1997
File Archive: AURALECO.TXT
Max Neuhaus, 18.05.1997
For most of us who attended this seminar, the issues of aural ecology are central and important. For the general public, they don't seem to matter very much.
Why?
Our ears are constantly feeding us information crucial to our survival on both intuitive and intellectual levels: informing us of events in our environment which we can not see, and through language, providing us with the knowledge we need to function. Yet, many feel hearing is not a very crucial sense -- perhaps on the same level as the sense of smell, but not nearly as important as vision.
We know that the impact of the sonic on what we perceive as reality in our environment is as powerful as the visual, and sometimes more so. In the sound track of a movie, visual scenes can be made to depict completely opposite scenarios, evoking contrasting emotions, by simply switching the sound effects on the audio track. In this case sound is the truth and modifies what we are seeing. It would be astounding if this was not often the case in real life also.
The functioning of our aural mind is largely unconscious. Although this does not mean it is any less powerful, it is hard to build a case for something which people are largely unaware of.
--
Even though it is not my primary activity, I have felt a concern for the role that sound plays generally in our society for a number of years. In 1974, I took a what was thought to be a radical position with an editorial in the New York Times where I condemned several naive ideas about sound in the environment. I was reacting to a pamphlet called "Noise Makes You Sick", published by the Department of Air Resources of New York's Environmental Protection Agency. In exaggerated pseudo medical terms, it condemned all sound as bad, saying in effect that hearing hurts you.
I countered with 'Noise Propaganda Makes Noise' (1) and finished it off with: 'Obviously we need to be able to rest from sound just as we do from visual stimulation, we need aural as well as visual privacy, but silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black. Certainly just as our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing.
Listen.'
Even by their own definition of noise as 'any unwanted sound' this propaganda was making noise: by making all sound unwanted, it made noise where there was none before.
The physically damaging sounds in our environment are few and known. Whether or not a sound causes psychological injury depends on how we think about it. If we think it is injuring us, of course it can.
Although their argument was not very well thought out and their facts exaggerated, it is amazing how pervasive this idea remains -- lodged in the back of most people's minds along with many other contradictions is a vague idea that sound is bad for you.
But at the same time as sound is not thought of generally as a very important issue, there is a great deal of hostility against it, especially among city dwellers. This resentment comes from the fact that we don't have the same control over our sound environment as we do over our visual one.
This lack of control is largely a result of a general lack of awareness in the architectural community about sound - architects think much more about the way a building looks than the way it sounds. This, coupled with the fact that sound isolation costs money just like its visual counterpart, and there is a larger profit margin in building without this invisible component, leads to a lot of acoustically transparent construction. The buyer usually doesn't find out about it until it's too late -- not many go out listening for an apartment.
All this is not the fault of sound and it's not sound that should bear the resentment.
Another contradictory thought that usually travels along with the idea that sound is bad for you is that the sounds of mother nature are good for you -- civilization makes bad sounds and mother nature makes good ones.
The sound barriers built along the modern super highway are a good example of this confused state of mind. At a certain distance, it is impossible to hear the difference between the sound of a super highway and the sound of a waterfall. Yet we spend millions to build acoustic barriers against one and millions to build a house close enough to hear the other. Admittedly for those living close to the super highway the difference is very clear, but perhaps it should be -- the ear may be telling us something with its incessant reminder: the air here is very unhealthy to breathe.
Surely this is well meaning acoustic ecology at its worst, or could it be an another example of an idea of ecology exploited -- in this case to raise the property values of land which shouldn't be lived on in the first place?
Large amounts of talk in the past about sound ecology have been focused on going back to nature or the good old days of the past, when things were natural and quiet, and if there are man-made sounds that are good, it's only the good old ones. As we can see from the above, the results of these ideas may not be as innocent as they seem.
I am consistently astounded at our aural naiveté in contrast to the rest of our culture. Thank God the world of visual art provides us with an analogy to get us out of this naive trap. For centuries painters have let us see that natural landscape is not the only subject matter. There are many interesting things to hear in a city just as there are many to see. Come on folks we are near the end of the twentieth century and fast approaching the twenty-first. We will not come to grips with the real and serious problems of sound in contemporary society with nostalgia.
So what can be done. Certainly we can articulate the issues in an intelligent way and try to clear away misconceptions, resolve some of the contradictions and give the general public an accurate idea of what sound is and means to us.
We can also assume a more active role. In the 1980's I took on the problems of emergency vehicle sirens in cities. The project's focuses were: how to make sounds that were locatable in an urban environment so people would know what to do when they heard one, that would allow two drivers of emergency vehicles to hear each other when their sirens were on so they wouldn't run into each other; and to make sounds we could live with: which would have authority without being authoritarian (2).
The goal was utilitarian -- to apply a unique knowledge of technique acquired in the process of building sound works, to what I saw as a serious problem. I was surprised therefore when I found my colleagues in the fields of culture interpreting it as a work, and truly horrified when they went on to call it the ultimate 'Urban Symphony'. As if once you are an artist or composer you are condemned for life -- idiotic: am I composing when I am frying an egg, just because it makes sound (actually I know some in the avant guarde who would say yes, but thankfully they are in the minority)
One of the unforeseen results of the siren project was that in the process of convincing people of the necessity of a better set of signals for these vehicles, I encountered every misconception about sound known to man. The one that was always present though, was that the sounds of our man made sound environment were inevitable: an unspoken conviction that there were no alternatives, we could not change them.
The sounds of our man made sound environment are usually simply byproducts -- the results of not caring if something makes a sound or not; and if it does, not caring what it sounds like.
Why then do we assume any given sound is inevitable. It could be because until recently we have not had the knowledge or means to shape sound. This is no longer true.
If we go back to the super highway again we see that the approach to silencing the highway was not to change the sound, but to build barriers against it, that changing the sound itself was not thought of. Instead of building barriers against it, why didn't they look at what was causing the sound. Hasn't anybody ever thought of designing a tire that makes less noise -- good traction and noise don't necessarily go together.
One of the things that encouraged me to go on with the siren project was the opportunity to provide an example that even some of the worst sounds we accept and live with are not inevitable -- that we can do something with sound and that sound can do something.
We don't have to take our sound environment as it comes. As specialists in the field we should begin to bear some of the responsibility and certainly take some direct action in determining what kinds of sounds the rest of the world has to bear.
There are some serious dangers inherent in this endeavor, however, as the misinterpretation of the siren project shows. It is quite natural for the people now beginning to work in the field of aural design to originate in the field of music -- it is the source of our most sophisticated knowledge about how people react to sound irregardless of whether it can be quantified or not. But there is a real danger here of not being able to separate insights that that knowledge provides, from the art.
Thinking that we can apply the music itself, no matter what its style, to the sound signals of everyday life -- quoting musical phrases to announce the arrival of elevators, and playing tinny tunes to make us more patient when someone puts us on hold on the telephone -- is simply perpetuating the mistake of MUZAK. Taste in music is highly personal -- one person's music will always be another's MUZAK. If we persist in this direction we will end up with a world full of 'designer' sound instead of one which functions from sound design.
Perhaps what aural ecology really means is just being forcefully careful about the sounds we add to the aural landscape.
(1) Published as an editorial in the New York Times on December 6, 1974.
(2) In 1991 Neuhaus was awarded the first patent for a sound as a result of his siren project. see 'Siren - Aural Design' (Dutch and English), Kunst and Museum Journaal, Volume 4 Number 6, 1993, Amsterdam and 'Siren' (German) and 'Listen' (German), Welt auf t÷neren Fn_en, Schriftenreihe Forum/Band 2, G÷ttingen 1994
Postscript
My odessy with police cars and fire trucks lasted on and off for 12 years. I feel I have more than fulfilled my active part in the area of aural design. But I would like to leave those who will endeavor in the future in the field, the following food for thought.
The terrible two stroke
I remember having a startling 'revelation' some time in the mid-seventies. I was passed in the street by an unmuffled motor bike and realized that this mechanical flatulence was one of the most evil sounds on the globe.
It seems innocuous, this motorini of the third world, but this sound (made by the most elementary of all engines, the two stroke) reaches into a huge range of environments: from the city to virgin forests with the chain saw, onto lakes and pristine beaches in the form of the outboard motor and the water sled, into the uninhabited wilderness with the trail bike and the snowmobile, and even into the lush suburbia of America with the power lawn mower, and the leaf blower. Getting rid of this sound would make a big change in the way the world sounds. Getting rid of some of the things that make this sound could certainly improve other areas of ecology.
The auto alarm game
I have watched the development of this one over the last fifteen years.
Here's how it works. The auto audio merchant sets up a store (now there are even franchises) selling car hi-fis and alarms. A customer comes in. With polished techno gobbledygook the salesman manages to get him to buy a sound system powerful enough for a small football stadium for the inside of his car. His store also sells auto theft alarms, but strangely he doesn't also try to sell him one of these.
A week later the customer comes back in tears. Someone stole the whole thing (hopefully to use as a portable public address system in a small football stadium) and he wants to buy a new one. No problem, they just happen to have a duplicate in stock, but this time...'you know I have this super loud alarm siren (guaranteed to wake the dead), it'll scare the hell out of anybody who tries to steal it the next time and you'll hear it no matter where you are.' Now its clear why the salesman didn't try selling him the alarm the first time: this way he sells two hi fi monsters and the alarm sells itself the second time around.
So here he is everything back just the way it was. He decides to go to the disco for the night. He finds a nice quiet residential street to park where he thinks nobody will try to steal his sonic beauty again, sets the alarm, locks up and heads for 120db heaven. About midnight some old duffer with too many beers parking behind him accidentally touches his bumper. All hell breaks loose. The poor guy nearly dies of a heart attack and the rest of the neighborhood has insomnia until 5 a.m., when the owner comes out of the disco. After six hours of 120db house music he can't even hear the alarm anymore, so he walks down to the next disco and dances for a few more hours. The rest of the neighborhood can still hear it, but they think it's inevitable.
Now the car alarm has become a status symbol, especially the kind that go off for a few seconds when you unlock the door, that way everybody turns around and looks. It's wonderful when it scares the owner so much that he panics and can't find the button to turn it off.
Why is this person allowed to make his problem ours? If there was a growing visual horror this , there would be a law against it.
Max Neuhaus