzers and howlers" he invented to represent the sounds of industry,technology and urban life. Russolo compositions, bearing such titles as"Awakening of a Capital" and "Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes", wereproduced on these devices and presented to Italian audiences in 1914. In theearly 1920s "noise instruments" imitating sounds from industry were alsoconstructed in the U.S.S.R. and used to perform "noise symphonies" and"operas". About the same time experimental symphonies of factory whistleswere held in several Soviet cities, partly due to the efforts of the greatRussian poet Mayakovsky.

way linked with the modern humanenvironment.

The first argument is that thephenomenon stems from an inten¬tional break with the adult world.

Young people demand their ownareas of freedom, and achieve them

in this sensethrough the erection ofa "sound barrier". This acoustic wall

protects their area of autonomy fromthose grown-ups who refuse to crossthis sound threshold. Within the

barrier, youth can operate freely andundisturbed.

The second thesis treats this erec¬

tion of a wall of sound in terms of

the sound-level of the environment.In order to make themselves audible,and to allow their own musicians a

proper hearing, it is necessary to belouder than the ambient sound-level.

Some thought-provoking materialhas been produced on the links bet¬ween the general environmental levelof sound and the sound-levels of

30,000 SINGERSON STAGE

Below, mammoth annual song festivalat Tallinn (Soviet Estonia).

During the two-day event open-air concertsattended by over 200,000 spectators areheld in the "Field of Song", whoseimmense shell-shaped stage has room for30,000 singers and 20,000 dancers.

<

O

r*£ Wk.>TAi^

SOUNDMARK OF VANCOUVER

One of the prominent soundmarks of Vancouver (Canada) is this set of air horns on topof one of the city's higher buildings. It plays the opening of Canada's national anthem each dayat noon. It has been doing so since 1967 when a local engineer, Robert Swanson, thoughtup the idea as a way of celebrating Canada's Centennial that year. Two otherVancouver soundmarks are the bells of Holy Rosary Cathedral and the nightlyboom of the Nine O'Clock Gun.

music, not only in the realm of beatand rock concerts, but also wherecontemporary "serious" music isconcerned: in a historical perspective,the growth in the size of orchestrasbetween Haydn and Mahler is alsonot without interest.

- The next argument is closely con¬nected with the preceding two, but isbased not on an attempt to over¬power and drown out ambient sound-levels, but to imitate them.

Here a number of acoustic factors

play a part, all of which can be foundin current music. The level of sound

is the most apparent characteristic,but there are also special reverbera-tive notes, continuous droning, orclearly recognized rhythmical patternswhich match entirely the modernsound environment.

If one now compares the unchang¬ing broad spectrum of backgroundsound to the low drumming of a beatband, the sharp wailing of a synthe¬sizer, and the clumped notes (clustereffect) of modern music, the argu¬ment that the music is a mirroringof our technical modern world of

sound becomes at least plausible.

Yet another thesis looks at theeffect of over-loud music on the

human organism. Thanks to a num¬ber of scientific experiments in the

area of music therapy we now knowthat music has a very powerful effecton the autonomous nervous systemin -man, particularly where the actionof the heart, the biood circulation,and breathing rhythms are concerned.

These physiological reactions allowone to argue that beat music, forexample, is not merely experiencedthrough the auditory system, but isfelt on the pulses, on the skin, inbreathing and in the heart itself;the whole physical body is affectedby music.

When listening to musical perfor¬mances amplified to abnormal levels,more hormones are released anda state of excitement is induced in

the listener. The over-amplifiedsound has the effect on the organismof an alarm signal, forcing the releaseof more adrenalinthe "fight or flight"hormonefrom the body's chemicalsystem.

This physical stress situation can bestimulating; it can also lead to acts ofaggression, e.g., the destruction ofseats at the end of a concert. The

flight reaction of the body movescompletely beyond conscious control,and can lead, in the extreme, tofainting fits.

Even more important are the mostrecent studies on the effect of over-

amplified sound on the body. These

studies see the consequences reach¬ing much further than their initialeffect on the nervous system, andactually affecting the substance ofthe brain.

As a result of acoustic shock, theengramsthe delicate pathwaystraced in the brain which producememoriescan be erased. Memorygaps can be induced. This finding iseven more alarming when consideringthe position of people forced to livein an industrial soundscape.

Thus, today, we find ourselves ina situation of acoustical crisis. We

will have to re-think the entire rela¬

tionship of men to their acousticalenvironment, as well as the increase

in noise-producing potential in ourtechnical . tools. The conscious

control of our acoustical and musical

environment seems yet more neces¬sary when we remember that thesame technology which has expandedthe sound range and repertory ofcontemporary music to such a fasci¬nating extent is also threatening ourvery capacity to hear, to remainsensitive to sound.

The time has come for a campaignfor the acoustical quality of life, foran ecology of sound.

Irmgard Bontinckand Desmond Mark

13

14

TUNING IN TO THE PASTCan we recapture soundscapes of bygone days?

The Western world of the Middle

Ages readily believed that the peoplesof distant and little-known lands

possessed strange characteristics,including oversized physical features.One example was the "Panotii ', peoplewith enormous ears who were thoughtto live "somewhere in the Indies

beyond the Ganges". In the 12thcentury, images of three "Panotii"

man, woman and childwere

carved above the portal of the churchof Vézelay, in France (photo right). ForChristians of medieval times the ear

symbolized in particular the hearingof the divine word. Left, a massivebell about to be tolled in one of the

many temples in the town ofBhadgaon (Nepal).

by David Lowenthal

DAVID LOWENTHAL, Professor of Geo¬graphy at University College London, haswritten extensively on environmental per¬ception and is currently concerned withvalues attached to relics from the past. Aformer Secretary of the American Geogra¬phical Society and an associate editor of theinterdisciplinary quarterly Environment andBehavior, he has published a number ofbooks including George Perkins Marsh, a bio¬graphy of a pioneer American conservationist.

WHAT becomes of music,

speech, and other sounds-,

natural and man-made, when theycease reverberating ? How far doprevious sounds differ from those oftoday ? How much do we remember

of what we hear? What meaningsand emotions attach to sounds from

the past? Why do familiar soundsoften trigger nostalgic yearning?What sounds do we regard as anti¬quated, and why?

On these topics little is known andless has been written. For each

of us the answers depend, in part,on our age, our cultural heritage, andour musical and other auditory ex¬periences. This article is a first ex¬

ploration into past sounds and ourfeelings about them.

The world we live in is a productof the past; the very familiarity ofits features implies the memory ofprevious experience. Awareness ofthe past through mementoes andmonuments is essential to individuals

and to nations; the recognition ofcontinuity gives meaning to thepresent and hope to the future.Vision is the main sensory modethrough which we apprehend the past,but it is not the only one. We areaware of the passage of time and theendurance of things through othersenses too.

This assertion may seem hardestto demonstrate with respect to sound.

No noise that human beings arecapable of hearing is really old. Radiosignals from the stars, to be sure,have taken many light years to reachthe earth, but these play an inconspi¬cuous role in our acoustical land¬

scape. No sound that we actuallyhear is more than a few moments

old; the rapid decay of sound energycoupled with our limited capacity forhearing makes even the loudest noiseundetectable soon after its inception.

In one sense, however, soundseems the essence of time. Aural

impulses have long been the mainway of marking off years, seasons,weeks, days, hours, and minutes:bells, chimes, and other clock mecha¬

nisms provide a man-made counter¬point to ' the natural periodicity ofpulse and heartbeat, and enhance ourawareness of connexions between

past and present.

Yet to recover the sounds of the

past is an infinitely more difficultenterprise than to restore the visual

images of previous landscapes.Countless visible relics, however

eroded, decayed, or selectively pre¬served they may be, nonethelesssurvive to ' tell us much about the

bygone material world and its spatialorganization.

But of sounds from the past, savefor a small and relatively recentrepertory, recorded for the most partunder laboratory or studio conditions, knot a trace remains. No recording*

15

> exists of the loudest known noise inworld history, the explosion of Kra-katoa volcano on 26-28 August 1 883,which was heard 3,000 miles away,and it is probable that no one nowalive would remember hearing it.

Of sounds before the phonograph,we know only what can be surmisedfrom indirect evidence: the noises of

presumably unchanging natural orhuman activities; the sounds pro¬

duced by ancient musical instruments;the performance of music preservedin notational form; the written ac¬

counts of those who heard andreacted to the noises and music of

their times.

"We know how Chopin played,"as Gerald Abraham puts it in TheTradition of Western Music, "onlythrough the playing of the pupils ofthe pupils of his pupils." And theirmemory, like all of ours, is a notor¬iously fallible guide. Earwitnessesare to be trusted even less than

eyewitnesses. "Long term memorytends to 'idealize' and isolate sounds,"

notes Barry Truax in an aural historyinterview, which is one reason whythe tape-recorded past seems quiteunlike the sounds we imagine weremember.

But however deficient these indirect

modes of historical reconstruction

may be, they are often invaluable.The timbre, tone, and rhythm of aclap of thunder, the beating of surfagainst the shore, have probablyvaried little over many millennia; theancient flute sounds today much asit did when first made; the clash of

spear against shield, the ring of thehammer at the forge, the sizzle ofmeat on a Neolithic spit can be fairlyaccurately reproduced by reactivatingtheir constituent parts.

Other features of past soundscapes,however, are now unrecoverable: the

utterances . of extinct species, theclangour of early metallurgy, theintonations of ancient languages,the distinctive susurrus of obsolete

domestic crafts. Not least, the words

spoken on any particular occasionthroughout history are gone beyondrecall.

For most of this we lack even indi¬

rect evidence. Least accessible is

the total ensemble of sounds that

characterized past epochs, the inter¬play of background and foregroundnoises that made up the daily sound¬scape heard in each community andlocale.

We do have some clues to these

things, for we know that the, soundsof nature antedate those of man, and

that machine noise follows the man-

made sounds of pre-industrial times.

16

Photo © from Aberrations, by Jurgis Baltrusaïtis.Olivier Perrin publishers, Paris 1957.

Nostalgia for past sounds indeed cen¬tres on our efforts to recapture, orre-experience, the soundscape pat¬terns that we associate with earlier,

simpler, more natural epochs.

Particularly do we sometimes longfor silence, that interval between

sounds so seldom present in theinterstices of our electronic age.Nostalgia sometimes deceives usabout the past; not even screechingjets and thundering subway trainscould be much worse than the

wheeled traffic of late 19th centuryLondon, as recalled in 1958 by thearchitect H. B. Creswell:

The noise... was a thing beyondall imaginings.... The hammeringof a multitude of iron-shod hairy heelsupon [the granite 'sets' of the streets],the deafening, side-drum tattoo of

^^

DESIGNED WITH EAR AND EYEIn religious buildings, certain architectural forms tend to promote the kind ofaudio-visual balance required for religious worship. Such buildings have a vitallyimportant acoustic function: singing, prayers and instrumental music establish alink with the spiritual world. In Gothic cathedrals the lightness of the arches andthe rhythmic repetition of the lofty stained-glass windows help sound wavesto disperse. Like the vaulting branches of trees in a forest, the arching pillarsact as distributors of sound, an analogy strikingly illustrated in photo montage,left, of a Gothic nave giving on to a forest path. Below, entrance to the ShahAbbas, or Blue Mosque, at Isfahan (Iran) where the acoustics are so sensitivethat a snap of the fingers directly beneath the cupola echoes no less than seven 'times. Bottom, 13th-century minaret in Turkmenistan (U.S.S.R.): from its tipthe voice of the muezzin echoes as far as the horizon. Minaret's spiralledstructure recalls that of the famous ziggurat-shaped minaret of Samarra (Iraq).

tyred wheels jarring from the apex ofone set to the next like sticks drag¬ging along a fence; the creaking andgroaning and chirping and rattling ofvehicles... the jangling of chain har¬ness and the clanging or jingling ofevery other conceivable thing else,augmented by the shriekings andbellowings... raised a din that... isbeyond all conception. It was notany such paltry thing as noise. Itwas an immensity of sound.

The everyday sounds of the pastwere different, yes, but not necessa-rily preferable, as we are oftentempted to suppose, to those of today.

Nevertheless, the city dweller whoretreats to the rural countryside, oranyone who sojourns for a time inthe wilderness, rightly supposes thatthe change of locale brings him incontact with earlier or previoussoundscapes. It is difficult whollyto escape the everyday sounds ofmodern life, for the internal combu¬

stion engine and long-distance com¬munications are almost omnipresent.

But today's natural and rural envi¬ronments bear at least some resem¬

blance to those of earlier epochs, andby listening to what happens there wecan partly recapture the soundscapesof the past. Just how much today'snatural or rural sounds replicateyesterday's can not be determined,however. A desire for both authen¬

ticity and specificity animates ourcontinuing search for ways to recoverthe actual sounds of the past.

THE capacity or ability to recap¬ture such sounds is a recurrent

theme of imaginative literature. Ba¬ron Munchausen describes a winter so

cold that a hunter's tune froze in his

bugle, emerging as audible notes onlythe following spring. Rabelais's Pan¬tagruel, sailing on the confines of theFrozen Sea, is amazed, while seeingnothing, to hear a great dinthebooming of cannon, the whistling ofbullets, the shouts and groans ofmen, the jostling of armour, theclashing of battle axes, the neighingof horses; all these sounds of a greatbattle, fought there the previouswinter, had frozen in the air and

were only now tumbling down andmelting into audibility.

The "Journeyers to the East" inHermann Hesse's The Glass Bead

Game include itinerant instrumen¬

talists and minstrels whose "mysticidentification with remote ages andcultural conditions" enabled them "to

perform the music of earlier epochs^with perfect ancient purity... exactly F

CONTINUED PAGE 20

17

Photo © Studio Natiris, Cébazat,. France.

GRASSHOPPER VIRTUOSO. Like a violonist using his bow,the grasshopper rubs its thigh, equipped with a toothlike ridge (above) againstthe sides of its abdomen, thus producing its characteristic "song".

On insect

wings of song'BATS, MOTHS AND ULTRASOUND. Bats find their prey while flying at nightby emitting ultrasonic cries and locating the source of echoes.Some moths can detect the cries and then take evasive action.

Photo below shows oscilloscope tracing of a bat's cry and a moth's response to it.Pattern at left of top trace shows bat's cry.Reaction of the moth's acoustic cells produced row of spikes at bottom.

Photo © Scientific Mmerican.

18

CRICKET'S MUSICAL 'FILE'.

Only the male cricket produces sound.It chirps by rubbing an upturned "scraper"on one fore-wing along a "file" or thickenedvein with crossridges on the undersideof the other fore-wing. Photo above, takenthrough a microscope, shows a cricket'smusical "file".

SPIDER'S LYRE. Is the spider deaf?It was always thought that the spiderhad no hearing organ, but then tiny slitsstretched from a fine membrane linked

to sensory cells were discoveredon the insect's feet. Some scientists

believe that these lyre-shaped organs,sensitive to vibrations, may be a kindof foot-mounted ear.

BUG'S BREASTPLATE. The bug stings itsvictims with its rostruma kind of beak.

This instrument also, amazingly enough,enables it to "sing". The bug scrapesit against minute grooves on its thorax(below) to produce its "stridulation".

Photos © Studio Natiris, Cébazat, France.

19

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

as if all the subsequent modes,refinements, and virtuoso achieve¬ments were still unknown."

One archaeological dreamer sur¬mises that, by analogy with thesound that needles re-evoke in record

grooves, the voices of plasterers ofpast millennia may be caught in themasonry of ancient walls and temples,awaiting only the proper stylus tocome to life once more.

The desire to regain audible his¬tory bespeaks the power of soundto transport us back to the past. Tohear, or even just to remember, afamiliar tune, can instantly call tomind long-vanished scenes andevents.

The playing of childhood melodieswas said to have triggered fatal out¬breaks of nostalgia among Swiss sol¬diers serving in France and Belgiumduring the 17th and 18th centuries.The Kühe-Reihen or ranz-des-vaches,rustic tunes to which herds were

driven to Alpine pastures, revivedSwiss recollections of their homeland.

The tune, "a fragment of the past,"as the Swiss essayist Jean Staro-binski puts it, "revives in the imagi¬nation all our former life ...". ;

Music is not the only'sound toarouse such memories; the bubblingof springs and the murmuring ofstreams, even certain vocal inflec¬

tions, can also be evocative.1 Indeed

the 19th-century French novelist,Etienne Pivert de Sénancour, felt that

"the sounds emanating from sublimeplaces make a deeper, more lasting,impression than do their visual fea¬tures."' The significance ï óf £ sounddominates the inhabitants of Ameri¬

can author John Updike's imaginaryplanet, Minerva: "an elderly Minervanwishing to memorialize his life, wouldremember it almost exclusively interms of music he had heard, or hadmade."

Any sound, if memory is vivid,evokes the past. But certain soundsin particular induce us to sense them

as old, stemming from antiquity or.surviving from a remote past.

Real or fancied similarity to someknown work persuades us to linknew music to some past epoch. Eventhe use of a particular key may evokethe musical past.

Thus long accumulated associa¬tions with major and minor modesmake it difficult for some cognoscenti,according to Gerald Abraham, to"hear B minor without our sub¬

conscious being stirred by memoriesof the Kyrie of Bach's Mass, thefirst movement of the Unfinished

Symphony, and Tchaikovsky's Pathé¬tique."

The timbre as well as the structure

of music may suggest the past.Certain instruments, whatever theiractual age, produce tones that aregenerally recognized as archaic. Therecognition stems from our expecta¬tion, based on a mixture of experienceand belief, that early musical instru¬ments were characteristically thin,reedy, quavering, or nasal; from theabsence of a well-tempered pitch; orfrom certain acoustic propertiesthecastrato voice, for examplethat areno longer to be found.

THE presumption of antiquitymay be mistaken: not many

early instruments have the archaeolo¬gical authenticity of the Ukrainianmammoth bones, so cut and shapedthat Soviet scholars could deduce

that Cro-Magnon man 20,000 yearsago used them as percussion instru¬ments; modern tests on them, as Ser¬

gei Bibikov describes in the "Unesco

Courier" (June 1975), yield "hard,resonant, and musically expressive"sounds.

But many so-called early instru¬ments are in fact copies or recon¬structions of originals; we havelittle firm evidence about how earlymusic sounded; some modern music

is intentionally written for antiqueinstruments or set to deliberatelyanachronistic language, like Stra¬vinsky's Lyke-Wake Cantata.

A presumption of antiquity alsoattaches to sounds that seem worn,flawed, or partly obliterated. Suchtones strike the ear as being eitherproducts of ancient forces or end

results of processes öf decay. . Ascratched record, a muffled church

bell, and a wheezy car engine givethe illusion of having come from longago because their tones suggestmuch prior use. A cracked or qua¬vering voice conveys a sense of timepast because we may assume it be¬longs to an old man or woman.

= Words sung or spoken may be ano¬ther high road to antiquity. Songs,chants, and other vocalizations

connote age when they employ anti¬quated language or refer to historicalpersonages or epochs. Referencesto bygone persons and places, obso¬lete vocabulary, and archaic musicalstyle and instrumentation convergeto create compelling illusions of anti¬quity, as in Gregorian chants.

Words or eroded sounds often

combine with aural memories to

conjure up past images. Philip Lar-kin's novel Girl in Winter describes

how recorded music can evoke a

vanished scene:

The record was old-fashioned, andhad a tinny quality only partly due tothe needle. The tune it played hadbeen popular for perhaps a week ortwo, or perhaps even for as long asa musical comedy had run in London,but was now quite forgotten. Theorchestra that played it did so inwhat had been the fashion of the

moment, with little empty tricksof syncopation that recalled the out¬

moded dresses of the girls that haddanced to it. It was strange tothink it had once sounded modern.

Now it was like an awning propped inthe sun, nearly white, that years agohad been striped bright red andyellow.

The content and condition of the

musical reproduction together sug¬gest outworn tastes, frayed and fadedfabrics, evanescent popularity. -

Auditory like visual experienceoften makes natural things seem pre¬vious to man-made ones. Rocks,

trees, lichen may look older thanhouses or highways because weassume that nature generally ante-,dates artifice. The sounds of nature

may similarly suggest a primeval -scene.

For Larkin's antagonist, "as far asage was concerned, sheer age thatwas almost timelessness, the sound

of trees was more impressive" thanan ancient Oxford church. "The

surrounding treetops settling andunsettling with an endless sifting ofleaves ... filled the air with the

whispering of eternity, ... makingthis place, famous as it was, like allother places."

But the rustle of wind in trees,like the atavistic charm of breakingwaves, is not so much ancient as it is

eternal. Such sounds betoken not

the historical past but the primordialscene, a time previous to history.

The sounds of decay, like itsvisual images, also evoke a feeling ofdesuetude. A crumbling stone wall.

20

an ivy-covered building, a mossy roofare felt to be old because they areapparently weathering back to age-old nature. Similarly, tunes, speech,and other man-made noises patternedafter the sounds of nature or decayingso as to resemble them impresshearers as akin to primeval.

We tend to assume that sounds dis¬

tant in space are also remote in time;far away and long ago seem intima¬tely interwoven. The experience ofechoes bears this out in paradoxicalfashion. As reverberations in ampli¬fied space they echo sounds furtheraway but after the original sound.

The growth of interest in soundsstemming both from nature and fromthe human past mirrors increasingdisenchantment with the noises felt

to be most characteristic of the pre¬sent day.

And a preference for. the auralpast goes beyond music; it questionsthe quality of the whole modernsoundscape. The broad-gauge blurof the machine-dominated environ¬

ment creates sounds that are in¬

herently boring. "In the past thetrains either whistled more or we

heard them better," reminisced one

old lady about the 1920s. "Theyhad more personality."

This is the quality that makes somany sounds of the past a preciouslegacy, now in danger of being lostthrough obsolescence, and that givespurpose to the World SoundscapeProject's effort to record certain

sounds before they vanish (seepage 4).

Such sounds include the ringing ofold cash registers, washing clotheson a washboard, churning butter, arazor being stropped, a kerosenelamp, the squeak of leather saddlebags, hand coffee grinders, milk cansrattling on horse-drawn vehicles,heavy doors being clanked shut andbolted, school hand bells, wooden

rocking chairs on wooden floors,the quilt explosion of old camerasand hand-operated water pumps.

A special auditory quality oftenassociated with the past is silence.We are so accustomed today to per¬vasive background noise that whenit is absent we feel transported intoanother time, the past if we wereaccustomed long ago to the absenceof noise, the future if we have never

experienced certain surroundingswithout it.

Critical reactions to the presentsoundscape help to make us awarethat the ¡ audible environment has a

temporal character. Just as concert

audiences have grown used to hear¬ing chronologically sequential pro

grammes, so does the whole sonic

world begin to acquire historicalmarkers.

We tend more and more to date the

distinctive elements of the sound¬

scape medley: the crash of wavesand the wind in the trees seem eter¬

nal; bird-song is both seasonal andcyclical; voices seem either old or

new depending on "their age andfamiliarity; traffic sounds are placedin time because we have experienced,or heard recordings of, trains andcars and planes of various vintages;music and Muzak have temporal con¬notations that differ depending onwhere and how we hear them.

Even when we do not consciouslyattend to these sounds their tempora¬lity affects us. As we keep incorpor¬ating past sounds into our presentlives, the auditory medley takes onan increasingly diachronic character.We hear in the present but simultane¬ously recognize elements, tonalities,and themes from many pasts.

What can be concluded from all

this? Given our present level oftechnology, past sounds, strictlyspeaking, appear to be irrecoverable.Sounds persist only in memory, oftenevoked by associations, and in their

influence on imagination.

What we can reconstruct from indi¬

rect evidence, however, suggeststhat in many important respects pastsoundscapes differed substantiallyfrom those of today. It is partlybecause of these differences that we

remain so strongly attached to soundsthat we consider to be antiquated,whether or not they are truly old.

David Lowenthal

FOR FURTHER READING AND LISTENING

The Vancouver Soundscape, edited by R. Murray Schäfer. A study onVancouver's sound patterns over its 100-year growth, accompanied by twoLP records recreating aspects of the soundscape. (See article page 4).

Sound Sculpture: A Collection of Essays by Artists Surveying theTechniques, Applications and Future Applications of Sound Sculpture,edited by John Grayson. Collection of over 30 articles and essays describ¬ing the evolution of sound sculpture and introducing all its current forms.196 pp. ($ 18.95). See page 28.

The Sounds of Sound Sculpture: A Cross Section RepresentingThree Decades of Sound Sculpture. An A.R.C. record accompanied by"The Sounds of Sculpture", a booklet providing descriptions and photos of thesound sculptures heard on the album. (S 6.95).

Environments of Musical Sculpture You Can Build, edited by JohnGrayson. How to invent and build your own new musical instruments and"sound sculptures" (see page 28) using ready-to-hand materials. ($ 18.95).

Pieces: An Anthology, edited by Michael Byron. An easy-to-sight-read anthology of compositions for drum and percussion ensembles, shaku-hachi (Japanese bamboo flute), voice and harp, solo voice, solo clarinet andnumerous works for piano. 176 pp. ($ 18.95).

Suitable for Framing: Compositions for Two Pianos and SouthIndian Mrdangam. An A.R.C. recording. ($ 6.95).

Forthcoming titles from the World Soundscape Project (see page 4).

Five Village Soundscapes in Europe, edited by R. Murray Schäfer. Astudy on the soundscapes of villages in Sweden, Germany, Italy, France andthe U.K., accompanied by two LP recordings.

A Dictionary of Acoustic Ecology, edited by Barry Truax.

European Sound Diary, edited by R. Murray Schäfer. . Excerpts fromthe diaries of world soundscape researchers.

The Art of Drumming: South Indian Mrdangam, by Trichv Sankaran.(Foreword by Palghat Mani Iyer). .Basic knowledge on the technique andtheory ot South Indian drumming presented to Western readers. All booksand records are published by the Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada(A.R.C). Send orders to: A.R.C. Publications Distribution, P.O. Box 3044,Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5. Canada, or contact your local book and/or recordshop. Please do not send orders to Unesco.

21

EARLY MAN GOES THROUGH

THE SPEECH BARRIERby Aleksey A. Leontyev

THE ancient Greeks believed that

field mice could read and there¬

fore used to scratch messages onstones asking the mice to keep outof their fields. Legends aboutspeechand sound persist among many peoplesof the world. There are several Rus¬

sian folk tales in which the hero tries

to learn the language of birds andbeasts as well as the languages ofother peoples.

In one such tale, for instance, thehero's parents send him out into theworld "to learn many different: lan¬guages from a wise man so that hemay know what the bird says whenit sings, the horse when it neighsand the sheep when it bleats."

Animals live in the same world of

sounds as man: the sounds, firstly,of inanimate naturethe whistle of

the wind, the thunder of the water¬

fall, the rumble of the avalanche;

the sounds of other living creaturesthe song of birds, the shriek of thehowler monkey, the snarl of the tiger;and the sounds made by man and byman-made things.

i It is the same world of sounds, butyet completely different: animals are,

: as it were, completely separated fromthat world by an impenetrable psy¬chological barrier, a filter which lets

through only certain sounds. They

ALEKSEY A. LEONTYEV, head of the de¬partment of Methods and Psychology at thePushkin Institute of the R ussian language, inMoscow, is a leading Soviet specialist in lin¬guistics and psychology. He is the author of10 books and over 200 papers in these fields,many of which have been widely translated,'and was a contributor to Foundations of

Language Development, a two-volume workpublished under Unesco's auspices in 1975.

hear sounds but heed only thosewhich are in some way connectedin their consciousness with their own

vital needs, those which have signi¬ficance as a signal.

The female nightingale appreciatesthe singing of the male as a signalof the forthcoming satisfaction of itssexual needs, whilst to a prowlingcat the same song conveys quite adifferent messagea meal in theoffing. The roar of a tiger is a dangersignal for all other living creatures.

To an animal, human speech is justanother, more complex signal, ano¬ther element of reflex behaviour.

Even such domesticated, animals asdogs, which sometimes appear tounderstand everything that is saidto them, are in fact responding tothe sound of the words (not to thesense of those words) as research

by the eminent Dutch animal psycho¬logist F. Buytendijk and the Sovietphysiologist Leonid Voronin has shown.

The essential difference between

man, even primitive man, and animalsis that man does not submit passivelyto nature but pits himself against it.He joins forces with others, helpsthem and is helped in return. Heuses things made by others and co¬operates with them in transforminghis environment. A new world thus

emerges, the world of man and ofman's achievements, material andspiritual, the world of human culture.

Sound too forms part of this emer¬gent culture. Primitive man needed

sounds in order to organize collectivelabour. Whereas among ; animalssound is identified with needs, with

man it became identified with activity.

It would be interesting to know

what these first truly human sounds,the primitive speech of Neanderthalman, were like. Early man obviouslyhad the necessary vocal apparatus,but its functions were limited: the

edges of the vocal folds, or true vocalcords, had not yet curved round andthe passage between the larynx andthe oral cavity was narrow, while thesoft palate was further away fromthe back of the larynx than in present-day man.

This means that the speech ofNeanderthal man must have been

accompanied by a lot of inharmo¬nious, piercing, high-pitched noises-whines, screeches, squeaks, etc.

This, however, was not the most

important characteristic of primitivespeech. Soviet anthropologists whohave studied the shape of the cere-'bral cavity in the skulls of our earlyancestors have come to the conclu¬

sion that by Neanderthal times thefronto-temporal region of the cerebralCortex, which is responsible for orga¬nizing external stimuli, images andsignals into a coherent order, wasbecoming highly developed.

This development signified a revo¬lutionary change. Man had hithertosimply allowed sound to break overhim like the waves of a great ocean,distinguishing only certain "splashes"of sound which carried some vital

message for him.

But when sound acquired a socialsignificance, man had an objectivecriterion for comparing different so¬cial sounds with each other: sound

became to some extent independentof the perception of a particular hu¬man being, and acquired an objectivecontent which was the same for all

hearers. Only then could man cap-CONTINUED PAGE 25

22

H* .

Photo 'G Raghu Rai, New Delhi

23

MASKED VOICES AND

SPOKEN SIGNATURES

For centuries the plastic arts depicted the human voice simply asan open mouth, suggesting the spoken word or a cry,as in the head surmounting this pottery vessel from Zaire (left).Below, decorative mask carved in stone and symbolizing tragedy,in the ruins of a Roman theatre at Demre (Turkey). Like theirGreek counterparts, Roman actors wore masks, piercedwith enormous gaping mouths, indicating the natureof the characters they played. Recently a Swiss musicianand painter, Aage Justesen, has succeeded in giving the humanvoice visual form. The vibrations of the voice can be recorded

as a series of irregularly-shaped overlapping surfaceswhich are then photographed. Justesen has usedthis process to record famous contemporary figures pronouncingtheir own name and has given the name "pictonoms" to the resulting"spoken signatures". Below, in descending order, the "pictonoms"of the celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Sherpa Tensing(the Nepalese who reached the summit of Everest withSir Edmund Hillary in 1953) and the Spanish painter Joan Miró.

Photo © Hoa-Qui, Paris

YEHUDI MENUHIN

JOAN MIRO

Photo René Caloz, Paris

24

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22

ture sounds and compare them withother sounds, only then could heput two meaningful sounds together.Thus he acquired the faculty oí speech,the faculty of communicating withothers.

As primitive man's activities be¬came more varied and complex hebegan to acquire a faculty which hehad previously lacked, that of per¬ceiving his own actions as a chainof separate but sequentially linkedoperations. Previously he had toindicate his activities by means ofsingle, unarticulated sounds, but nowthere was no longer anything to pre¬vent him articulating different soundsto compose a complete, coherentlydeveloping sequence.

This again represented a revolu¬tion in the relations between man

and his world, and in his perceptionof the world: sound now became

subjectively linked not with an acti¬vity, but with a particular object usedin that activity. Sounds had becomesymbols.

Words now began to representonly that aspect of things which isof practical utility. They conveyedideas about things themselves, aboutthe whole category of similar objectsand about the variety of functionswhich such objects perform in sociallife. As words developed this newrole, general ideas about objectsbegan to exist independently of theparticular situation in which the objectis being usedconcepts emerged.

The . next and vitally importantdevelopment was the appearance ofconcepts which were not connected

"with any tangible object. Joy andsorrow, time and space, life anddeath have no existence in the world

of material objects, but they existin the world of words and the world

of concepts. Thus, thanks to sounds,

thanks to words, man could now jugglewith the most abstract concepts.

Words were now becoming moreand moo3 numerous, but the human

ability to pronounce different soundswas still restricted. Such a skill

became increasingly necessary aswords could now be lifted from their

immediate context, that of practicalactivity, and needed to be recognized,distinguished, demarcated from other,similar words. How was this to be

done?

One way of varying sounds is bythe pitch of the fundamental tone,but here again the possibilities arelimited: the human vocal apparatus,except for that of a Chaliapine, iscapable of producing sounds withina register of only two octaves, andthe vocal apparatus of primitive man,as we have already seen, was inca

pable of producing pure musicaltones.

A simpler way is to take variationsof timbre-the pitch and quantity ofovertonesi.e. to take as the criterion

for distinguishing between differentsounds the region in which the cha¬racteristic resonance bands determin¬

ing the quality of a given sound areto be found, a region known as theformant of that sound. The formant

does not depend on the fundamentaltone with which a particular soundis uttered. The concomitant noises

occurring along with consonants are'also situated within the limits of par¬ticular regions of the sound spectrum.

This was the way which naturechose in creating human speech.Each of the thousands of languagesin the world has its own system ofspeech sounds. Each of these sys¬tems satisfies at least two conditions:

all the sounds in that system aresufficiently well differentiated in theirplace and manner of articulation.However, only those differences inarticulation which produce adequatedifferentiation of formants, thus en¬

suring that the ear can distinguish thedifferent sounds, are actually used.

The criteria used for differentiatingthe sounds of speech vary widely fromone language to another. In Rus¬sian, sounds are differentiated byplace of articulation (labial, dentaland velar consonants), by whetherthey are voiced or unvoiced, "soft"

or "hard", and by whether or not thenasal cavity is involved in their pro¬nunciation.

There is no distinction between

hard and soft in German, but there

is a distinction between strong andweak. The aspirate-non-aspiratedistinction is important in Hindi. InFori, one of the languages of Papua-New Guinea, none of these previousdistinctions is made and the importantdifferences are the presence or absenceof the nasal glide or the glottal stopat the beginning of a consonant. Thelength of the consonant is also animportant factor.

In the course of his developmentman learned to organize word soundsinto coherent sequences. Why thenshould he not apply the same prin¬ciple to organizing sounds within theword itself? This would obviouslygive him even greater opportunitiesfor distinguishing words and in par¬ticular for inventing new ones in orderto keep pace with the ever-increasingvariety of objects and concepts in theworld around him.

The task of shifting sounds aroundand putting them into different orders

did not, however, prove easy. Even^now it is not easy because of ther

IIo Ïi. "cz

igTO

o3

LISTENING

TO PREHISTORY

Thousands of years old, this stripof reindeer horn (below) is oneof the most ancient musical

instruments yet discovered.Covered with geometric incisionsand painted with red ochre, itwas found in the Dordogneregion of France. It bears a strongresemblance to an instrument

known as a "bull-roarer" (above)once used in Brazil during certainmystic ceremonies. The bull-roarerconsists of a thin board that

the player holds by a cord tiedto one end and whirls over his head.

In whirling, the board also spinsaround its own axis, thus

producing a roaring or wailingsound. Today the bull-roareris simply an easily improvised toy.

25

, need to arrange sounds into basicpronounceable unitssyllables. Forthis reason, a particular sequence ofvowels and consonants is obligatoryin many languagesthe Polynesianlanguages, Japanese and others.

In those languages where thesyllable can end with a consonant,the choice of such final consonants

is always smaller than that of initial

consonants, and in the languagesof South-East Asia-Chinese, Viet¬namese, Burmesethese are almost

exclusively the so-called sonants.The combination of consonants in a

syllable thus always follows a definitearticulatory sequence.

To take an example from the Rus¬sian language, we have the mono¬syllabic word "vdrug", meaning "sud¬denly", but .from the point of viewof articulation the syllables "drvug" or"rdrug" are not possible words.

Another new world also emergedalongside the world of words: thatof socially experienced feelings, ex¬pressed in images specially createdfor that purpose. Primitive art, pri¬mitive sculpture and music were born.

The opinions of scholars differ asto the origins of music. The com¬monest theory is that man began bymimicking the sounds of nature. Butthere are no. clearly distinguishabledifferences of pitch in nature, no cri¬teria, that is to say, that the originatorof the first scale could work by. Whyfor that matter did he need to fix, to

memorize a sound of a particular pitchin order to compare it with others?

The most likely explanation is thatthe first sounds of fixed pitch werespeech sounds which already had ahuman significance. Musicologistswho have studied the music of

present-day peoples with archaicforms of culture, such asthe aboriginesof Tierra del Fuego or the Vedda ofSri Lanka, have found that singing isthe only form of music familiar tothem and that there is a striking simi¬larity in the musical structure oftheir chants, the overwhelming major-

pr

MUSIC FOR SEEING. The interplay of light, leaves, birds and wind¬swept flowers in this drawing explains its title. Summer Sonata. Itwas drawn in 1907 by the Lithuanian painter Mikhail Churlionis (1875-1911) who sought to present the language of musicsonatas, preludesand fuguesin visual terms.

ity of which consist of a sequence ofonly two or three notes, not exceedingthe range of a minor third. Thesongs of peoples with a more highlydeveloped culture such as the Hausaof Africa have a similar recitative

form, a similar sequence of two notesseparated by a minor third.

The ability to distinguish the soundsof music thus developed from theability to distinguish differences oftimbre, and is another physiologicalmechanism peculiar to man. Thisability was systematized and dev¬eloped as music itself developed.Music, however, did not part companyentirely with speech. There are manyknown languages in which differences,of pitch help to distinguish differentwords or even different syllables-Lithuanian and Serbo-Croat, Swedish

and Norwegian, Japanese and Ainu,most of the African languages, manyof the Amerindian languages, Chinese,

Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, the

Austronesian languages and manyof the languages of Papua.

Sound was now broken down into

separate phonemes and syllables, butin the form of stress or accent itcontinued its existence. Accent

may be even or it may be musical,using differences of pitch, or it maytake the form of stress, involvingdifferences of intensity. But thereis not à single language, nor indeeda single word in any language,without accent. Accent is a vestigialfragment of the primitive speechsound, but one which now plays anew function.

Speech is, however, more thanthe sum of the words which composeit. Words flow together into com¬plete utterances and the thing thatbinds them together, which indicatestheir special functions (question,exhortation, exclamation), which

26

shows what elements of the utterance

the speaker considers most impor¬tant, is yet again sound, this timeembodied in the speaker's intona¬tion.

Intonation is another vestigialtrace of primitive, probably evenanimal sound: "dumb" animals, al¬

though they are unable to imitatespeech sounds, can sometimes imi¬tate human intonation quiteaccurately.

The language of man contains yeti' another leftover from its animal an¬

cestry: interjections, those inarticulateutterances which facilitate the ex¬

pression of the simplest emotions-fear, surprise, joy, sorrow, admiration,etc.without the use of words. In¬

terjections are similar, though notalways identical, from one languageto another. To express surprise, aRussian says "Akh!" or "Okh!", aFrenchman "Oh-la-la!", an English¬man "Oh!", a German "Ho Ho!", and

a Papuan of the Asmat tribe "Woo".

Another ancient stratum of sound

in various languages is onomatopoeia.A Russian represents the crow of acock as "kukareku", a German as

"kikiriki" and an Englishman as "cock-a-doodle-doo".

Sound has been socialized, it has

become the common property of allhumanity, but at the same time itremains an essential element of that

which makes each individual human.

Soundthe sound of speechmakesall the wealth of knowledge and socialexperience available to us. Soundthe sound of musicenriches our

emotional world. The sounds of

man are social sounds and the world

of human sound is. a social world.

Underlying the system of sounds inany given language is a particular out¬look on the world which is expressedin that language, in its sounds, itswords and its grammatical forms.To be able to grasp this new, alwaysfresh, always surprising outlook, tosee the ßame world through differenteyes, is a great pleasure which is now

) accessible to more and more people.

Aleksey A. Leontyev

The wind sighing in the trees, ruffling water, beating across vast plainsand rushing through narrow mountain gorges produces some of nature'smost striking and memorable sounds. In the 17th century a GermanJesuit scientist, Athanasius Kircher, widely known for his writings onacoustics and musicology, created this "wind harp", a curiousinstrument whose strings vibrated in the wind to produce unexpectedand mysterious sounds.

WIND, WATERAND TALKING BUSTS

Hero of Alexandria, the Greekmathematician and writer on

mechanical subjects who livedin the 1st century A. D. createdremarkable "water sculptures"which delighted hiscontemporaries. In thisingenious example, the waterfills the box and drives out

the air, causing the birds topipe different notes. The wateris then emptied by means ofa syphon causing the owl toturn towards the birds which

are now silent.

Engraving shows the creation of a sound environment as imaginedby Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the wind harp shown above, in hiswork Phonurgia Nova (1673), a mixture of serious scientific expositionand a kind of science fiction. A system of "acoustic horns" funnelsstreet noises to the "talking busts" inside the houses. A moderncounterpart exists in the U. S. A. today where a young Americancomposer, Maryanne Amacher, creates experimental "musical"compositions out of natural and urban sounds. Such sounds arerelayed live to a concert hall and are blended into spontaneous"musical" performances.

27

Sounds of sound sculptureWe present on these pages some of the remarkable sound sculpturesthat have been created since this new art form began three decades ago.How it evolved and how it is developing today are described in "SoundSculpture" a collection of essays by an international cross sectionof sound sculptors, published by The Aesthetic Research Centreof Canada, in Vancouver, from which these examples are taken(see also box page 21).

Below, Argentine artist Luis Frangella with a section of his soundsculpture "Rain Music II". Frangella visualises as many as 110 suchmodules, each with its series of drums, assembled to form roof-likecanopies. Moving elements above drums transform impact of raindrops or wind movement into drum beats.

SOUNDING RODS shown above with their

creator Harry Bertoia (U.S.A.) are sculpturesof varying metals, thicknesses and heightsdesigned to produce tones bearing no relationshipto the present musical scale.

FLAME ORCHARD, a field of fire modulated by electronicmusic that changes the shape, colour, size or movement ofthe flames. Its designer is Gyorgy Kepes, head of the Centerfor Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology (U. S. A.)

28

MUSICAL CARILLON by artist Tony Price stands on a piece of scrublandnear Santa Fe, New Mexico (U. S. A.). Here it is being played with clappersactivated by ropes. The wind also plays it. Its metal cylinders came froma scrap yard.

I GOURD TREE AND CONEI GONGS with its author the lateHarry Partch (U. S. A.). This artist,who used three phrasesmagicalsounds, visual form and beauty,experienced ritualto describethe core genesis of his art, hasbeen called the founding father ofsound sculpture.

SONOROUS STRUCTURES built

by artist brothers François andBernard Baschet, of France, in¬clude this steel and aluminium

work entitled "French Monument

Born on 57th St". The brothers

are pioneers in the integration ofnew musical sounds with visual

forms.

29

WE all live in an environment

of acoustical vibrations from

which we take what is useful, infor¬mative, and enjoyable for humanexistence and into which we broad¬

cast a variety of sounds that othersmay hear and make use of. Fromthe standpoint of the behaviouralsciences, the phenomena we callsounds can be divided into three

basic categories, the first callednoise, the second music, and thethird speech. I will try to explorethese three realms of sonic expe¬rience here from the somewhat

specialized perspective of psychiatry.

NOISE. Physically, all acousticalphenomena share certain properties.Sounds are produced by movementsand transmitted centrifugally in theform of pressure waves throughvarious media. When such vibra¬

tory events impinge on pressure-sensitive receivers called ears, theyCall forth a variety of perceptions.

As human beings, we are in pos¬session of a remarkably capableauditory system, and while our earsdo not react to vibrations much

above 20,000 cycles per second asdo those of bats, certain insects,and other members of nonhuman

species, what we do with the limitedband of frequencies that we perceiveis truly remarkable.

The three categories of humansoundsnoise, music, and speech-represent not only spheres of differ¬entiation in our perception of sonicevents but also point to differentgroups of specialists who deal withunique aspects of the world ofsounds.

Noise is generally thought to bethat category of sound which has anintrusive or disturbing effect. It tendsto make people wince and complain.They can only tolerate a certainamount of noise before feeling

PETER OSTWALD, American psychiatristand educator, is an authority on acoustics andlinguistics especially as related to problemsof mental health and disease. Professor of

Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, Uni¬versity of California in San Francisco, he isparticularly interested in the psychiatric pro¬blems of refugees, displaced persons andvictims of disaster. His latest book. Commu¬

nication and Human Interaction, will be

published in 1977.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

OF SOUND

by Peter Ostwa/d

tense, irritable, annoyed or actuallyin pain.

This does not mean that all noiseshould be controlled or eliminated.

One of the great advantages of theSoundscape Project inaugurated byMurray Schäfer and his colleaguesin Vancouver is that it shows the

sorts of noises people become adap¬ted to and learn to live with (seearticle page 4). A certain amountof discomfort can also result when

we are suddenly deprived of thecustomary environmental noises.

Physiologists used to think of theear as having a fairly fixed "threshold, "and that a sound could not be per¬ceived until it achieved an intensitycapable of crossing this threshold forhearing. We now know this to bean overly simple idea, one whichmay be true for a very small set ofrelatively pure sounds presentedunder controlled conditions in a

laboratory, but is not applicable tothe majority of noises.

Indeed, every sound of nature isa relatively complex physical event,one which must be considered in.terms of the duration of time from

the onset of vibrations to their cessa¬

tion, plus the exact waveforms,frequencies, and intensities of vibra¬tory components. Not only may theauditory threshold shift in the courseof listening, but even before a soundactually begins, different listenerscan have different threshold levels

depending on their state of arousaland their expectations.

One reason why noises differ intheir effects is that as we focus to

listen, our eardrums may tighten up,requiring less acoustical energy toset the auditory system in motionthan when the drums are relaxed.

Under the condition of auditoryattentiveness our ears are maximallyreceptive, and sounds that are ordi¬narily ignored may then come intoawareness and be labelled as noise.

One can easily observe this reactionin the concert hall when a slightwhisper by someone in the audiencecan be distracting and unpleas¬ant to the attentive music-lover.

Acoustical scientists who useinstruments to measure sound havediscovered that what we call noise

tends to have a high intensitywhenreaching about 120 decibels a soundactually starts to produce painandthat in terms of vibration pattern,noise tends to be spread in a fairlydense and irregular way across thefrequency spectrum, with a timedistribution that is not very predictable.Science also is able to make somefairly reliable statements about howmuch noise is potentially damagingto the ear as well as to the rest of

the human body.

But can the physical study ofsound waves totally define what anoise is? No! Some human fac¬

tors play a very important role inthis. For instance, a listener's ageseems to determine how much andwhat kind of sound can be tolerated.Youngsters in general tolerate muchmore noise than do oldsters, and acymbal crash or vocal shriekenjoyablefor a teenager can drive a middle-aged person quite frantic.

Tastes and styles in listeningchange from generation to genera¬tion. Thus, the engineer with hisbattery of measuring devices capableof giving objective definitions tovarious noises, is still left in the endwith a subjective definition: noise isunwanted sound.

30

With this definition in mind, wecan turn to some observations about

noise which are of psychiatric interest.First of all, there appears to be astrong association between noiseand fear. Throughout the course ofhuman history noise has been dreadedas a source of evil power. Theancients thought that noise hasdeath-dealing properties and .onefinds the idea in primitive folkiore,for example, that it is the noise of aspear's impact which kills its victim.The Assyrians believed in evil deitiescapable of producing noises thatcause earthquakes and storms.

Frightful creatures are often por¬trayed as noisy. One sees thischaracterization not only on thestage where villains shriek and dan¬gerous beasts roar, but also in thebehaviour of people who are on theattack.

Noise has been a tool of warfare

for centuries. Trumpet blasts anddrumbeats incite men to action. The

Romans employed a special cadre oftroops to make noises capable offrightening and confusing the enemy.The invention of chemical explosivesfor warfare strengthened this con¬nexion between noise and offen-

siveness, and during the two worldwars, systematic efforts were madeto find sounds that can kill.

Gala concert!

The technology of destructivesound is paradoxically silent ! Ultra¬sonic beams which can burn and

destroy tissue actually are inaudibleto the human ear. Used mostly formedical work in ultrasound diagnosisand surgery, this form of acousticalenergy does not at the present timepose much of a threat to humankind.

Noise has often been used for

therapeutic purposes. Defective ordamaged organs give off tell-talenoises, and clinicians must know

how to recognize them. Scrapingjoints, heart murmurs, harsh noisesin the chest, gurgling of the intes¬tines and many other bodynoises have been diagnostic signsfor centuries, detected first by theclinicians' unaided ears and later bytechnical means, such as percussionof the chest and auscultation with a

stethoscope. Today's specializedmethods of phonocardiography cangive useful information about heartdisease.

Currently, doctors do not believethat excessive noise is particularlygood for patients. But it should bementioned before we go on to thetwo other categories of sound thatthere have been therapists whofirmly believed in the curative pro¬perties of violent acoustical stimuli,mostly in the days when illness was

thought to be caused by evil spirits"taking possession" of the body.

To aid in exorcising these invaders,healers would scream and yell atpatients, or use instruments to maketerrifying noises. The influence ofMesmer, a doctor of the 1 8th centurywho believed in animal magnetismrather than evil spirits (and, inciden¬tally, was a practising music thera¬pist) has promoted a much quieterand restrained form of psychotherapy.Yet even today, mostly in nonmedicalcircles, a so-called "primal scream"therapy is being promoted. It callsfor noise as part of the healingprocess.

MUSIC. I now want to comment

on music as a distinctive experiencein the world of sound, one that ismore pleasurable than noise butunlike speech conveys no precise orlinguistic meanings. The highly emo¬tional and desirable connotations of

music probably stem from childhood,before communication with words,

when an ebb and flow of rhythmsand vocalizations bound the infant to

his or her mother and song-and-dance was part of socializationthrough play.

Every human being has a residueof ecstatic feelings tied up in memorywith blissful emotions. It can be

tapped when the individual is appro¬priately stimulated, through singing,playing, listening, and participatingin music.

Subsequent life experiences have atendency to emphasize the importanceof music for emotional well-being or,on the contrary, to squelch the child'sinvolvement in this form of sonic

hedonism. Some children develop aspecial relationship to music, an artform available in every human cul¬ture which offers unique opportunitiesfor imagination and self-expression.

Like mathematics, the other greatnonverbal form of thinking thatinterests many children, music occa¬sionally produces a marvel of nature.This is the child prodigyWolfgangAmadeus Mozart or Yehudi Menuhin

for examplewho can set the worldon fire with his extraordinary abilitieseven before reaching adolescence.

Other musically gifted personalitiesemerge into the spotlight of publicacclaim only when they are bigenough and sufficiently independentto forge a career without parentalguidancethe Beatles, for example,whose musical taste and even generalbearing and behaviour have influencedan entire generation of people inmany countries of the world. Devoidof semantics, music is the only lan¬guage that approaches true univer¬sality.

Music-making is a skill that involvesspecific vocal and/or manual move¬ments, and for this reason is much

easier to acquire during the firstsdecade of life. Our mental and*

31

^emotional openness to the learningof new complex acts tends to fadeafter puberty, and this limits thenumber of people who can excel inmusical behaviour.

The psychiatrist thus encounterstwo kinds of problems around music.One has to do with musicians who

cannot tolerate their minority statusand who may suffer from the socialisolation which results from speciali¬zation and excellence. The other

problem has to do with non-musicianswho for various internal and external

reasons cannot participate in thisforemost emotional experience andthus are cut off from one of the richestsources of human culture.

It is interesting from a historicalperspective that Sigmund Freud, thepsychiatrist whose ideas have hadsuch a strong influence during thepast eighty years as a result of hisextraordinary literary skill and forceof character, was in significant waysunmusical.

This may have stemmed in partfrom his early childhood. Freudbecame upset when his little sisterstarted playing the piano and in arather tyrannical way he demandedthat the offending instrument beremoved from the house. Later,when the world-famous psychoanalystwas consulted by musicians, includingGustav Mahler and Bruno Walter, hespent very little time with these menin contrast to the much greater atten¬tion he gave to other patients.

Nor did Freud's most creative

disciple, the psychiatrist O G. Jung,have much understanding for music,as he regretfully confessed in personalcorrespondence. Part of the problemmay stem from the intense curiosityboth of these men of genius displayedtowards dreaming as a means ofpsychological insight.

Not only are dreams mostly visual,but the sound-effects that accom¬

pany them tend to be difficult toremember and even more difficult

to talk about. During sleep, hearingtends to be directed outward into the

external environment, whereas theeyes are closed and able to scan theinner, psychic milieu. Hervey deSaint-Denis, whose dream studieswere published several decadesbefore Freud's, found that differenttunes played while he was asleepcaused him to dream about women

he had danced with to these tunes.

The composer Igor Stravinsky wasable to observe how dreaming helpedhis creativity. One night beforegoing to bed he was disturbed by acertain tonal interval which keptcoming to mind, and he dreamt aboutit as an elastic substance stretched

between two notes. Along with thenotes he visualized testicle-like eggs,warm and protected by nests. Thisvision apparently reassured the com¬poser, and after waking up he felt'more comfortable about his musical

ideas and whatever else had been

troubling him.

I once treated a patient who, afterdreaming about a theme from Bach'sSaint Matthew Passion, suddenlycame to the realization that he felt

jealous enough to "crucify" his bestfriend.

SPEECH. Finally we turn to speech,the third major component of man'sworld of sound, one we value mostfor reasoning and for the communi¬cation of explicit, factual meanings.

Like music, speech begins ininfancy. The mother orfather fol¬lows the child's gaze to what interestshim or her and teaches the child what

to pay attention to and what to ignore.Objects of focussed attention aregiven namese.g., Mama, milk.Daddy, toy, bed, etc.and as thebaby grows older he or she repeatsthe names, or verbal labels, withincreasing exactness.

Connectives, adjectives, action-words, and adverbs that the child

hears in the environment of speechsounds also become part of his orher verbal repertoire, partly due toan innate or biological propensitywhich the human brain has for makingsense, and partly because the childwants to share the communicative

network of a family and society.Most children achieve considerable

facility in understanding and using'speech before they are ten years old.

A secondary process of literaliza-tion takes place during this firstdecade of living in most societies,especially those which considerschools to be essential for the educa¬

tion of children and where high valueis placed on reading and writing.

Unfortunately the acquisition ofliterary skills creates conflicts betweenthe ear and the eye. No sound isever heard or spoken in exactly thesame way twice, and during theyears that the child masters language,he or she also comes to enjoy themarvellously dynamic and flowingquality of speech and learns todepend on the ever-changing nuancesand emotional inflections of the voice.

The speech medium consists ofhisses and buzzes articulated quiterapidly, in clusters of about five mor¬phemes per second. To representthis information nonacoustically withvisual symbols requires an alphabet,and no alphabet has yet been devisedthat accurately and reliably translatesall speech sounds.

Thus school-children are made to

learn a fairly arbitrary system of let¬ters, so arbitrary in fact that asGeorge Bernard Shaw pointed out,the word "fish" could also be spelled"ghoti" (gh as in laugh, o as in women,and ti as in nation).

In psychiatry, we see many casual¬ties of this kind of education. First

of all there are "dyslexic" childrenwhose brains simply rebel at thebasic notions of written language sothat while they speak perfectly well,

they write in reverse or in typicallydisorganized ways, and have troublereading.

Another group of children showsundue concern for verbal disconti¬

nuities (e.g., spaces between wordsplay a significant role in writing butdon't exist in speech). Some beginto stammer or stutter over words that

ordinarily pose no problems. Dys-fluent youngsters are often singledout for ridicule, punishment, or extraschoolwork. Finally there are chil¬dren who withdraw from speechsituations because of a sense of

frustration or the fear of humiliation.

I have tried to set down a fewobservations about the role of sound

in human affairs, dividing the acou¬stical world roughly ¡ntc three com¬ponents music, and speech.There is, of course, a considerableoverlap. Thus certain musical com¬positions when heard for the firsttime may seem noisy, and speechcan enter the realm of music throughsong.

Electronics has given science thetools to study acoustical behaviourdirectly, by recording sound so itcan be repeated over and over, andby video-recording the body move¬ments and facial expressions duringsound-making and silent behaviour.Much of the knowledge gained fromtoday's research probably cannot bepreserved in books and journals, aswas done in past centuries, but hasto be transmitted through directexperience.

I have been impressed in my acti¬vities as a psychotherapist with theextraordinary versatility that patientsat all agesnot only children andadolescentsdisplay in their use andabuse of sound. Therapeutic com¬munication consists in many ways ofattempts to clarify meaning andreduce anxiety through the analysisof what people say, how they feelthemselves to be in an environment

of social rhythms, and what they doto each other.

Whether such knowledge will affectthe search for truth and how it can

influence belief is impossible to pre¬dict, but my hope is that the humanear will continue to become increa¬

singly sophisticated in perceiving thewarnings of noise, the beauty ofmusic, and the meaningfulness ofspeech.

Peter Ostwald

32

BOOKSHELF

RECENT UNESCO BOOKS

History of Mankind: Culturaland Scientific Development: Vol.5, The Nineteenth Century, 1775-1905, edited by Charles Morazé.Latest (4-part) volume in a uniqueglobal history, produced underUnesco's auspices, of man's cul¬tural and scientific developmentfrom Prehistory to the Atom Age.Published by George Allen andUnwin, London, 1976. (Parts 1and 2, £ 15; Parts 3 and 4 £ 15each).

The Health of the Oceans, byEdward D. Goldberg. An analysisof data on marine pollution. 1976,172 pp. (28 F).

Annual Summary of Informa¬tion on Natural Disasters, No. 9,1974. Detailed information on

earthquakes, tsunamis (seismic sea-waves) volcanic eruptions, land¬slides and avalanches. 1976,99pp.(18 F).

Cross-cultural Broadcasting, byEduardo Contreras, James Larson,John K. Mayok and Peter Spain.A study on the political, cultural,linguistic and psychological impli¬cations of cross-cultural broad¬

casting. 1976, 49 pp. (6 F).

Cultural Policy in the UnitedRepublic of Cameroon, by J. C.Bahoken and Engelbert Atangana.1976, 91 pp. (12 F); CulturalPolicy in the Republic of Zaire,a study prepared under the direc¬tion of Dr. Bokonga Ekanga Botom-bele, 1976, 119 pp. (14 F). (Bothpublished in Unesco's "Studies andDocuments on Cultural Policies"

series).

UNICEF greeting cardsFor more than 25 years sales of

UNICEF greeting cards have helped toprovide food, medicines and schoolsupplies for needy children in over100 countries. This year's cards,offering a wide selection rangingfrom eight designs in mini format to alarge size Collector's Edition, are nowavailable at UNICEF sales pointsthroughout the world. A trilingual(English, French, Spanish) UNICEFdesk calendar for 1977 on the theme

"The Rights of the Child" is alsoavailable. This gay winter sceneoneof UNICEF'S broadly internationaldesigns for 1976is by the German(Fed. Rep.) artist M. Beisner.

I I LU GS

Culture and a new world economic order

A SPECIAL ISSUE

OF UNESCO'S QUARTERLY CULTURES

An international round table on intellectual and cultural co-operation anda new world economic order was held in Paris last summer, as we reportedin our last issue. Unesco's quarterly Cultures (*) has just published a special200-page issue entirely devoted to this event.

Meeting at Unesco headquarters on the initiative of leading internationalnon-governmental organizations, 34 statesmen, scientists, writers and artistsfrom all parts of the world set out, under the chairmanship of Mr. Jeand'Ormesson of the Académie Française, to formulate the cultural conditions,moral attitudes and political and economic principles that should form thebasis of a new world economic order. In welcoming the participants, theDirector-General of Unesco, Mr. Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, declared: "Far frombeing the expression of self-seeking demands, to strive for a new world orderis to wager boldly and wholeheartedly on man, on his will to survive andto live a fuller life... Within this context, the efforts undertaken by Unesco, asby all the other organizations that make up the United Nations system, linkupover and above technical procedureswith the longing for a new huma¬nism, free from exclusiveness or restriction, in which the explosive truth of theDogon proverb that tells us that Man is the grain of the universe wouldbe revealed."

In its last issue the Unesco Courier presented extracts from contributionsby two of those taking part in the round table, Trygve Bratteli of Norway andSamir Amin of Egypt. Cultures now publishes the ensemble of the textsfrom the round table, presented in five major sections:

The challenge of the 20th century: Philip Noel-Baker (U.K., Nobel laureate),Alfred Kastler (France, Nobel laureate) and Sean. MacBride (Ireland, Nobellaureate) outline the major problems of the 20th century: the arms race, thepopulation explosion, environmental pollution.

Proposals for a new order: Willy Brandt (German Fed. Rep., Nobel laureate),Trygve Bratteli (Norway) and Samir Amin (Egypt) describe the major economicand political principles that could serve as models for the creation of a worldorder designed to promote more harmonious international relations.

Cultural identity and the new order: Each people's growing awareness ofits cultural identity is a striking feature of the 20th century. OswaldoGuayasamin (Ecuador); Joseph Kotsokoane (Lesotho), Prem Kirpal (India) andPaolo Grassi (Italy) seek to reconcile traditional cultural values with the moder¬nization of society..

The new order in culture, society and economic life: Nine texts by econo¬mists, sociologists and scientists describe the many cultural aspects of a neweconomic order.

The vision of Man in a new world: Social, economic and cultural changesconfront artists and writers with a new vision of Man. Here, artists, writers,theatre directors and urbanists trace the major trends in the evolution ofartistic expression in the 20th century.

(*) Cultures (Vol. III. N° 4. 1976) Annual subscription 75 Fr. francs: Each issue 22 Fr. francs.

Over 50 issues

of the ' Unesco Courier'

on cassettes

Since June 1972 each issue of the

Spanish edition of the "Unesco Courier"has been recorded on cassettes by ElLibro Parlante (The Speaking Book) anofficial body based in Buenos Aires andconnected with the Ministry of SocialWelfare of the Argentine Republic. Therecordings appear regularly each monthand so far over 50 numbers of the "Cou¬

rier" have been published, each on twocassettes. Each issue is loaned free to

blind "listener-readers" whose numbers

are constantly increasing. For furtherinformation write to: El Libra Parlante,Avenida de Mayo 869, 1084 BuenosAires, Argentina.

Africacu It,

a Unesco

TV programmeUnesco has produced a TV programme

based on the culture of the Ashanti

people of Ghana. "Africacult" showshow a traditional culture can continue

to exist alongside a modern economy,stresses the importance of culture asa factor of economic and social devel¬

opment and demonstrates that culturalidentity can be a powerful force for unity.Written and directed by Philip Gaunt,this 16 mm. 18 min: colour film is avail¬

able in English, French, Spanish andRussian language versions. Furtherinformation from the Press and Audio-Visual Information Division, Unesco,Place de Fontenoy, 75700 Paris.

33

Letters to the editor

OPEN LETTER FROM

NAPLES SCHOOLCHILDREN

Sir,

In the_ February 1976 issue of the"Unesco Courier" we read the letter pre¬sented to the Director-General of Unesco

by 50 children of the primary school atEtterbeek, near Brussels, when he visited

their school.

We share their ideas and their fears.

And so we want to send the followingletter to these children at Etterbeek:

"We ask the same questions as you:Why is there social injustice? Why arethere wars? Why- is there economicdisorder and lack of freedom? It is

perhaps because war already exists withinus, in the constant duality of good andevil which so often leads us to give into the worst instincts that degrade humannature. But we should try to resist thisenemy within us, in order to understandour neighbours better and help themto develop all that is best in themselves.

And we should join together in buildinga different society where the noblestideals become realities in a new order

based on respect for mankind and esteemfor human dignity.

"We, the children of the A. Scarlatti

middle school at Vico Equense, are yourfriends'. We greet you in the name of allour classmates."

Anna Lisa, Maria Grazia,Colomba Staiano, Patricia Como,

Benedetto Esposito,Antonino Caccioppoli, Andrea Celentano,

Domenico Esposito, Renata CuentoVico Equense, Naples, Italy

REBIRTH OF PHILAE

Sir,

After reading your issue dealing withPhilae (November 1974) it was with greatinterest and wonder that I, with a groupassociated with The Goulburn College ofAdvanced Education, Goulburn, NewSouth Wales, Australia, visited the Philae

monuments as part of a recent MiddleEast tour.

We were able to view this spectacularoperation of the salvage of the monu¬ments. The fact that we were actuallyon the coffer dam wall to see the expertiseand technology being used to transferand eventually restore these master¬pieces of architecture is something Ipersonally will never forget.

Norma Gowland

Bradfordville

New South Wales, Australia

RESEARCH DIVORCED

FROM REALITY

Sir.

I recently came across DragoljubNajman's article on conservatism in theworld's universities (your June 1975issue). Mr. Najman's comments are par¬ticularly relevant to developing countrieslike India.

His question "How many of those whoteach in schools of engineering have everbeen in charge of factory workshops orbuilding sites?" strikes me as distur¬bingly poignant.

In India, teaching jobs serve merely ascomfortable sinecures for those who

either cannot or do not wish to joinindustry. Consequently, research (ifany) being carried out is quite divorcedfrom reality. Moreover, members of theteaching faculties are easily lured bypublications in foreign journals. Whatthey overlook is that Western countrieshave reached a stage of technologicaldevelopment where they can indulge inresearch topics which are for us a luxurywe can ill afford.

Politicians' and statesmen's exhorta¬

tions for science geared to. the needs ofsociety may have become hackneyedthrough over-use. But this need is stillof over-riding importance, even thoughour university teachers tend not to per¬ceive it.

I hope the "Unesco Courier" will conti¬nue to highlight issues of special rele¬vance to developing countries.

P. R. PatnajkResearch Scholar

Indian Institute of TechnologyMadras, India

APOSTLE

OF THE INDIANS

Sir,

Congratulations on having publishedtwo articles on Father Bartolomé de Las

Casas, the "Apostle of the Indians"(June 1975 issue). You did an admirable

job in presenting to a wide public themost interesting aspects of the life ofthis great pioneer in the struggle forhuman rights.

The attitude of Bartolomé de Las Ca¬

sas in America before his first conver¬

sion was virtually unknown. Now thanksto the "Unesco Courier" it has been

described in many languages to readersall over the world. From this issue

scholars and students can renew and

deepen their understanding of the Indianand white colonization in America.

Congratulations on all you haveachieved in the "Courier" over the

years helping to raise our cultural levelby teaching us to think and find thetruth.

Jorge López FuentesHavana, Cuba

LEARNING TO COPE

WITH STRESS

Sir,

Dr. Ivan S. Khorol's extremely topicalarticle about stress ("Unesco Courier"

October 1975) raises questions of con¬cern to everyone and above all of courseto specialists.

The scientific and technological revo¬lution, urbanization and the growingtempo of living are placing increasinglyheavy intellectual and emotional loadson people. Given these conditions, me¬thods of reinforcing the nervous systemmust be sought.

The problem is a complex one, requir¬ing the co-ordinated efforts of clinicians,biochemists, physiologists, pathophysio¬logists, pharmacologists and sociolo¬gists' in all countries. It may be neces¬sary to set up a single centre to

co-ordinate these efforts and research,

perhaps in the form of an InternationalStress Institue.

A. Luk

Moscow, U.S.S.R.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA'S

CITY OF HUMOUR

Sir,

The article about Gabrovo, Bulgaria's"capital of humour" and its Scottishcounterpart, Aberdeen, in your issue onthe world of humour (April 1976) wasfirst rate. We too in Czechoslovakia

have our town of humour: its name is-

Kocourkov.

Although it is a fictitious place, manybooks have been written about the

town and its inhabitants, and anecdotes

about the people of Kocourkov havebeen told throughout Czechoslovakiafor at least a century. The doings andquips of its people which amused ourgrandparents still set our childrenchuckling. ,

This town . where clocks move back¬

wards and the people get up to all sortsof tricks has figured in books and illu¬strations and was the subject of a filmmade in 1937.

On one occasion the people of Kocour¬kov welcomed the king with a red carpet.But it was too short and so as the kingwalked along they rolled it ' up behindhim, meaning to lay it out again when hereached the end. In their haste, how¬

ever, they entangled him in the carpetand rolled him in the mud. They alsobuilt a town hall but forgot the windows.So they let people bore holes for win¬dows wherever they chose, until the build¬ing looked like a giant Gruyère cheese.

Kocourkov, Czechoslovakia's imaginarycounterpart to Gabrovo, transmits goodhumour and optimism and symbolizeshonest self-criticism.

Vladimir Kriz

. Jihlava, Czechoslovakia

CHILDREN'S CONTEST

FOR UNESCO'S 30 YEARS

Sir.'

A regular reader of the "Unesco Cou¬rier" for over 20 years, I have recentlybeen organizing a competition on Unescofor primary and secondary schoolchildrenin Villepinte. The contest has beenlaunched as part of our town's culturalactivities programme and is intended tomark the 30th anniversary of Unesco'sfoundation.

Working in pairs, the children will beasked to compile dossiers on Unesco

and its activities using documentarymaterial and adding their own descrip¬tions and commentaries.

The competition opened on 1 October1976 and the closing date is 31 Decem¬ber. The winning entry will be pub¬lished in a booklet which we distribute

quarterly to all our local clubs and asso¬ciations.

C. A. LeroyPresident,

Municipal Cultural CommitteeVillepinte, France

34

Constructiveeducation for

children

W.D. Wall. Ph.D.

Harrap ^^The Unesco Press

An outstanding survey

of major themesin constructive education

Intended for' the parent, administrator, guidance worker and youthleader as well as the educator and child psychologist, this first volumeof a Unesco study by W. D. Wall concentrates on educational problemsof the first ten years of a child's life, including:

mental hygiene and education

the role of the family

home, school and community services

pre-school education

the primary school and its problems etc.

"... a book of scholarship which will become an educational classic."(The Times Educational Supplement).

A companion volume. Constructive Education for Adolescents,is to be published soon.

349 pages

Co-published with George G. Harrap & Co

54 French francs (Cloth)68 French francs (Hardbound)

Ltd., London

Where to renew your subscriptionand place your order for other Unesco publicationsOrder from any bookseller or write direct to theNational Distributor in your country. (See listbelow; names of distributors in countries not

listed, along with subscription rates in localcurrency, will be supplied on request.)

AUSTRALIA. Publications: Educational Supplies Pty.Ltd.. P.O. Box 33. Brookvale. 2100. NSW: Periodicals:Dominie Pty.. Limited. Box 33. Post Office, Brookvale2100. NSW. Sub-agent: United Nations Associationof Australia. Victorian Division 5th floor, 134-136Flinders St., Melbourne (Victoria). 3000. - AUSTRIA.Verlag Georg Fromme & Co.. Arbeitergasse 1-7, 1051.Vienna. - BELGIUM. "Unesco Courier" Dutch edition

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35

MOSQUITOS

HEARING ORGANHere photographed with a high-poweredmicroscope is the hearing organ through whicha mosquito picks up vibrations around it.A female mosquito attracts males by thehigh-pitched sound of her wings.(See also pages 18-19).

Phototo <: Studio Natiris, Cébazat. France