Wall of sound

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  Kate Chisholm

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

We’re all very clued up on visual interference, blots on the landscape, the way buildings look and affect our aesthetic sensibility, but we tend to overlook the sonic soundscape which surrounds us. On Wednesday’s Discovery programme, an acoustician, Professor Trevor Cox, took us on a sound walk from King’s Cross to Regent’s Park in London to celebrate 25 years of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. This was set up by R. Murray Schafer, the ‘father of acoustic ecology’, who began by being concerned about the impact of noise pollution on the human psyche. Since then the project has taken on a bigger perspective — looking at the way that urban soundscapes are changing as quickly as the physical appearance of cities. What we hear around us from hour to hour has changed radically since the traffic-free days of our grandparents (or perhaps I should say great-grandparents). Surely this must affect us? Does it matter?

The chirruping of a couple of sparrows in my garden in the last few days has made me realise how much they’ve been missing from my aural horizon in recent years. It’s a sound I grew up with but they’re a rare sounding now in many urban spaces and especially to the denizens of south-west London where the screeching of bright-green parakeets drowns out the rumbling jets of Heathrow.

Noise pollution has become a huge problem, whizzing traffic drowning out thought, casual chatter in a restaurant inducing headaches and nausea. As John Betjeman once wrote, ‘Imprisoned in a cage of sound,/ Even the trivial seems profound.’ One way to deal with it, as the researchers in Vancouver have been finding out, is to train the brain to hear selectively, listening for those hidden sounds within the wall of noise. On the sound walk down Euston Road in London, Professor Cox and his fellow acoustic ecologists walked on in silence trying to locate with their ears, not their eyes, what was there beyond and behind the deafening hum of four lanes of busy traffic. A church bell rang above the sirens and the squealing brakes. A single dog barked. In the distance the Eurostar rumbled out of St Pancras.

In the piazza in front of the entrance to the British Library, just a few steps away from the road, the walkers discovered a completely different atmosphere. The architect’s design ensured that a brick wall surrounds the square, creating an acoustic oasis in the midst of the urban hubbub. Such quiet (or relatively quiet) spaces are the life-blood of cities, enabling us to survive the ever-rising noise levels.

Also on the walk was Hildegard Westerkamp, an artist and composer who argues that it’s the soundscape, not the landscape, which is nature’s signalling device telling us whether it’s healthy or not. She took a microphone out into the Zona del Silencio in the Mexican desert after dark and recorded the sound of the cricket who had by chance landed on it. Back in the studio she amplified the recording and then played it back to us. It was magical. That such a small insect could make such an eerie, beautiful, rhythmic sound, echoing through the vast emptiness of the desert.