The Memory of Sound

Preserving the Sonic Past

Seán Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134684762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Radio

This book explores the connections between sound and memory across all electronic media, with a particular focus on radio. Street explores our capacity to remember through sound and how we can help ourselves preserve a sense of self through the continuity of memory. In so doing, he analyzes how the brain is triggered by the memory of programs, songs, and individual sounds. He then examines the growing importance of sound archives, community radio and current research using GPS technology for the history of place, as well as the potential for developing strategies to aid Alzheimer's and dementia patients through audio memory.

1
Introduction

Echoes and Shadows

An English Child in the 1950s

The first sound is the roar of a huge rocket engine, deep, full of terrifying power, danger and possibility, evincing an image of something pulling itself almost painfully away from the earth’s gravitational hold. There is an amber glow above me now, in September 1953. I am in the giant spaceship as it flies into the future of 1965, where Jet Morgan and his team are beginning Operation Luna in the first series of Charles Chilton’s Journey Into Space, the last BBC radio series to win the ratings battle over television.

I am seven years old, listening on a pre-war valve radio (a Cossor 484 Table model from 1937, now old and relegated from downstairs, but still capable of booming sonorously enough when aerial and earth are set up correctly) in the rear bedroom of my grandmother’s Portsmouth terraced house on the south coast of England. I know there are pictures on the wall, out of sight in the near darkness, images of nineteenth-century rural landscapes that once belonged to my great-grandfather on his tenant farm in central Hampshire. My pictures tonight, though, are made by sound, as I lift off with Jet, Lemmy, Mitch and Doc towards the eerie twilight world of unknown space.

The memory of that radio, the golden light from its dial reflected on the ceiling over my head, opens other peripheral sounds. One road away there is a railway line. If I were to look out of the window now, I would see the silhouette of a footbridge across the line. Lying here as the radio story unfolds, I hear the sounds of trains shunting, the crash and clatter of wagons being pushed backwards and forwards seemingly arbitrarily, without purpose. Then I hear the soft complaining of my grandmother’s bantam hens, disturbed by the noises on the line. I remember now that although we are in an urban street, my grandmother was born a farm girl from Liss, and she never lost the habit of keeping animals.

The sounds are layered; below me and under the immediate musique concréte of trains, hens and radio, there is the low murmur of adult voices coming from the living room downstairs. My father is talking with my grandmother and my aunt and uncle. I know they are smoking, because they always do: Player’s Navy Cut. My grandfather is there, but I do not hear his voice. He has said very little since returning from Passchendaele in 1917, almost forty years before. But I remember now that before World War I shell-shocked him into silence, his trade was as a French polisher, working for a Portsmouth firm that sold grand pianos. I remember he always gave me half a crown. I remember the stubble on his cheek.

The next sound that emerges from memory is projected by a widening circle of experience and stimulated suggestion borne of recollection around the house. In the morning, there will be the sound of slow hooves, the iron wheels of an open cart. The greengrocer, Mr Madgewick, will come slowly down the road with his seemingly always tired horse, pausing outside every house to sell. My grandmother will walk down the curved, pastel-coloured, crazily paved front garden path and buy vegetables for the weekend. Then on Saturday afternoon, my Uncle Les will sit intently by the living room radio—the family’s new Ultra ‘Coronation Twin’, (in honour of the year) model R786–as Imperial Echoes announces Sports Report, as he poises himself, roll-up cigarette on his lip, pen in hand, football coupon on the table, and listens for the escape from labouring in the dockyard that never came.

This is as far as I take this sound journey into my childhood for now, but I could go further. The important point is that all of this comes back when I hear the opening moments of a radio programme that seized my imagination as a young boy. Sound—like smell—is a significant trigger to memory. In this book I will explore the connections between sound—in particular radio—and recollection. How do we remember? What do we remember? Do I really have an auditory memory of those family sounds from the 1950s, or am I remembering them by association? Have I unconsciously applied a form of the ancient art of memory, a form of audio memory palace as originally conceived by the Greek poet Simonides sometime in the fifth or sixth century BC? If so, does that make the memory less valid? We shall interrogate this later in the book. In the meantime, the question remains: What is it about sound and its links with emotion that is both memorable and recoverable through our historic imagination? Why should it be that it is more accessible mentally than most moving images? Are we in danger of damaging long-term memory by the ability we now possess to access information within seconds on a ‘need-to-know’ basis via the Internet? These are important questions, because in an ageing society where we increasing treat large numbers of patients suffering from various forms of memory loss, the ability to learn or absorb a fact, feeling or theory, and then retain it mentally, is a significant issue.

I am writing here about radio, but my subject is sound in the broadest sense, so I will move laterally through various media in this writing; radio, though, is a starting point because it is so much about memory. As the Australian poet and radio producer Michael Ladd has so well articulated:

It’s a paradox; radio draws on sound archives, but its own sound is always disappearing. Radio’s audio memories return, only to be erased again. Non-verbal sounds and the spoken word are always being born and always dying. They exist in space, in the ear, in the perceiving mind, and then, fairly quickly, just in memory, or, if they have been recorded, lie dormant in the recording medium. They don’t live unless they are being heard. While you can play back a track on a CD, or via a computer download, broadcast radio is a medium of continuous disappearance. It is simultaneous in the community but ephemeral, giving multiple listeners a unique experience of the passing moment. I was writing and publishing poetry before I began my radio career. Time passing, ephemera, were always key concerns of my writing for the page, so sound, and particularly the transmission of it by radio waves, was a natural place for me to investigate further.¹

Given changes in recreational habits amongst the young, and the demise of the idea of a ‘Children’s Hour’ or traditional listening form for infants and children, (something that many previous generations remember fondly), we should ask, what will be the long-term effect on memory of instantly sourcing information and entertainment through computers and electronic games? My memory of Journey Into Space will be, I suspect, typical of a generation of youthful listeners to 1950s BBC Radio. Others will recall tuning in ‘under the bedclothes’ to Radio Luxembourg or pirate radio. A pre-war generation could still recall into great old age the theme song to The Ovaltineys Concert Party from an earlier incarnation of Radio Luxembourg, which may give this advertising jingle the greatest longevity of any British-known brand. We may argue that given a society in which short-term attention does not necessarily mean that the capacity to store and preserve information is lesser, memory and its evolution will adjust in ways appropriate to that developing society. Equally, by considering nationalities and societies where oral traditions and traditional storytelling remain active, we may come to sense that as a modern society we are losing more than we are gaining.

The original context of hearing the sound is very important, however, because sound memory unlocks other senses. In doing research for this book, responses to questions about audio memory of radio in listeners born in the 1940s produced a shared, common recollection among British audiences associated with Sunday lunchtimes and afternoons. The playing of the tune ‘With a Song in My Heart’ created in many British listeners of a certain age a sense memory of the smell of gravy and roast meat cooking. Why? Because in the years immediately following the Second World War, and well into the 1950s, the BBC Light Programme broadcast ‘Two Way Family Favourites’, in which the BBC linked with British Forces broadcasters— usually in Germany—between 12pm and 1.30pm on Sundays, and the theme tune of the programme was ‘With a Song in My Heart’. It may be true—as some respondents have said—that smell and taste are in some cases even more evocative than sound, (Proust would probably agree), but frequently it is sound that provides the first trigger. Likewise, many people of the same immediate post-war generation (remember radio was intensely important to this group, just before the advent of television) recalled clear mental pictures of their family front rooms (the best room for many UK families, often only used for special occasions and Sunday afternoons) linked to the sound of the radio’s broadcast of variety programmes such as The Clitheroe Kid, which starred the child impersonator Jimmie Clitheroe, The Billy Cotton Band Show, and other comedy programmes from the era of British variety, always broadcast in the same time slot, in the early afternoon of a British Sunday. Beyond Our Ken, starring Kenneth Horne, and its sequel, Round the Horne, were favourite memories, as was the comedy series The Navy Lark, one of the highest audience rating programmes from the ‘golden age’ of post-war UK radio. Poignantly, one respondent remembered listening with the family to these programmes and then going out of the house to spend the rest of the afternoon with school friends. For him, the sound of laughter from the radio audience contrasted sharply with his memory of the quietness of an English summer Sunday in the mid 1950s. The sound world of childhood included the radio, but the broadcasts lay at the centre of a sonic pool, and the ripples of memory spread out from that centre: programme scheduling, family custom and the comforting habit of stability, however illusory, fuelled the post-war British appetite for a sound world of entertainment.

Melodies Sung and Spoken

I want to examine the tools we use to plant sound into the human mind; rhythm, repetition and rhyme in poetry, song and oratory. Poets and playwrights have understood this from the time of Homer, as well as the itinerant balladeers and travelling storytellers who projected their images into the mind of audiences before there was a printed word. Shakespeare and his contemporaries used oral devices with great skill. As Hamlet hatches his plot to play on the conscience of Claudius through drama, he says:

I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I’ll know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil; and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

—[Hamlet: Act II, scene 2]

The subtle blending of rhythms follows the pace of the human heart; much of Shakespeare’s text moves in pentameters that mirror the natural average speed at which a human being walks. It is an aid to the actor remembering the lines, and at the same time it places the ideas into the brain of the listener in a memorable way. Likewise, we can observe here the device of the rhyming couplet to end the speech—and in this case, also the scene, as Hamlet exits, full of new purpose. This works in several ways; firstly, there is a sense of finality in the rhyme; delivered well, it will earn the actor a round of applause from the audience, because it provokes a response. It also tells us that this part of our experience is over, like the punchline in a joke. Even within the short span of a rhyming couplet, there is much to learn about sound and recollection; the end of the second line of the couplet is a sound memory of the end of the first, an echo. Shakespeare used the trick sparingly; he knew when to employ rhyme, and when not. Rhyming couplets and a strong rhythm are aids to learning, but without due care they can sink into doggerel. Hence, when we reach the player king’s performance in the same play, we have the rhyme scheme and rhythm of a much lesser writer than the Bard, although it is still he that contrives this:

I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break,
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity:
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks to the tree;
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be …

—[Ibid.: Act III, scene 1]

Rhythm and rhyme play an important role in our ability to remember offstage too. My father-in-law lived to the age of 97. Towards the end of his long life, he suffered from vascular dementia. There were times when he found it hard to recall his own family, or what had happened a few minutes earlier, but until the day he died he could recite from memory Prince Hal’s speech from Agincourt in Henry V, and Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, which he had learned as a schoolboy almost a lifetime earlier. He grew up in a time when learning by rote—be it poetry or multiplication tables— was a norm in school. The act of writing—as well as reading or learning a poem—can be critically influenced and affected by sound and structure in a similar way. Memory may be fleeting, but a shape can hold it, as the poet Katrina Porteous has said:

For me a poem begins and ends in memory. The sound-patterning from which a poem is composed is a way of fixing a thought or feeling in the memory, a stay against loss. So poetry orders something in sound and in time, in order that it might be revisited, like a place. For me, writing a poem does not feel like an act of innovation but like one of remembering, of listening, of being as true as possible to something which already exists: a translation of emotional resonance into physical sound and architecture.²

Rhythm and rhyme were and are powerful reference points for our daily audio memory, speaking, or thinking important numbers and passwords in certain rhythms. If the rhythm is wrong, often the number will not come. It can be subliminal, and often is more easily recalled for that very reason. Radio is memorable because it too works subliminally on the senses as we lead our lives, move about our homes or drive our cars. We hear a tune once on a music station and may be impelled to buy the record or download the song, because it has made a positive memorable impression on our mind, often through rhythm, rhyme and repetition, combined with a capturable melody. It may linger unwontedly too, the song we cannot bear, but will not leave us alone: ‘Earworms’. There is melody in the spoken word too. The question remains: How do we listen? Just what is the connection between listening and memory?

Saving Sounds

In his introduction to the film sound theorist Michel Chion’s book, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, the great film sound designer Walter Murch recalls the acquisition of his first tape recorder as a boy. He remembers one evening after school, coming home and turning on the radio to hear sounds that were, in their strangeness, like nothing he’d experienced outside his own imagination. As fast as he could, he set up his tape recorder, and began to capture this strange ‘music’:

It turned out to be the Premier Panorama de Musique Concrète, a record by the French composers, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and the incomplete tape of it became a sort of Bible of Sound for me. Or rather, Rosetta stone, because the vibrations chiseled into its iron oxide were mysteriously significant and heiroglyphs of a language that I did not yet understand but whose voice nonetheless spoke to me compellingly.

—[Chion: xiv]

Whether or not we have access to the actual audio memory of the recording ourselves, we have here Murch’s human memory of its effect on him at the time, and its long-term significance in his subsequent life and work. Surely one of the key phrases in that extract is the phrase ‘a language that I did not yet understand…’. If we are imaginatively captured by a sound before we understand it, we remember it; that experience of wonder before understanding is in itself the beginning of true understanding. If we understand through imaginative engagement, we are much more likely to remember: passion persuades. For me it was the experience of hearing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the first time as a young boy. I had no idea what it was, it seemed to belong to no musical laws or conventions I knew, and yet I was excited, terrified and amazed by it simultaneously. Later, when I learned its story—on and offstage—it retained the power to shock and astound. To this day, it still does.

The tape recorder that preserved Walter Murch’s experience was itself a memory machine, born out of a long and continuing line of devices by which we preserve the past mechanically and electronically, part of the dream to make at least a part of ourselves immortal. As far back as 1888, Edison had said: ‘The phonograph knows more about us than we know ourselves’. [Milner: 35] Yet at its inception, the device—like the wireless that was yet to come—was conceived as a utilitarian instrument, its purpose being mostly limited to such tasks as teaching speech and language, recording the famous or dictating. It was also used as a record (the origin of the word in audio terms) of a precise event, and was therefore extremely useful as witness to te...