Acoustic Engagement and the “Gorgeous Wooze”

Image: soundplusdesign.com

When I woke at 4:57am today in rural Vermont, I realized I had been woken by birdsong. The air was so packed with it you couldn't distinguish one call from the next. There was no starting and stopping; it was full on, full-throated and loud, startlingly so. My two-year-old woke up asking for milk and a spot in my bed. Neither of us fell back asleep.

Lying there in the half-light, I remembered waking up in New York City when I lived there a decade ago and what that sounded like: traffic, traffic, store front shields scraping up for the day, sirens, more traffic—a tinny, grinding, cacophonous din, which sometimes, for reasons I never figured out, became a hum that could sound like surf if you forgot where you were (which was never easy). Heavy snowfall was the only thing capable of muffling the City into, not silence, but a constrained quietude. And for a few hours—if we were lucky…the spell could be broken in minutes—all of Manhattan became a blanketed leviathan, a feverish heart in the chest of a submerging whale, an entombed anthill writ large. That’s when we’d get out our skis and slice right down the center of 2nd Avenue or up Broadway to the sparkling stretches of Central Park bordered on all sides by the city, uprising enormously in all its geometric force and certainty. But it was soft in the middle, and we sluiced along.

I should back up and say that the pre-dawn rural Vermont bird chorus happened to coincide with my reading of a post on BLDG BLOG called “Sound Not As Memory But Experience,” which profiles “a project by the talented Dutch graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt in which a variety of people have been asked to describe their favorite sound.” The result is a unique and compelling auditory almanac called Take a Closer Listen. I read the post casually at first, not considering any connection to my work in Communications at the Foundation. This was an artistic meditation on the visceral and sensory experience of place—tangential at best to community planning. But then I thought, wait, what about that air-clogging birdsong and that ravenous city din and how both have worked to shape my experience? I have extremely powerful impressions of these places, and others, which correlate specifically to how they sound. Sounds are part of the unique, local, incomparable fabric—what Ortonites sometimes call the “heart and soul”—of cities and towns and, I’d argue, one of the reasons they end up mattering to us.

So the question I pose to you is this: Can we effectively engage people by talking about the sounds of their towns, their homes, and what it would be like to live in them if those sounds disappeared or were replaced by something else entirely? You might laugh us right down Main Street, but we've been laughed down Main Street before. (Check out our Current Projects to see how we employ storytelling and art as primary engagement strategies.) I’ll call this “acoustic engagement” for lack of a better term. After the customary initial skepticism surrounding such an approach, I’d be willing to bet that residents of your town would start listening to themselves and each other a little differently than they did before. They’d be reminded of the importance of the working farms (tractor engines, bailers) and good schools (laughing, shouting kids) and local gathering places (church bells, music on old Peavey amps, espresso machines, poetry, a pool cue on an 8 ball) and parks, playgrounds and paths (barking dogs, more kids, footsteps, the whir of bicycle wheels, people talking, even singing).

Here is an excerpt from Zuydervelt’s Take a Closer Listen by Chris Herbert called “echoes in a tube station”:

A few years ago, I wandered into a tube station on the deeply buried Central Line
in London. Along the platform and out of my line of sight, three or four girls were
singing close RnB harmonies. By the time this arrived at my ear, it had been bounced
along several hundred metres of tunnel, an unfathomable series of natural comb filters
that rendered it an unintelligible but gorgeous wooze, speckled with the faint percussive
clank and rumble of a fully operational mass transit system.

Bet you never heard sounds in the subway described that way before. Gorgeous wooze. Whoah. Makes you want to go back there and listen to it all over again, or for the first time. And I think that’s actually the point here. We’re so familiar with places that we forget to pay attention to them. We think we know them. We even think we know what is best for them and, consequently, plan, build up, renovate, repurpose, abandon or demolish them, not always for the better.

So are we listening? If yes, do we ever describe what we hear to one another? Do we ever talk about why those sounds are important, how they fill up our lives and affect our outlook, how they might even inform our personal and collective choices?

As Zuydervelt describes, all it took was “a beautiful, sunny day in July…lying in a park in Geneva,” eyes closed, an iPod out of batteries and a few minutes of forced listening to realize—thanks to that particular acoustic jumble of home—what was really going on around him.

What are the sounds of your neighborhood or favorite place? Does this affect how you think about or experience the place? What if those sounds were gone? Would that mean the place is also gone? Or would it just be different? And would you be okay with that? Not so much? Why not?

And while I’ve got you...what if you posed these questions at your next community potluck, or with your students, or at book group, or around the dinner table with your family? Heck, give it a go with the local planning commission and risk being laughed down Main Street. You won’t be alone, and you’ll definitely learn something.