Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu
We are, for the most part, oblivious to the subtle concatenations of sound accompanying our everyday lives – that gentle resonant thud as The Oldie lands on the doormat, the elastic snap of its plastic wrapper giving way under pressure, the papery creak of its pages being turned between finger and thumb.
And inevitably so, for it would be a distraction to attend too closely to the soundtrack of the daily routine of washing and dressing, breakfasting, setting out to work and the hubbub of the office.
Still, paying attention to those background sounds can be rewarding. Professor of Acoustics Trevor Cox advocates taking a regular ‘soundwalk’ – a two-hour silent stroll focusing intensely on the sounds encountered.
On one such expedition along London’s busy Euston Road, besides the roar of the traffic, he tuned in variously to an unexpected hush in the piazza outside the British Library, a diverse range of footwear sounds (the click-clack of high heels; the rubbery resonance of trainers) and the squelching of an under-inflated bicycle tyre. He was particularly struck at how the railway stations on his route sounded so different: ‘The throb of idling diesel trains at King’s Cross seemed much more authentic than [electrified] St Pancras.’
Becoming sensitised to random sounds in this way could, one might suppose, add an extra dimension to life, like becoming fluent in a previously unknown language.
‘No two raindrops sound the same,’ claims Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his seminal The Soundscape – a treasure trove of the possibilities of what can be heard by attentive listening.
And each type of tree, he suggests, also has its own distinctive voice – contrasting the rustling of the beech as its boughs move in the breeze with the sob and moan of the fir tree, the whistling of the holly, and the hissing of the ash.
So, too, if more obviously, the clamour of the natural world. Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens early one May morning, Victor Hugo describes being mesmerised by a symphony of sounds: ‘The twittering of the linnets in the sycamore, the triumphal sparrows, the woodpeckers creeping up the chestnuts gently tapping away’ along with ‘the fondling tones from their nests and the palpitations of the wind’.
Or Tolstoy, in a well-known passage from Anna Karenina, inspired by his experience of keeping bees on his estate, has Levin attending to his apiary: ‘His ears filled now with the busy hum of the working bees flying off, then the blaring of the lazy drone and the exciting buzz of those standing guard protecting their property.’
For Schafer, the specificity of rural sounds can be particularly evocative. He recalls, from his childhood growing up on a farm, the ‘almost imperceptible’ change in tone of the butter churn as, after half an hour, the slopping cream gradually became solidified. In winter, there was ‘the heavy stamping of snow boots in the front hall’ and, in the silent intense cold of the night, the sudden crack of a nail springing from a wooden board.
He is also illuminating about what he calls ‘sacred noise’, ambient sounds indicative of the numinous in ways that we may only dimly appreciate. The
ringing of church bells, he points out, not only defines the parish as the area circumscribed by their range but is also ‘centripetal’, unifying the community, drawing man and God together. The chiming of the church clock on the hour and its quarters was if anything more significant still, delineating ‘with merciless precision’ the regularities of the working day, an inescapable reminder of time passing and human mortality.
The sense of the numinous is favoured, too, by the reverberatory acoustics of the soaring internal spaces of the great cathedrals, whose amplification of ordinary speech compels the congregation into silence or hushed whispers. Historically, that resonance favoured a musical liturgy over the spoken word – hence Gregorian chant where every syllable is sung at a different pitch and the awesome grandeur of that most powerful of all instruments, the organ.
The reverberatory thud of The Oldie’s arrival may not be in the same league, but the physics of its acoustics – and the rewards of paying attention to them – are undoubtedly, if unexpectedly, related.
‘The chiming of the church clock was an inescapable reminder of human mortality’