Sounds Wild and Broken, page 37
In the sensory violations and dysphoria of the city, there is a door to empathic understanding of other species, “our relatives under the waves” and those terrestrial species who carry the sea only as memories in the fluids of their cells.
Submerged in sonic violence, I am whale, my entire body thrumming night and day with unwanted vibrations, energies alien to my flesh. My ancestors and their long experience of sound did not prepare me for this.
In a soundscape dominated by the noise of a single species, I am forest, stripped of the diversity of voices that took millions of years to evolve. I am now deep in the grief of extinction.
Reveling in the songs of the few remaining species, I am blackbird, a wild, broken singer. I feel myself propelled by life’s joyful, improvisational imperative to find a voice in this strange new world.
The sounds of the city not only plunge us more deeply into our humanity. They are, if we attend to their effects, an immersion in bodily, sensory kinship with all speaking, listening beings. But unlike these other beings, we humans have a measure of control. We can choose a different sonic future. The whales, forests, and birds cannot.
PART VI
Listening
In Community
A tone clear and warm as sunlight sounds from the giant bronze bell. The ring contains no hint of clang or jangle, just a single frequency, sweetened and fattened by overtones, pitched a few notes below middle C, exactly at the midpoint of the range of human speech. Although I stand two meters away from the bell, the sound seems to emerge from within me, a calming, centering glow that spreads from chest to extremities, then flows outward into my perception of the park in which I stand.
The barrel-shaped bell, a meter tall and more than half a meter wide at its mouth, is suspended from the domed roof of a pagoda. A horizontal wooden beam hangs from chains next to the bell. A child stands on tiptoe and reaches up to haul on a rope dangling from the beam. She pulls back, then releases, and the wooden striker swings onto the bell. The sound rings again. Pure and steady toned, with a slight pulsation, a swelling of amplitude that comes at a pace just slower than a calm heartbeat.
The sound is persimmon fruit in the mouth. The fading of red to orange in a sunset sky. The transience of all beings. So the Japanese literary tradition tells us, from the fourteenth-century epic The Tale of the Heike, to Masaoka Shiki’s haiku, to the song lyrics of poet and teacher Ukō Nakamura. The sound of the temple bell, the bonshō, nourishes, lifts, and places us in right relationship.
This bell was made by the late Japanese Living National Treasure Masahiko Katori. Like other recipients of the honorific, Katori’s artistry and craftsmanship are considered part of Japan’s Important Intangible Cultural Properties, a government-sponsored system honoring practitioners of significant artisanal and artistic practices. Unlike other national schemes that identify and honor buildings, landscapes, or museum-worthy artifacts, these programs seek to elevate and protect not durable physical objects but the knowledge carried by people.
Like cultural knowledge, sound is unseen and ephemeral. When artisans die, the wisdom carried in their muscles and nerves goes with them. Likewise, a sound wave carries the meaning and memory imparted by its maker but soon disappears. If the artisan teaches others, knowledge passes on and is modified by students’ interpretations and innovations. A sound wave, too, transmits its energies, sometimes only as the heat of friction as the wave dissipates, but sometimes when it is heard by living beings and changes them. The ring of the bell lives on in my memory, held in electrical gradients and a tracery of molecules, all sustained by the furnace of my metabolism. In writing these words, the bell’s vibrations flow to the page and then into your mind and body. The sound of a single strike of wood on bronze lives on in human bodies, just as the cultural knowledge of Masahiko Katori is alive in the knowledge and work of contemporary Japanese artisans.
The sound of this particular bell—the Peace Bell in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park—has, like the intangible cultural properties of Katori’s work, received official government recognition. Along with other bells in the park, the ringing of this bell is Soundscape 76 of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan, a government program established to find and honor significant soundscapes, and to encourage deeper listening. This program, launched in 1996, is a rare example of government recognition of the value of soundscapes. The polity’s typical relationship to ambient sound is through its attempts to regulate noise pollution, an important role but one focused on sound as a negative experience.
Globally, policies designed to preserve and honor valuable national or regional treasures are almost entirely focused on visible, tangible objects and physical spaces. From the point of view of preservation and curation, this focus is understandable. Objects can be sequestered into collections and viewed at will. The boundaries of parks and buildings can be marked and protected. But the wonders of human culture and the living world come to us through many senses. To honor only material objects and spaces is to exclude much of what gives life joy and meaning. Might we honor other manifestations of human culture and beyond-human life, as does the 100 Soundscapes of Japan project? The distinctive sounds of human neighborhoods and natural communities. The nuanced yearly cycles of aromas in forests and seashores. The taste of foods particular to a region. The feel on our skin of the wind blowing down a wintry street canyon or across a springtime park. The varied sensations of the ground under our feet. The shiver or glow of changing seasons. These, too, deserve attention, celebration, and, in some cases, preservation. Sounds can be recorded and archived, as can the chemical mixes of aromas, but these static records do not capture the living, changeable presence of the sensory environment.
The 100 Soundscapes of Japan were selected by a committee of the Ministry of the Environment from more than seven hundred nominations, some from local governments and businesses, some from individuals. The selection includes soundscapes from physical, biological, and cultural sources. This breadth is especially fitting because sound is always integrative, blurring boundaries as waves of energy meet, unify, and stimulate human perception. Some of the 100 Soundscapes are fleeting sounds, such as the sweet ringing of suzumushi crickets or the singing sands of Kotogahama Beach, and others are omnipresent, such as the rumble of waves on the shore of the Sea of Enshu. The collection attempts to capture some of the changing sonic qualities of human activity, including the anachronistic sound of steam engines alongside more contemporary sounds like whistles of ships and the ebullience of cultural festivals. The soundscapes are available to listeners regardless of wealth, class, or religion, although visiting all of them would require travel. Unlike some other forms of cultural and natural celebration, the sound of wind in the reed beds along the Kitakami River or the temple bells of Teramachi asks of listeners no admission ticket.
A survey in 2018 found that five of the original one hundred soundscapes were gone or inaccessible. Frogs had disappeared, trams no longer ran, or earthquake damage made access to sites impossible. The majority of those remaining had some form of local government or citizen group promotion or protection. The listing therefore provided a measure by which to monitor long-term change and has catalyzed local interest and awareness. Despite these successes, the 100 Soundscapes of Japan project has added no new sites since its founding. Yet the sounds of Japan changed significantly in the last quarter century. Bleeps, voices, and music from mobile phones are ubiquitous in cities; shipping traffic has risen in the oceans; private vehicle ownership increased then dropped; a pandemic temporarily silenced much industry; and the sounds of forests, wetlands, and shores shifted as species thrived or struggled. Regular additions to the national register of soundscapes would both record these changes for posterity and turn human ears back to the world, encouraging sonic curiosity.
Although the list is, for now, static, the project has stimulated new ways of relating to sound in Japan and overseas. Soundscape researcher Keiko Torigoe served on the selection committee and later visited some of the sites to understand how local communities responded to their designations as nationally significant soundscapes. In the dunes near Nagaoka, on the east coast of Japan’s mainland, the local government commissioned and installed a statue of Namikozo, the “wave boy,” an ocean spirit who announces the weather through the drumming of waves. Torigoe felt ambivalent about representing the intangible spirit of the waves in concrete form, although the sculpture does orient visitors to the soundscape and honors an important cultural story. River damming and tree plantations are threatening the shoreline here, and so the sound of water beating against sand is considered threatened by some residents. Farther south, in the subtropical forests of Iriomote Island, she found that tour boat operators had ceased using motorboats on a river whose bird and insect sounds are on the national soundscapes register. One of the goals of the 100 Soundscapes project was to draw attention to and protect vulnerable sonic communities. In this case, the river’s soundscape directly benefited from a reduction in engine noise. In the far north, on Hokkaido Island, she found that the designation had provoked conversations about understandings of soundscapes. The listed soundscape here comprises the creaking, groaning, and hissing sounds of winter sea ice on the Sea of Okhotsk. But the most notable “sound” of ice for locals is the sudden silence that descends when the garrulous motions of the sea are quieted by a cap of weighty ice, a process that often happens over just a few hours. The cultural meaning of this silence has changed. Formerly, it was a sign of the arrival of the “white devil,” an ice-imposed end to fishing that presaged months of hunger and poverty. But since the 1960s, scallop aquaculture has boomed, and ice sheets provide shelter for the bays in which the shellfish thrive. Now the ice’s sounds and silence are marks of the productivity of the sea.
The 100 Soundscapes of Japan project has led to elevated sensory awareness in places outside the locales on the official list. The Soundscape Association of Japan, for example, now offers regular encouragements to deeper listening, both by sponsoring experiences such as walks where participants turn their attention to the soundscape and by hosting discussions about how best to appreciate, understand, and protect the sonic diversity of Japan.
In 2001, partly inspired by the success of the soundscapes list, the Ministry of the Environment expanded its work into the realm of aroma. Japan’s 100 Sites of Good Fragrance lists those whose aromas have particular cultural or natural significance. These range from wisteria blossoms to grilled eel, sulfur springs to the scent of used books in Tokyo’s Kanda district. As was true for the designation of soundscapes, the motivations for this project were both to honor the sensory richness of Japan and to underscore the need to control noise and odor pollution. Rather than focus government efforts exclusively on managing negative experiences, these projects remind us to seek out and embrace the positive too.
That Japan should be a global leader in the recognition and celebration of its sensory richness is not surprising. Japanese religious, literary, and aesthetic practices pay close attention to the nuances of sound, aroma, and light, and to the embeddedness of human culture among plants, other animals, water, and mountains. Matsuo Bashō’s haikus, for example, are full of the sounds of frogs leaping into water, cuckoos singing, and cicadas trilling. Buddhist and Shinto temples draw our senses into the spiritual agency of trees, the life of water, and the insights offered by sand and stone. The “right to sunlight” is protected by law, forbidding building practices that cast too much shade on neighbors. These are cultural foundations of sensory attentiveness and respect.
The 100 Soundscapes of Japan project also drew inspiration from across the Pacific. In the 1970s, Canadian composers R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax popularized the terms soundscape and acoustic ecology, and along with collaborating musicians and sound recordists, studied the varied textures of sound across Canadian and European landscapes. Schafer described this work as a “study of the total soundscape,” whose aim was to encourage “aural culture” and reduce noise, asking of every community “which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?” Keiko Torigoe and others integrated this Western approach into Japanese culture that was already, in her words, “open to the world of sound.”
An official list of notable soundscapes draws private sensory experience into community. Just as we gather to eat, pray, sport, view visual art, and hear music, so, too, can we gather to listen to the sounds of Earth, the marvelously diverse interminglings of the voices of wind, water, and living beings, humans included. How else might we create a culture of listening?
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We gather at a picnic shelter on the shore of Lake Cootharaba in Queensland, Australia. The Pacific Ocean rolls onto beaches only seven kilometers east, but here the water is calm, fed by the freshwater flows of the Noosa River. Underfoot, sand mixes with the shed leaves of eucalypt and Casuarina trees, a soft, aromatic duff. Under a high sheet of cloud, water and sky present a milky silver expanse, interrupted only by a narrow band of green from the trees on the opposite shore, more than four kilometers away.
But despite appearances, the waters are not uniform. The two dozen people assembled here have come to hear the multiplicity of the lake and its river, using our ears to connect with lives and stories either below the surface or in the water’s relationships with people. Our guide, sound artist and researcher Leah Barclay, arrives with arms laden with wireless headphones. We each don a pair and flip a switch to set them to the right channel, tuned to a small transmitter in the bag of electronics that Barclay carries at her waist. This is the same setup used by DJs and dancers at “silent discos,” but today this technology will evoke not human music but the many stories of the water.
We laugh awkwardly at the strangeness of breaking conversations as we encase our ears in headphones. Some ambient sounds flow through—human voices and wavelets on the sandy lake margin—but mostly we have entered an aural realm where we are all tethered to a single source, the soundtrack that Barclay creates and is beaming to our headsets. For the next ninety minutes, we take a slow walk along the shore. Our feet step on sand, boardwalk, and pavement, our eyes dwell among trees and people, but our ears plunge into layers of sound recordings and live hydrophone feeds from mostly below the water’s surface.
At first, we are immersed in shimmering, squeaking, and popping. Barclay does not interpret but allows the sound to exist for what it is, an aural experience of the vitality of the river. From my own previous experiments with hydrophones, my imagination is drawn to the motions of gas bubbles rising through sediment and the clatter of swimming, crawling, and singing aquatic insects. As we move from the picnic area to a small beach and then through some woodland, other sounds emerge. The pulse of waves sucking on sand. The bass rumble of what might be thunder. Pops from snapping shrimp and clicks from dolphins, and the drumming and tapping of fish. Human voices dip into and out of these sounds, including the songs of Gubbi Gubbi people responding to the river, stories of bonds between people and dolphins, snatches of conversation about respect for the river’s animals.
The experience is partly music—Barclay uses sound samples to build rhythm, tonal structure, and melody—but it also feels like architecture as she shapes aural spaces that lack obvious pulse or narrative. Unmediated witness is also present in the portions of the experience where a live hydrophone feeds directly to our ears.
The monotone silver sheet of the lake surface acquires a new character. Like a closed door behind which we can hear lively conversations, the water seems no longer still and dull, but full of personality and possibility. This is the power of sensory connection: we understand in our bodies what the mind acting alone finds hard to apprehend. Before walking with Barclay’s composition, I knew that water was full of life and motion. But, in a way, I could not grasp these abstractions. The sound in the headphones directly connects my senses, emotions, and mind to the energies in water, not just to ideas about water.
Unexpectedly, water sounds also change my experience of other senses. I feel a sudden enthusiasm for wavelets and immerse my hands at the water’s edge, feeling the pulse on my skin. Hearing a mix of snapping shrimp and insects, I wonder about salinity and taste a drop of water. It is brackish, the union of inland wetlands with seepage from the ocean. The sight and sound of a child rushing into the water and throwing sand into wet piles merge with the less familiar sounds in the headphones, making me puzzle at humanity’s playful fascination with water. From sandcastles to sailing dinghies to ocean cruises, we seem to crave contact. On a point that juts into the lake, the wind gusts, and I delight in the convergence of its scouring action on my skin and the rough, stormy textures of the sound in my ears at that moment. The aromas of sodden vegetation strike with particular force. Somehow listening wakes up my nose.
