The Sound of a Room

Memory and the Auditory Presence of Place

Seán Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000197938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Schlafmedizin

What does a place sound like – and how does the sound of place affect our perceptions, experiences, and memories? The Sound of a Room takes a poetic and philosophical approach to exploring these questions, providing a thoughtful investigation of the sonic aesthetics of our lived environments. Moving through a series of location-based case studies, the author uses his own field recordings as the jumping-off point to consider the underlying questions of how sonic environments interact with our ideas of self, sense of creativity, and memories. Advocating an awareness born of deep listening, this book offers practical and poetic insights for researchers, practitioners, and students of sound.

1

In One Circle Bound

Room as a Sonic Event

To start with the image of a particular room: a perfect circle, the walls, three floors of books reaching up to a dome with a central skylight. Everything built on the principle of circularity. The floor area containing work tables radiating out from a central pillar, topped by an Art Deco shell-design lamp, and punctuated by free-standing bookcases. Each table seats eight people, and there are power points for computers. The sound of the room: a seemingly contradictory stillness, the sort of stillness one equates with a confined space, and yet this room is vast. It holds a silence that presses on the ears and dares sound to happen. Any sound that clings to us as we enter this huge space seems to evaporate like water. The storm of the world’s noise turns back at the door; the atmosphere of the room repels it. This is the Picton Reading Room, a part of the Central Library on William Brown Street, Liverpool, England, in what is known as ‘The Knowledge Quarter’. Next door on one side, up the road, is the Walker Art Gallery, while on the other, down the hill, is the World Museum. Across the cobbled street is the vast St George’s Hall, below it a garden, and across a piazza to the left, a theatre. When this area was developed, in 1875, the chairman of the library and museum Sir James Picton, laid the foundation for this room, designed by Cornelius Sherlock, and modelled on the Reading Room in the British Museum in London. It was completed in 1879, and was the first electrically illuminated library in the United Kingdom.

I sit and listen to the room. It seems the right place to begin a journey into poetic acoustics, the sonic character of Place, a room full of apparent near silence that rewards concentrated attention with minute and subtle clues. It is around noon on a hot weekday in July. Although there are about eighty work stations here, today, I count only ten people sitting reading, working on laptops, or – like me – scribbling in notebooks. During term time, this place would be full of students on most days, particularly as exam time approaches. Yet the volume of occupancy does not seem to change the sonic dynamic of the place. However many people there are here at any one time, the room has the ability to absorb their sound. Likewise, because of the nature of the purpose of the space, human presence does not seem to impact greatly on sound level.

As I write these words, I am also recording on a small digital machine that accompanies me everywhere, like a camera. It will be my companion on this journey into space, and I plan to use it from time to time as I am using it today, to compare my experience with what it hears, with what places tell me of themselves as I listen to them in situ. Being very small, it can be unobtrusive, and I sometimes augment the built-in microphones with a lapel mic, to gain a new perspective. Because I use it all the time, I can be rather remiss in indexing the content, which means that on the memory card are hundreds of files, identified by no more than numbers. Sometimes, when I scroll through, choosing one at random, I find myself playing a sonic guessing game: where on earth is that? When did I do that? What is going on here? It is rather like browsing through a set of old photographs – I have no context, and sometimes not even a memory. A sound recording, however, is different to a snapshot; it is linear, it moves through time, and as it does so, the voice of the place gradually reminds me of where or who it is. There may be human voices, an event… but the first thing that speaks is the place itself, through its acoustics, the hard or soft surfaces, the dry exterior or the liquid space of a great church. It is better than a home movie, because in a movie I would be outside the event, looking in, observing my own experience, whereas with sound, I am reimmersed in the moment, living it again through the time it took to happen in the first place. It is that slow reveal of identification that is an essential part of the experience of a recording, setting it in the memory. It is also central to this writing.

A visual analogy might be George Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, experiments in observation which he carried out in Place Saint-Sulpice in October 1974. Perec’s book has fascinated me for some years, printing as it does the being of an overcast Parisian day in 1974 onto time: the everyday, the humdrum, what happens when nothing happens. Sitting behind a café window, Perec wrote what he saw, exactly, with forensic attention to detail. Much of the space in which he worked through that weekend may be taken in casually and quickly, almost at a glance. ‘A great number’, wrote Perec,

if not the majority, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered. My intention… was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.

(Perec, p. 3)

To live in the moment like this is to develop an acute sense of being alive, and there can be no more laudable intention for any writer at the start of a quest than to invoke such an aim. Eyes and ears work in partnership, as we shall see and hear. Active listening is a learned skill as well as for some, an inborn instinct. It is to be nurtured, and the rewards can be like switching on a hearing aid to a deaf person. See what was there all the time!? I want to train my ears and mind to listen in the same way Perec looked. A key part of my study will be an invitation to the colleagues in radio and sound recording to reflect on their work, and share their thoughts and memories on the role of an acoustical space as an active partner and participant. This direct witness will partner my own. I want to ask: why does the place sound like this? What has shaped it towards this sonic character? What is its effect on us when we enter it? How does active listening change our perception of where we are?

For the purpose of this study, a room is more than an inhabited physical space, it is a field of consciousness, a sonic energy field with ourselves at its centre. This writing is about missed sounds, but it is also an investigation into how sounds govern our sense of place, how we contribute to them and how they partner us in terms of perception, image and the sound of ourselves. A field, a park or a sea shore is thus a room, as much as the library in which I am writing now. Central to the aural character of where we are at any single moment is how a space changes the seed of a sound through reverberation and resonance, as the reed of an oboe is changed by the body of the instrument into which it sings. Linda-Ruth Salter takes us back to first principles in summary:

Sound is caused by a vibration in air that propagates in the form of audible mechanical waves of pressure and displacement. When these waves pass through air in an enclosed space, they reflect off the surfaces of the enclosed space. These surfaces include not only the six surfaces of a typical rectangular enclosure, but also the surfaces of whatever is in that enclosure, including objects and people. In a non-enclosed space, these waves reflect off the physical elements in the space, including trees, people, hills, water, and so on. Each type and shape of reflective surface absorbs, reflects and diffuses sound waves in different ways. The human ear hears, and the human mind decodes the differences, determining whether the space is open or enclosed; the volume of the enclosure; the materials of the enclosure; the number, materials, and shapes of the contents; and the placement and direction of objects and reflective surfaces in the space. We can “read” a space with our ears.

(Salter, pp. 776–7)

The worlds that this book seeks to explore are wide-ranging, from our daily places – our domestic rooms, car spaces and public transport, to the houses of the sacred, performance halls and the strange twilight environments of archaeoacoustics. These are the physical realities of the sound of rooms in all their principal manifestations. Yet this writing also seeks to explore certain non-physical sonic rooms, spaces where sound creates its own spaces within the mind and the memory, the sound rooms we enter when we listen to music, or hear a radio play, or even occupy the sonic space within a poem. We are ourselves, rooms of sound, alone in the crowd as we stand in the arena, absorbed in a favourite band, or at the cinema, enveloped in surround sound, while at the same moment, we each experience our own version of the experience we are hearing, according to where we are sitting or standing within the room, and according to preference. Some may find the movie sound too loud; others may not even notice the volume. How our personal room is tuned, dictates what our sonic preferences may be. We inhabit communal sound, but we digest it on a personal basis. Barry Truax refers to the ‘acoustic community’:

The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants… Therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged.

(Truax, p. 58)

Subsequent chapters will particularise the sounds of environments that surround us as we live; we cannot avoid being somewhere. At various steps, the transcription of recorded sound will bring us back to the character of the place, its voice and the fact that it is at one and the same time a constructed thing and an ongoing and subtly changing sounding-board and echo-chamber. Sonic horizons can be seductive; the immediacy of a place may draw our attention from the context within which the place itself exists. Walking into my book-lined dining room, I am aware of a changing ambience, different from the hall outside. Yet my recorder reminds me that outside this room, is the room of the street on which this house is situated; it changes as the day changes – early morning stillness, birdsong into rush hour traffic, and so on through the stations of the day. It is a room within a room, and at the centre is me, with my microphone. We live in series, and a room does not require walls to enclose us.

At the heart of this is a mystery. The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor wrote:

Imagine extracting all foreign sound from a building… imagine what it would be like with nothing left, nothing there to touch anything else. The question arises: does the building still have a sound?… I think each one emits a kind of tone. They have sounds that aren’t caused by friction. I’ve no idea what they are. Maybe it’s the wind or something. But you only really feel there’s something else there when you enter a space that’s soundproofed.

(Zumthor, p. 31)

I am comforted to know that an architect of Zumthor’s standing also senses the inherent characteristic voices of spaces, but cannot define them. Like him, I would place the sound of apparently empty space at the beginning of all things: ‘Listen! Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere’ (ibid., p. 29). What matters most of all in the unravelling of this is not that it occurs, but that we should be aware of it. By invoking the works of another great architect, we begin to understand that our ability to listen, so long taken for granted, is vital to our placement in the world, placing us always at the very hub of everything that makes up our experience. Juhani Pallasmaa has suggested:

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return sounds back to our ears… It is thought-provoking that the mental loss of the sense of centre in the contemporary world could be attributed, at least in part, to the disappearance of the integrity of the audible world.

(Pallasmaa, p. 53)

In the twenty-first century, certain words have been reappropriated with fresh nuances of meaning; among these words are ‘wireless’ (formerly an archaic generic term for radio transmission, or actually a noun for the object of reception itself, and sometimes both. For instance, we listen to wireless transmissions on a wireless). Similarly, the word ‘stream’ has become familiar as a term denoting the continuous act of transmitting or receiving through the internet a programme or other electroacoustic communication. When Albert Bregman wrote his seminal book Auditory Scene Analysis in 1990, he employed ‘stream’ as a word to demonstrate the multiplicity of sonic information we are open to absorbing at any one time:

A physical happening (and correspondingly its mental representation) can incorporate more than one sound, just as a visual object can have more than one region. A series of footsteps, for instance, can form a single experienced event, despite the fact that each footstep is a separate sound. A soprano singing with piano accompaniment is also hear as a coherent happening, despite being composed of distinct sounds (notes). Furthermore, the singer and piano together form a perceptual entity – the “performance” – that is distinct from other sounds that are occurring. Therefore, our mental representations of acoustic events can be multifold in a way that the mere word “sound” does not suggest.

(Bregman, p. 10)

Bregman also reserves the word ‘stream’ for a perceptual representation, with the physical cause described by the phrase ‘acoustic event’ or the word ‘sound’ (ibid.). While acknowledging both the elegance and logic of this thinking, I am seeking here to focus on a prevailing ambience within a place itself, so would wish to employ Bregman’s ‘stream’ as an implicit term rather than becoming embroiled in a confusion of changing meaning due to the passage of time and changes in technological vocabulary.

To return to the here and now, the sound of the library is as much a stream of consciousness as a stream of auditory evidence. In today’s room, the actual fabric of the walls is for the most part assumed, obscured as it is by books, fifteen layers of bookshelves following the circumference of the architecture. Silence. And yet as I look up and round, attempting – and failing before I start – to estimate the sheer number of volumes that surround me, I gain the sense of a place that through the projection of the imagination may in fact be one of the noisiest rooms I have ever sat in. Every book has a voice, the expression of the thoughts of its author, with the potential for speaking directly to me. These truly are whispering galleries, and cumulatively, the whispers are deafening. It is also a room of murmuring ghosts, a chamber where past and present touch, because where I sit, generations before me have sat: academics, poets, students, revolutionaries and local people who simply wanted to look at the day’s papers, to find a place away from the worries of life and to make sense of it all. There is a fellowship held in this circular space, a companionable presence across time. Who knows what other journeys began here? In the process of researching this book, one of my favourite statements came from the composer, musician and sound artist Nathaniel Mann:

For me there is an endless pleasure to be found in deducing just how ‘a thing might ring,’ and in knowing that there might be something about the way each object or structure was built, assembled, formed, wrought, grown or even broken that lets it have a second (secret) life, as a sound making instrument.¹

To my ears – and I suspect, to Nathan’s – that might equally be a hollowed-out stone or the Taj Mahal.

I continue to listen. Silence here of course is a relative thing, like a visual interpretation of white; Wittgenstein gives us the analogy:

If I say a piece of paper is pure white and then place snow next to it and it appears grey, in normal surroundings an...