Sounds Wild and Broken, page 23
The blackcap chose a perch at the edge of a natural bowl, a partial enclosure for sound. Limestone buttresses extend on either side of the cave mouth, ribs of stone that have resisted erosion. The cliff overhangs here too, forming a high partial roof. The cave itself is a modest indentation in the limestone wall. Its forecourt is a high-walled limestone yard. This enclosed shape likely gave the cave its modern name, Geißenklösterle, the “goat-chapel,” where herders could pen their livestock. The view to the valley is through a gap in the buttresses. No doubt this natural enclosure afforded protection for ice age inhabitants from wind and unwelcome visitors. It also created a space in which sound blooms. The space cups each note of the blackcap’s song, causing them to linger and ripen.
The blackcap’s notes reflect back to me from the limestone walls, the reflections arriving about fifteen milliseconds after the sound that flowed directly from beak to ear. Because the reflections arrive so soon, my brain perceives them as part of the original sound, not as separate echoes. The reflections give a feeling of great clarity and richness. The architects and acoustic engineers who design modern recital halls pay special attention to what they term these “early reflections.” Large baffles above and to the side of the stage shoot early reflections straight to the audience, giving a feeling of intimacy and verve even in larger spaces. A few natural spaces do the same, notably Red Rocks Amphitheater at the foot of the Rocky Mountains near Denver. There, sedimentary rocks from the Paleozoic form a bowl and high side walls that combine to produce a spectacular performance space, a larger version of this cave entrance in Germany. The walls of “shoebox” recital halls produce a similar effect, bouncing sound from the players seated at one end of the narrow box all the way down the length of the room. Geißenklösterle cave and its buttresses act as reflectors for the blackcap’s song and, perhaps, long ago, the notes of a swan or mammoth flute.
Enclosures also add reverberation and thus a sense of depth and richness to sound, as every bathroom singer knows. The polished hard ceramic tiles of bathroom walls are excellent reflectors of sound, and so each sung note ricochets over and over. These reflections meld into a reverberation that prolongs the life of each note. The effect at the cave mouth is subtler than a bathroom, maybe half a second of slight reverberation. But this is enough to add a touch of tonal gold to the bird’s voice.
Half an hour’s brisk walk south of Geißenklösterle is another cave, Hohle Fels, “the hollow rock.” The cave entrance is a dark maw at the base of the slope, wide and high enough to admit a small truck. In the past, farmers stored hay inside, and during the Second World War, military vehicles were stashed here. Now the entrance is protected by a metal gate hung with signs naming visiting hours. In front, the narrow river meanders across a meadow glowing with thousands of dandelion blooms. The cave entrance is at the bottom of a smooth-faced limestone cliff, a wall about six stories tall.
Inside the cave mouth, beyond the cabinets of maps and artifacts that line the entrance, a passageway heads straight back into the hillside. As I walk, the walls and ceiling close in. The smell of damp limestone dust and algae displace the aromas of trees and meadows. After a minute’s walk, the cave floor drops precipitously, and a metal walkway carries me on. Below my feet is a pit about four meters deep, illuminated by scattered spotlights, its walls bermed with sandbags. This is the site of an archaeological dig underway since the 1970s. The bags protect the unexcavated layers below, ready for work to recommence later in the year.
I look down from my perch on the metal walkway. Propped on the sandbags are laminated paper signs naming and dating the cultures associated with the sediment “horizons” or layers. The deepest, “Neanderthal, 55,000-65,000 vor heute [before the present]”; then, rising along the side wall of the cave, “Aurignacian, 32,000-42,500”; “Gravettian, 28,000-32,000”; and “Magdalenian, 13,000.” The slow accretion of sediment has captured and preserved artifacts from sixty-five thousand years of domestic life. First Neanderthals, then the changing culture of anatomically modern humans in the ice age. Fragments of memory, layered into the earth. In one of the the deepest, oldest layers of human presence, the Aurignacian, lay the female figurine and the griffon vulture flute, now on view at the Blaubeuren Museum ten minutes’ drive from here.
My feet on steel mesh, I hover over the excavation, gazing on this record of human life. I surprisingly experience not awe or temporal disorientation—feelings that accompany much of my reading about the Paleolithic or other ancient times—but a sense of calm. In this taste of humanity’s long prehistory, some deep-buried anxiety unknots. My life is almost entirely embedded in the tempo of modernity, living by the minute, focused on hours and sometimes years, living in houses that will likely fall apart this century, using electronic tools that will not see out the decade. Our culture is on track to remake itself and much of the Earth by century’s end. Almost nothing draws our senses, imaginations, and aspirations further than a few years. And when we do think on the scale of thousands of years, it is hard to imagine any continuity of the human story between now and this distant future. The past, too, is alien, out of reach of the senses and thus bodily understanding. The physical presence of tens of millennia of humanity tells my body: there is another, longer narrative.
The vast majority of our species’ time on Earth was experienced by people with bodies and brains just like ours, living and sometimes thriving through their relationships with one another and the land. The form of these relationships differed on different continents, but whether in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, or later, the Americas, the record speaks of persistence across spans of time incommensurate with my experience of the everyday. This long life as hunters, gatherers, and agriculturalists is part of our identity and inheritance, now almost entirely obscured by the technologies and preoccupations of the moment. For a few moments, it feels good to breathe the scents of old Earth, and I feel at home. This is not nostalgia. I don’t hanker for a return to an illusory Eden. Instead, the pit recalibrates within me the sense of what it means to be human. In these long, almost forgotten millennia lies much of our history. A fragment of truth about identity is revealed here. I’d known this, of course, but our species’ past seemed abstract, a disembodied set of ideas. This pit, this exhumation of time, spoke not only to ideas but to the lived, embodied experience of our species.
I linger, savoring the sight of so much human life condensed into one place, then move deeper into the cave. From the walls of this tunnel, the clang of my feet on the metal gratings echoes, a harsh and confined sound. But there’s a softening up ahead, a spaciousness that intrigues my ears. I duck at the passageway’s end, pass through a constriction, and, treading on dust and gravel, enter the cave floor beyond the excavation.
I lift my head and gasp. I’ve stepped into a vast cavern. A few spotlights directed at the walls suggest its size, but it is the sound of water drops that drives home the point. They fall from the high ceiling onto puddles and wet stone. Each tok of their landings fills the space, quiet snaps that reverberate for more than a second. Even the scuffs and crunches of my feet on the cave floor are magnified. The cave sounds like a Romanesque church or a large unadorned rotunda.
There’s no singing bird here to demonstrate how whistled notes behave, and so I use my voice and hands to explore sound. I clap and the impulse comes back to me as a stretched decay, loud at first, then tapering over a second or two. Later, when I deliver the same clap outside, it is a lash of sound, gone in an instant. In the cave, I whistle and each note remains strong for a second or two after my breath stills. The effect is sonic animacy, as if the cave imparts afterlife to sound.
This drawn-out reverberation is the acoustic signature of capacious, hard-walled spaces like cathedrals, empty factories, or huge cisterns. The walls reflect sound, sustaining reverberation as sound bounces from one side of the enclosed space to another. But even a good sound reflector like stone drains some energy from sound waves. In a voluminous space, sound has long airborne intervals where it flows with little attenuation between its draining collisions with walls. A large volume thus creates a sound that lingers in the air as waves travel from one distant wall to another, sometimes for many seconds, especially if the space lacks sound-absorbing material like heavy curtains. Hohle Fels cave has a volume of six thousand square meters, like a big church.
This cave’s reverberation is much more drawn out than that of Geißenklösterle. As a consequence, very rapid and nuanced sounds are quickly blurred. If I’m just a few meters away from other visitors, their speech turns to a velvety smear. This would be a terrible place to give a lecture. Likewise, a complex violin piece would sound disastrous here, the swiftly changing notes would melt into one another. But simpler melodies sound gorgeous. I’ve never heard my whistling lips sound so good. Outside the cave, in the meadow, my hand claps and whistles are like thin, dry bread. Inside, they fatten and expand into luscious slabs of cake. Flute music would be gorgeous here.
In parts of the cave, reverberation of my voice hits sweet spots and resonates, amplifying frequencies of sound whose wavelength matches the size of the space. Especially in the smaller side chambers, the lowest frequencies of my voice balloon. This resonance is a general property of sound in enclosed spaces; from wineglasses, to bathrooms, to halls, the dimensions of each space boost particular sound frequencies. In the cave, this resonance combines with echoes to create an expansive feeling, an acoustic luminosity.
Paleolithic people surely chose the Hohle Fels and Geißenklösterle caves for protection from the elements, not for their sonic qualities. But alongside their utility as living quarters, both spaces have rich acoustics. In the afternoon that I spent in Hohle Fels, I watched dozens of visitors come and go from the large inner cavern. On entering, every adult immediately hushed their voice to a whisper. Whoops and whistles came from the children, playful salvos of sound. These are places that immediately assert their sonic exceptionality.
The first known musical instruments were made in places well matched to their sounds. Or so it seems to modern ears. Today many live performances and recordings of flutes use electronics to add reverberation, placing the sound within a simulated cave or chamber. Did the reverberant qualities of caves somehow catalyze the invention of the first flutes? I imagine a child sucking marrow from a bird bone and delighting in how the sound bloomed within the cave. Skillful parents might then have taken up familiar tools and experimented. Bird-bone flutes perhaps then planted the idea for the sophisticated tool work needed to create a mammoth-ivory instrument.
These are speculations. All we know for sure is that rich acoustics of space and the first evidence of instrumental music co-occur in the same cave. This coincidence resolves into something more like a pattern when we also consider evidence from other Paleozoic caves in southern Europe.
In the 1980s in France, musicologists and archaeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois used their voices to explore caves with notable Paleolithic wall paintings. By singing simple notes and whistling, they mapped their perceptions of the caves’ acoustics. They found that paintings were often located in places that were particularly resonant. Animal paintings were common in resonant chambers and in places along the walls that produced strong reverberation. As they crawled through narrow tunnels, they discovered painted red dots exactly located in the most resonant places. The entrances to these tunnels were also marked with paintings. Resonant recesses in walls were especially heavily ornamented.
In a 2017 study, a dozen acousticians, archaeologists, and musicians measured the sonic qualities of cave interiors in northern Spain. The team, led by acoustic scientist Bruno Fazenda, used speakers, computers, and microphone arrays to measure the behavior of precisely calibrated tones within the cave. The caves they studied contain wall art spanning much of the Paleolithic, dating from about forty thousand years to fifteen thousand years ago. The art includes handprints, abstract points and lines, and a bestiary of Paleolithic animals including birds, fish, horses, bovids, reindeer, bear, ibex, cetaceans, and humanlike figures. From hundreds of standardized measurements, the team found that painted red dots and lines, the oldest wall markings, are associated with parts of the cave where low frequencies resonate and sonic clarity is high due to modest reverberation. These would have been excellent places for speech and more complex forms of music, not muddied by excessive reverberation. Animal paintings and handprints were also likely to be in places where clarity is high and overall reverberation is low but with a good low-frequency response. These are the qualities that we seek now in modern performance spaces.
The convergence of cave visual art and sonic qualities suggests that people were noticing and responding to caves as acoustic spaces, not only as shelters and painting canvases. If so, then like other animals whose sounds are molded to the acoustic shapes of their homes—treehoppers whose sounds match their host plant, birds singing in mountain winds, whales calling through the deep ocean channel—the form of human music is partly a product of its sonic context.
The first musical instruments were well suited to their homes. Whether by design or happy coincidence, the bone and ivory flutes fit the acoustics of limestone caves in which they were crafted.
The flutes fit the cave, not the reverse. There is no evidence that Paleolithic people changed the shape of caves to adjust their sonic qualities. Like almost all other species, human sound making found its home within the constraints and opportunities offered by preexisting spaces. But this one-way relationship would change. We are one of the few known species that deliberately sculpt sound-making spaces. Prairie mole crickets are our companions in this innovation. In this threatened species of the North American prairies, every courting male builds a bulbous underground chamber leading to a funnel that opens to the aboveground world. The males sit in the chamber and make repeated croaks by rubbing their wings together. They face away from the funnel, directing sound into the resonant chamber and out through the funnel to the world. Males gather in clusters on the prairie and blast their combined sound to the sky, an arthropod fanfare sung through trumpets made of sculpted prairie soil. Males are flightless, but winged females home in on the sound. In remnant patches of prairie habitat where this species lives, the chorus is sometimes loud enough to be heard four hundred meters away.
Humans are mole crickets on a magnificent scale. We build not small burrows but concert halls, worship spaces, lecture rooms, and headphones, each tuned to the particular needs of the sound they contain. This ability to adjust the spaces in which we make sound has kindled a creative triangle: human musical composition, the form of musical instruments, and the space in which we make and hear music. Within this triad—composition, sound making, space—no one member is dominant. Instead, which one leads or follows has shifted over time. The story starts in the Paleolithic but is alive and accelerating in our modern concert halls, earbuds, and streaming online music services.
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Flames and swirls of color by muralist Eli Sudbrack dance across the building’s brick facade. Down the street, light reflected from the East River gleams from the glass and metal of new condominium towers. Most other buildings in the neighborhood are under scaffolding or have already been upgraded to expensive offices and retail. This building, though, is one of the survivors of Brooklyn’s raze-and-build boom, an architectural holdout from the neighborhood’s industrial past. White block print runs above the new mural’s bright colors: National Sawdust Co. In the 1930s, wood was pulverized and bagged here, sent off to sop blood in butcher’s shops, soak up barroom spills, and pack stored blocks of ice. The sawyers’ blades and blowers long gone, National Sawdust is now a performance venue and, through its residencies and programs, a catalyst for new music. I’ve come here to hear how the ancient relationship between acoustic space and music is taking novel forms.
It’s September 2019, opening night of National Sawdust’s fifth season. There are a dozen performances on the program, crossing genres from chamber to experimental electronic music, solo voice to large choruses, and classical piano to contemporary instrumentalists. But it is not just the diverse program that gives the evening its power. The room, too, takes on a different sonic form for each performer, transforming from spacious, to warmly intimate, to tight and loud. We are experiencing the launch of a new way of shaping sound within the space.
Above us hangs an array of sixteen microphones. On walls and ceiling, 102 speakers wrap the room, some visible, others out of sight. This system—installed weeks before by an audio company, Meyer Sound, sculpts the sound of the venue, taking the ancient creative triad of musicians, acoustic space, and instruments into its next iteration.
This sound system is not merely amplifying sound, although for music created on laptops or for very quiet instruments, that is part of its role. The system allows performers and sound designers to decide how sound will behave inside the venue, opening new possibilities for composition and performance. Following the touch of buttons on an electronic tablet, the performance space can now sound like a cave, recital hall, or a space so far unimagined. Walls move in and out. Sound shifts its points of origin in the room. Reverberation expands, then contracts.
As I listen to the concert, I’m carried from one place to another. The air glows as soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell’s voice lingers above us. We’re in a sun-warmed atrium, looking out on an expansive vista. When the Young People’s Chorus of New York City surround us, lining the walls, each voice is clear and distinct, yet they also merge and swell. Walls seem to shiver with their rising, hopeful energies. Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang are on stage, but somehow we’re inside the sound of guitar, percussion, and electronic samples, immersed in the knotted, turbulent flow of their stories. The melodies of flutist Elena Pinderhughes live partly on her lips and in her flute, then they fly across the room, a bird’s motion briefly come to life as sound. Music from the National Sawdust ensemble comes directly from their instruments, but lingers in the air for a fraction of a second, as it does in a classical recital hall. Then a short announcement and the room has the clarity of a university lecture theater.
