Nois(e)Scape

Feb 2016

Submitted by sam Krizan

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us, when we listen to it we find it fascinating.

…unleash your heart to the diabolical vroom-vroom and giant radials,

For the dance you lead,

On the white roads of the world…

Our soundscape is the component of the acoustic environment that we are able to perceive. Soundscape can be separated from the broader term acoustic environment which is the combination of all the acoustic resources within a given area - natural sounds and human-caused sounds – all as modified by the environment. The use of soundscape depends on varied disciplines which range from urban design, to wildlife ecology, to making sound-art. The splitting of sound from its source, from the maker of the sound, is comparable to, one might imagine, having schizophrenia. Sounds get torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound is no longer linked just to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape.

…listen to the Sounds Go Round; the Sounds Go Round… 

Acoustic ecology is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between living things and their environment. Acoustic ecology, as an academic study, started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University, and resulted in the World Soundscape Project. After this pioneering undertaking, interest grew to attract the interests of researchers and artists from all over the world. In 1993, the members of an international acoustic ecology community formed the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology. While some have taken inspiration from Schafer's writings, there has been robust divergence from the initial ideas. Widespread networks of artists explore the world through sound recordings, wild and/or mediated, and among the expanded expressions of acoustic ecology is increased attention being given to the impacts of road work, changing cityscapes, and airport construction; capturing everything around us from whatever source. The broadening of bioacoustics, the use of sounds made by animals, includes the subjective and objective responses of animals to human noise, and the effects of human noise on animals, with ocean noise pollution getting lots of attention. 

skree skree skree whut grrr ahoo woo aoo whut whut grrrr skree scree scree uhh
whee sluh grrr huuh whut
hmmm drrruh arrf urrff 

When sound become an abstraction, and data from Nature, which is usually quite silent, becomes less dominant, the city in its entire noise production becomes an organism. In language it can take a form not unlike this:

tooot screeech clinnck ruun buumm klaanggh wheeugh scruugh phew bluuh
hee hee haha ahh wot boboboboom
snaarg yee yeeeh cring 

There were four forms of onomatopoeia being advocated by early

20th.C artists: direct, indirect, integral, and abstract. The first of these is the [usual] onomatopoeia seen in typical poetry, e.g. boom, splash, tweet. They convey the most realistic translation of sound into language. Indirect onomatopoeia expressed the subjective responses to external conditions. Integral onomatopoeia was the introduction of any and every sound irrespective of its similarity to significant words. This meant that any collection of alphabetic letters could represent a sound. The final form of onomatopoeia does not reference external sounds or movements like the earlier versions of onomatopoeia. Rather, they tried to capture the internal motions of the soul. The literature promoted a kind of hyper-conciseness. It was dubbed essential and synthetic lyricism. The former refers to a paring down of any and all superfluous objects while the latter expresses an unnatural compactness of the language not used elsewhere, as this portion of a [Futurist] poem illustrates;

…thicknesses sounds smells molecular whirlwinds chains nets and channels of analogies concurrences and synchronisms for my friends poets painters and musicians zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Within the context of noise, Solitude, a rarity which requires resources and determination, becomes a specialization; it can be after all, Silence. All the Rest Is Noise.

ZANG-TUMB
TUMB-TUMB
TUUUUUM 

This article was inspired by the Performance, Music For Natural History, at the Royal BC Museum, which sought to acoustically replicate sounds found in Nature underscoring the diminishing connections our culture has to the biosphere.