The silence of the woods is full of noise

The woods are many things: peaceful, calming, multi-hued, and (in my memory) often silent. But that mental shorthand is a mistake. That forested silence only addresses the pleasurable absence of the sound-detritus of modern life. There are no car horns, no rumble of heating or cooling systems, no yakety yakety yak yak of too many people in too close proximity, no clacking keys, inspired or otherwise. In other words, the woods create the illusion of silence by taking away irritants.

Truth to tell, the thing my brain likes to encode as “silence” is anything but. There is, in the woods, a continuous burble of a stream. The crickets offer up a track of chirping, that sawing stridulation that calls to mates and forms the backdrop of dreamland.

Other night-noises abound as well. There’s the scream and then hoot of an owl noting its territory; the rustle of a mammalian something-or-other searching for a snack amidst the leaf-litter of the forest floor; the wit wit wit of a first bird at morning light. I listen to these noises, and translate them from the unexpected “what?” into the identified “oh, that.” These sounds bring the satisfaction of discovery, and yet they are quiet, ever so quiet, and in their quiet regularity they soothe.

What we (or at least I) think of as forest silence, then, is the absence of urban noise. It is also bound up in anticipatory listening. Was that the rumbling croak of frogs? The intermittent drops of dew from the treetops? The tap tap tap of water dribbling over an end-of-season waterfall?

Silence here is a coded word, speaking to peace as measured in slowed breathing -- the rise and fall of the backpacker at ease, sleeping perhaps more deeply than home bed and familiar surroundings allow. It is a word reflective of paced regularity, of less-familiar noises often repeated, assessed, and held in the translated understanding of thing-as-sound. By grappling with what a noise represents, we become comfortable with it, often to the point that it no longer registers.

What I recall, in my fecklessness, as silence, is instead the susuration of leaves, the murmers of small animals, the steady quiet systematic vamp-til-ready steady state of forest hum. It is, in other words, a low-level background that caresses and comforts my ears, accustomed as they are to the more penetrating sounds of urban existence.

Silence as golden? Not exactly. But forest as restorative, a living quiet that listens back? Absolutely!

Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein

Bells, chants, prayers, the scrape of chairs at table, the hum of a vacuum, the splash of a sink being plunged: the soundscape of Goldenstein Cloister is equal parts liturgy and daily life. Layer onto that the laughter of eighty-something sisters sharing coffee, the creak of a chairlift, the slap of running shoes from Sister Rita’s daily 5K after prayer, and you begin to hear what’s at stake in Austria right now.

The Augustinian choir women of Goldenstein had spent their lives in this convent—decades of vows that they believed bound the Church as much as themselves. And then, dissolution. Closure. The doors shut on their home, the place where they had lived out obedience, prayer, and community. Their leader called it a “necessary act of care.” But care for whom? Care, in this telling, seems less about human dignity and more about ease of management. (There may be a plausible “other side” to the story, but when your church leader argues that orthopedic shoes are a violation of the vow of poverty, somebody hasn’t thought about how decisions about elders read in the broader universe.)

What these sisters assert is simple and radical: their vows were two-way. The Church has responsibilities here. And the sisters and their supporters are claiming them.The three Augustinian sisters—Rita, Bernadette, and Regina—repossessed their cloister earlier this month. That sparked a cascade of attention: a podcast episode, a BBC story, Guardian coverage, and a flourishing Instagram feed that pairs black-and-white habits with splashes of bright flowers and cheerful captions in German and English.

What I hear in all this isn’t only the sound of bells or the chant of the office. It’s the sound of determination, of voices raised in defense of their rights, of a community that has chosen to rally around them. On-site helpers showed up with brooms and mops to scrub the convent back into habitability. Supporters—English and German alike—comment on their posts, write emails, show up at Mass. And even when there is no priest to say Mass, the sisters sing the rosary together, because prayer continues regardless of who is willing to stand at the altar.

Why bring this story here?

First: because it’s a rare window into monastic life today, with all its joy, grit, and creativity.

Second: because some of you may want to follow them online or even donate. They’re @nonnen_goldenstein on Instagram, and their captions read like tiny table-prayers, interspersed with photos of a community refusing to fade quietly away.

Third: because it’s a living parable of resistance. For those of us who study monastic history, it’s not every day that we get a real-life #NunsOnTheRun story unfolding in our time. These sisters have claimed their right to remain, to pray, to belong. The least we can do is listen, and perhaps add our voices in support.

Their own social media team has a bouquet of hashtags: #nunsontherun #goldenstein #augustinerchorfrauen #churchfluencer #nonnen #klosterleben #elsbethen #fyp #gästebuch #guestbook #willkommen #youarewelcome. Give them a follow. Raise up your voice for the dignity and self-determination of those who have faithfully served. Support their renewed convent soundscape. After all, the soundscape of Goldenstein is not just liturgy or rebellion—it’s the sound of life insisted upon, carried forward, and sung into being.

RESOURCES: 

Bethany Bell, “Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps,” BBC, 12 September 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y8r2gk0vyo

Kate Connelly, “‘We were obedient our entire lives’: the nuns who broke back into their convent,” The Guardian, 26 Sept 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/26/we-were-obedient-our-entire-lives-the-nuns-who-broke-back-into-their-convent

Kloster Goldenstein: 

• Instagram Account: @nonnen_goldenstein, https://www.instagram.com/nonnen_goldenstein/
• Their gofundme is at https://gofund.me/6f2f1838c 
• A taste of their community worship: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPGUpStCADw/
• Convent website: https://goldenstein.cc/

Asian Sojourn 3: Living in Sacred Space – Kathmandu

My morning walks in Kathmandu (taken back in June 2025) had me thinking a lot about the ways in which spaces become sacred. Every fifth building seemed to be a temple or a stupa, and as I said before, my hotel window opened out onto the Atko Narayan Temple, and there was a ceremony there on Wednesday of my visit.

As a first-time visitor to Kathmandu, I would get up many a morning (yay, jetlag?) and walk around the Durbar Square complex, enjoying the sleepy pigeons and ringing of bells, or wander through the streets enjoying the mix of architecture, the bustle of cleaning and setting up for the day, and the visible and audible practice of faith. I peered through at many a Bahal courtyard, those monastic courtyards with small shrines, and went into a few if they weren’t a center of activity. I tried to remain unobtrusive, but also was drawn to the beauty and to the demonstrated care for this overlap of public space and private belief.

Offerings of flowers and food, the ringing of bells, the tidying of shrines, the singing in group or alone: all these activities seemed integrated into a day, suggesting a much more physically engaged religion than the more staid practices of my Christian Science grandparents or my Lutheran inlaws. Likewise, the intermixture of regular housing, active business, and spots inviting active devotion is compressed relative to urban landscapes I regularly inhabit. That meant that cooking and commerce rubbed elbows with sacred practices, reminding me how thin the boundary might be between ordinary routine and spiritual gesture. I wonder if medieval practices of faith, before the emergence of confessional concerns, might have been just as colorful, as sound-based, and as kinetic as what I experienced in Kathmandu. Was Bregenz like this, a mix of street cleaning, setting up stalls with vegetables from the farms uphill, bells and clatter and clamour all mixing in with the chants of the hours and the calls of hopeful merchants? It would have been lively, if so!

The infrastructure of Kathmandu also strikes a notable contrast with the more familiar streets of Nashville. Transport is, as the tourist guidebooks remind us, often done in human-powered vehicles, whether that’s of people or of packages. Overloaded bikes like the one below impressed the stuffing out of me; I’m hard put to bike myself up a hill let alone contemplate carrying a bunch of packages. Not shown is the time we saw two people on a bike, the one in front balancing what was clearly a flat screen TV in its box. Holy moly! And then there’s the wiring. Yes, we did experience power outages. With that wiring spaghetti, it’s a wonder that there was power at all! 

But one cannot subsist on the sacred alone, and I’d like to give a shout-out to Kathmandu’s food scene.

I mentioned the Ginger Cafe, but I also got my share of street food and momos. I never did find my way back to the best shop, but everywhere I stopped, I always found the food fresh and the stall-owners friendly, forgiving of my linguistic inabilities. Momos are the easiest food the first time out (not only my first meal but my most frequent!), but the fried breakfast breads – and especially the Jeri Swari – were a special treat. Jeri Swari is cool: the “Jeri” is a deep-fried, sugar-coated flour batter which is shaped into intricate loops or coils and fried until crispy, then soaked in saffron-infused syrup. The “Swari” part is a flatbread which is both a wrapper and the justification: “I’m an adult eating a real breakfast and not just chowing down on a honey-delivery system.”

Watching your food being made is a delicious way to start any day. It’s also a reminder that in Kathmandu, even everyday meals are carefully crafted. The generosity and care of the cooks are as much a part of the experience as are the flavors themselves.

Attention filtering – the voluntary earlid

An auditory distraction — a crying baby, a ringing phone — hits like a punch to the gut, instantly demanding our attention. But recent studies by Mandal and colleagues (2024) suggest that our minds may be better shielded than we think.

They introduce the idea of an “attentional earlid.” Just as eyelids can open and shut to regulate what reaches our eyes, our attention seems to have a mental earlid that blocks irrelevant sounds from interfering with other tasks.

To test this, Mandal’s team asked participants to do visual puzzles while irrelevant sounds — simple, pure sine-wave beeps — popped up in the background. These weren’t meaningful noises like a person’s name or an odd sound that stood out in context; they were deliberately boring. Surprisingly, the beeps didn’t slow people down or cause mistakes. In the face of noise, the earlid held.

But there was a catch. When the task included listening — for example, counting the number of time a particular sound occurred — the earlid opened, and the irrelevant beeps slipped in, pulling at attention. In other words, if your ears are already opened, stray noises evidently sneak through on the same pathway.

This fits with broader psychological findings: our brain has limited channels of processing, a bit like trying to carry too many grocery bags. Perceptual load theory (Lavie 1995 is the classic work) says we only have so much capacity. Mandal’s earlid idea adds another layer: when sound isn’t part of the job, our brains can shut the door on irrelevant auditory clutter altogether.

That has real consequences for musicological me. Much of my work relies on listening-as-study, but the background noise in our in-town property hovers around 70 dB. Out on the farm, on the other hand, it drops to the 30s or 40s (unless the turkeys are quarreling). Thus, in town, my earlids have to contend with a flood of competing input. At home, the quiet of the countryside acts like a protective layer, letting my attention settle on the music.

So here’s my observation: if the earlid is about shutting a door and closing off the sound entirely, then quiet spaces might work more like sound-glasses: they cut the glare of unwanted noise so my ears can adjust to what matters most. That may explain why listening at home, in relative silence, always seems to lead to better prep for the deeper analysis and meaning-making than the work I do later on campus. (Huh. I’d always just chalked it up to the distractions of a peopled landscape once I got to my office.)

I’ll have to think about this more; I’ve mentioned in other earlid posts that in my own musical-listening practice, I see a linkage of left-brain intellectual processing and right-brain beauty-finding as a strong sound filtering mechanism. The rest of the world can fall away when I’m working in my musico-analytical space, and even Mandal’s content disruption – my name – can miss my attention on-ramp. (Sorry, kids!) I’m not yet sure whether I think that’s an “attentional earlid” or a “sound-glasses” type phenomenon – or a third thing altogether.

At any rate, today’s browsing in the literature was a bit dismaying to my prejudices. Maybe, just maybe, those noise-canceling headphones y’all carry around are actually important as tools to help manage both attention earlids and sound-glasses. If so, they could be essential, if unstylish, accessories for those thinking tasks that occupy my days.

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REFERENCES:

• Cyrus, Cynthia. “I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2024, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/11/i-am-not-crocodile-earlids-and-thinking.html.
• Lavie, N. 1995: Lavie, Nilli. “Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21/3 (1995): 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.21.3.451
• Mandal 2024a: Mandal, A., Liesefeld, A. M., & Liesefeld, H. R. “The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50/1 (2024): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168
• Mandal 2024b: Mandal, Ananya, Jan Philipp Röer, and Heinrich R. Liesefeld. “Auditory Distractors Are Processed but Do Not Interfere with Visual Search of Any Difficulty When Sound Is Irrelevant.” Visual Cognition 32/9–10 (2024): 1067–83. doi:10.1080/13506285.2024.2397825.

  
  

Asian Sojourn 2: Kathmandu: parade rest!

From Delhi, I traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, where we had a hotel just two blocks from Durbar Square. My host picked me up from the airport, hallelujah, and drove me across town in his very, very small car through the very crowded and monsoon-wetted streets. Once to the hotel, he gave me the standard orientation to drinkable water (and undrinkable); the various amenities, including generous outlets right by the bed and a swivel fan; and a few pointers on where I might want to go the next day.

The view from my bed was rather stunning, since our hotel faced the Atko Narayan Temple; in this rendition, you can see the edges of my window:

It was a delightful location, and one of the days of our stay, there was a festival, so I got to observe the ceremonies with burning offerings, bell ringing, chanting, and the like. No pictures, though; I didn't want to be intrusive.

After a lovely, lovely night's sleep topped off with a productive dose of jet lag (love my kindle, love that I can do highlighting on my kindle, made SO much research progress at 2a.m.!), it was time to face the city.

Being a first-time tourist in Nepal, I started with Kathmandu Durbar Square, as one does, by paying my entrance fee and getting my long-term visit card (hint: bring along your passport and a passport photo when you first show up; your fee will last until the end of your visa), and then went touring. I never did master the names of all of the square's buildings, but I was fond of the carvings and the architecture, and enjoyed spending a GREAT deal of time looking at all the intricate details.

 

But my leisurely pace was interrupted when the courtyard started filling with soldiers -- soldiers carrying drums! It seems the military band was under review. Setting up took some time, but they eventually got themselves ordered. I did notice that they formed up as much in the shade as they could (and who could blame them?). Eventually, however, their commander shifted them back to the center of the courtyard and out into that bright, warm sunlight. 

While there was some tootling around beforehand, the flag ceremony introduced the drums and winds.

 

After a good deal of speechifying (all in Nepali so I can’t report the content!), the unit marched out. 

 

There must have been some activity outside of the palace, because it was at least 10 minutes before the soldiers passed by on the outside on parade, music whirling along with them as the percussion kept steady time.

Watching the first portion of a parade, even a small one, made me think about those commonalities with my hometown experience. I too have been in groups which have crowded toward the shade while wearing an unpleasantly heavy uniform; outdoor performance environments are not always optimal. Sure, dark fabrics with heft and weight look impressive, but there’s a reason science-fiction often references temperature-regulating textiles! (And I in my short-sleeves was grateful to be recording from the shade, and I was seated on the steps, not standing or moving around!)

In all, about 45 minutes elapsed while I watched the group. I had time to think, in that idle way, about the meta-messaging of such events. The pride and perfectability of formation was a signal of the kind of discipline the group represents, and was reinforced by two different leaders, the quieter of which got quicker movements from the group. The (memorized) music spoke to a regularity of rehearsal. The timbres seemed familiar even if the instruments per se were not. The winds reminded me of fifes, though I never got a good look at the instruments since I was trying to stay out of the way and not be THAT tourist. Still, the fife and drum type combination has a lasting appeal in the military world, so the whole experience was weirdly familiar, for all that I was on the far side of the globe.

In all, my first full day was a great success. The chance encounter with the pass-in-review meant that I managed to hit the “urban soundscape” button right out of the gate with "real music," not just the sounds and noises of the city. And historically-oriented me was truly delighted in the architecture, carvings, and museum displays. 

I’m not one for crowds, but I’m genuinely glad that we chose to stay down by the “busy old center” for this part of our trip. 

Note: These events took place July 1-2, 2025.

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RESOURCES: ARRIVING IN NEPAL 

• My flights into Nepal were limited to a single carry-on (7 kg total), and a checked bag of 20 kg total (44lb). I had known to pack with those limits, but I know others had been caught out.
• When you arrive, there's a screening that includes watches and gold jewelry as well as electronics and so forth; be prepared to stand in that line a longish moment since others may have buried those items at the bottom of their bags. There are signs in English with instructions.
• I did the Nepal "visa on arrival" process, and I filled out all of the paperwork of step one right there in the arrival area, though you can do part of it online up to 15 days in advance (if you print out your results). I had brought sufficient US cash to pay for my tourist visa, but I did use the airport ATM to get my first batch of Nepali rupees (since I had to pre-pay the hotel upon arrival). It is also possible to get a taxi from the taxi desk in the airport (which is what Nissa did when she arrived), and the cost is regulated so you don't have to worry about negotiating in your travel-weary sleep-deprived state.
• We each had an e-SIM purchased from trip.com; I used the airport wifi to log in and claim it. Even sleep deprived it was an easy process: scan the QR code and click where it tells you.
• We stayed in a distinctly budget hotel, Nirvana Kuti by Durbar Square -- really just three apartments, one per floor, with a bathroom, hallway sink, and small kitchen area with a kettle and (drinkable) water dispenser as well as a wash-up sink. The rooms were basic but spotless, and cheap, cheap, cheap! The space had comfey beds; fan but not AC; robust WiFi as long as the power was on; but no on-site services. There's a little convenience store right next door for all your snacking needs. However, for all that it was a plain-jane (and budget-friendly) location, our host Bobby was one of the highlights. A Nepali native who had studied for three years in Australia, he was super friendly, interested in cross-cultural conversations at his daily check-in, and incredibly helpful with arrangements and recommendations. (For instance, he took us a couple of blocks over to buy umbrellas at local rather than tourist prices!) We liked the place and its location so much that we stayed there again upon our return. NOTE: there is a second hotel of the same name, so use your map and navigate to the one by Atko Narayan Temple...
• We ate several times over by Freak Street, where every other shop is a restaurant. My favorite was the Ginger Cafe (I got the veg khaja set, very yummy!) which is technically located on a cross-street, Phalchasa Galli. I was the only non-native in the restaurant.

Listening to the Birds

Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle

In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?

Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice. 

To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:

I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:

I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)

In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice. 

And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.

Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Mapping Soundscapes: Applying Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou’s Measures to Memory and Place

A 3-way Venn diagram of Individual, Sound and Environment

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece.

Every place, argues Stratoudakis &  Papadimitriou (2007), has its own distinctive sound picture. That is, it had a unique identity, “not only in terms of geography or physical-temporal aspects, but also in its acoustic properties.”

In their map of understanding (Fig. 1), the individual intersects directly with sound through meaning-making and can also listen and/or emit, shaping sound as it exists. Sound likewise interacts with the environment through coloration and direct/reflected sound. Thus, the three worlds interact with sound as one of the mediators of the individual’s relationship to the broader environment. That is, the “inner reality – inner sounds, thoughts, feelings and memory,” as Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou put it, takes in environmental information through sound.

Figure 1: Sound as Meter, derived by Cynthia Cyrus from Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou (2007)

This is an interesting point, since the shape of experience AS memory is heavily dependent on sensory memory. I wrote recently about the memory of a 1614 snowball fight and of the 13th feet of snow of one terrible winter that Sister Anna Wittweilerin attests to in her Tagebuch (absorbed later in the Thalbach Convent Chronicle). (Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up)

As we follow her memory (Thalbach Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625), we actually superimpose sound details without her naming them. We can imagine the “thwuck” of a snowball thrown and successfully landed on its target; we can hear in our inner soundtrack the laughter of the sisters engaging in a bout of unusually fine fun. I can hear the clucking hens, their day disturbed by the unusual activity, and perhaps a single rooster crow to establish inner territory within the hen-house while the outer world manifests these unusual games and noises. I imagine the trees whispering off to the right of the convent yard in the hillside between them and the parish church as the inevitable winter breeze rolls down the afternoon mountainside. And we know from experience that the broader landscape would be hushed, since snow deadens sound. All of these elements were present in my inner landscape as I read Wittweilerin’s passage, though she uses no sound words at all. Her nouns – snow, snowball, hen-yard – become my soundtrack through an associative linkage of my own inner memories of these things.

My projection of this past environment, in other words, DOES appear to be mediated in part by sound-memory as well as by the convent sister’s narrative. Readers bring their own experiences to the things they are reading; that includes their own experiences of sound-as-mediator.

The second big contribution that Stratoudakis & Papdimitriou make is to model one approach to considering sound. Since “soundscape is an ever-changing version of a given environment [and thus] presents great spatio-temporal variability,” they provide a model for considering changes over time. They ask that we consider sampling positions as well as recording periods. For them, sound (and its attributes), space (geographical coordinates) and time (annual and daily cycles) are the three main elements for describing a soundscape. They suggest a day divided into three hour chunks, and consider a variety of individual parameters. 

They also caution that one should note “places of particular geo-morphological interest.” The gurgling stream, for instance, that is close to Thalbach’s back property in summertime, would shape the soundscape as a kind of acoustical dent (or would it be hill?), a natural feature that would deform the experience of other sounds as its summer-time omnipresence shades and colors the other sounds in its proximity.

Measures from their study that could be particular useful for other projects (like my own) are these:

• Source (bird, frog, car…)
• Area sampled
• Timestamp
• Origin: biological, geological, anthropological
• Meaning: background, foreground

I gave some thought to those measures as I trod through graveyards on my research trip. Birds: check. Crickets: Also check. Stream: Yep. Fountain: noted. Bell peals: Cool, I mean, yep. Cars are, of course, historical anachronisms, but they function too as a reminder that the wagons and carts of former time should be accounted for in a historical re-imagining of the past.

To be fair, Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s ultimate interest lies in the mapping and manipulations that computer modeling allows, and it is indeed fascinating stuff. But for me, at this point, the pragmatic elements of parsing the sound-world had more ready applicability, and it is that more humanistic element of their study that I have shared here.  A link to their full study is in the notes below.

TAKE-AWAY
Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou offer a handy model for thinking about sound as measurable yet deeply experiential. While their research is oriented toward computational modeling and A-V replication, its implications extend beyond technical applications. Their framework provides a useful lens for humanistic inquiries, helping us parse how environments, past and present, are aurally constructed and mediated. In particular, their model of a sound-mediated understanding of environment emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal variability in soundscapes. It also inadvertently underscores the ways in which individual memory and perception shape our understanding of sound. My own reflections on convent narratives and historical re-imaginings highlight how memory itself can function as an imagination-informed soundscape—one in which readers contribute their own inner sonic realities to narratives that seem on the surface to be silent.

In short, whether addressed to the recorded sounds of a contemporary Grecian landscape (them) or to the imagined echoes of historical spaces (me), Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s measures offer a method for attending more carefully to the role of sound in shaping experience.

---

WORKS CITED: 

Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds Blog, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com, 19 Feb 2025.

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2. Brixen 1896.

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece. Digital copy available here.

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.

“Bulgy enlargement” and medieval hearing loss: Insights from Flohr and Kierdorf (2022)

 

Bulgy enlargement of ear canal signaled by black arrows (from Flohr and Kierdorf 2022)

This post is a response to (and a brief meditation on) the recent work of Flohr and Kierdorf on two medieval skeletons showing signs of hearing loss:

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. (2022). Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4), 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Since I’ve just spent a lively month developing a music and madness unit within our music history course for majors, I’ve already been reading and thinking a lot about paleopathology and diagnosis of illnesses of the past and their implications for human experience.

So, when I tripped across the Flohr and Kierdorf article on bone loss in the ear from the middle ages, it was sitting smack dab in the middle of some weird Venn diagram of transient interests.

• Ears and hearing, check.
• Past illnesses, check.
• Medieval, check.
• Soundscapes (and their absence), check.

TBH, I’m in it for the weird facts. I am not a medical person, nor do I play one on TV; I come at this as a humanist, and as someone still –STILL – bothered by ear issues of my own (Today makes it four months of otitis media and associated tinnitus, egad).

TWO DISEASES, TWO DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES

So, in the “learn something new every day” category, there are two separate diseases that can cause external auditory canal problems. External ear canal cholesteatoma (EACC) is the one most commonly diagnosed out of the past, whereas their finding of keratosis obturans in one of the skeletons is new.

Keratosis obturans, I learned from Piepergerdes et al. (1980), is a disease in which keratin (that stuff from hair and nails) accumulates in the ear, causing acute biting pain and hearing loss. It gradually forces the external auditory canal to widen, but doesn’t actually damage bone.

EACC, on the other hand, is (layman translating): skin overgrowth that inflames the area wrapping around the ear bones – periosteitis, in other words. It’s sort of like having shin splints, but in your ear. Symptoms are more an ache than an ow, plus hearing loss. This is the one that causes osteonecrosis – the bone can be damaged and deteriorate if it’s left untreated.

Of the two diseases, Keratosis obturans is more common than EACC, at least in the 21^st century. However, it has been missing in the paleopathology record until now.

WHAT THEY FOUND

Flohr and Kierdorf point out that both Keratosis obturans and EACC lead to enlargement and perforation of the external auditory canal wall. They call that expansion “bulgy enlargement,” and call it out in their images (as shown in the title card for today's blog post, above).

The “why” of that skeletal deformation seems obvious to a layman (me) when you look at the way that “stuff” fills up the ear canal in Keratosis obturans. Chartrand’s Figures 5 and 6 give you an idea of how that works – the left image is several months in, the right hand one is at 5 years. Can you even imagine? Oy! Modern images from Chartrand 2013

Chartrand's images of Keratosis obturans at 4 mo. and 5 yrs

For this study, Flohr and Kierdorf examined two medieval skeletons:

• The first skeleton was of a 6th-8th c woman age >50. Her skeleton comes from a well-studied town graveyard.
  
• The second was a man age >50 from the monastery of St. Lorenz at Schöningen.We don't know if he was a monk or a lay brother; we just know that he was buried in the monastery graveyard some time (unspecified) in the late Middle Ages.
  

While both had “bulgy enlargement” of the ear canal, the second skeleton also had involvement of the mastoid, but the first didn’t. In other words, the woman had Keratosis obturans, and the man had EACC.

WHY IT MATTERS

The “why” provided by Flohr and Kierdorf is all about the ability to distinguish one disease from another, and that’s remarkably cool. Distinguishing between these diseases enriches our understanding of health conditions in the past, and theirs was the first to find Keratosis obturans in the archaeological record. Nifty stuff!

My own “why” is a little bit different, though. I’m thinking about the ways in which these two medieval individuals experienced the world around them.

The woman with Keratosis Obturans would have been hard of hearing, that bugaboo of the aging process. But she’d also likely have had moments of “the twitch,” that head jerking response to stabbing pain in the ear. Such pain may not have intruded very often, but she was living with pain as a regular occurrence. The world around her might still have been beautiful, but she would surely have had moments of wishing she could hear the bird singing, or follow the conversation more closely, and other moments of just wishing it would all stop. Ear pain can be the worst. Keratosis obturans was for her likely a loss, and one that plagued her on a regular basis. On the other hand, as they say, each day above the ground is a day for celebration.

The monastic man with EACC (who had also had several broken ribs, a broken arm, and other signs of hard living) was similarly hard of hearing, but his ear only ached. He too would have missed the birds, and frustrated his companions in his inattention and jumbled responses to conversational gambits. But for him, the ache of old bones and the ache of the ear might have been apiece, similar in their experiential implications. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.

A WORLD MADE MUFFLED

What’s amazing is to think about the fact that we have these clues into the sound-world of these older medieval individuals just by the signs and signals of the bones they left behind.

For both individuals, we can tell that the vibrant soundscapes of youth were now behind them; they lived in a muted world.

• Given its more muffled nature, the world would have had mysterious almost-sounds that they’d be trying to decipher.

• They’d mix up conversational answers because they were only guessing at what the person speaking to them had said. That can be embarrassing and can also strain relationships.

• They might have developed some skill with lipreading (it’s a godsend, truly), but it doesn’t fully make up for what one hears through the ears, and the world goes silent when you turn around to write on the board – oh wait, that’s me. Try, … and the room went silent when when they turned to pick up the water pitcher.

• Knock-to-enter might not have worked as a signal any more; overall acoustical signals would have become increasingly unreliable as time went by.

• In particular, their use of the natural world and its auditory signals was no longer reliable. The sudden hush of the adjacent forest as a predator (or really any big bulky critter) comes through might not have grabbed their attention as it would have in their youth; they might have been unaware of the bleating lamb needing attention; the call of the rooster in the morning might not have served as wake up call now that the sound didn’t penetrate through as once it had.

SKELETON STORIES

In short, these skeletal clues offer something remarkable: a glimpse into the lived realities of medieval individuals as shaped by their embodied experience and its relationship to the world around them. The stories etched (or pressed) into bone invite us to imagine what it meant to listen, to strain to hear, to ache and hurt, and yet to adapt in a time not so very different from our own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chartrand, Max Stanley. “Beware the Septic Keratosis Obturans: Stealth Public Health Threat” (March 2013): DOI: 10.4172/2161-119X.1000283

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4) (2022): 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Piepergerdes, M C et al. “Keratosis obturans and external auditory canal cholesteatoma.” The Laryngoscope vol. 90,3 (1980): 383-91. doi:10.1002/lary.5540900303

Smooth or Spiky? November’s Sound Samples (12/2/24)

A cylinder ("smooth") and a spiky call-out box ("spiky")

As I have sought to be more intentional in my listening (and as my ear is gradually coming back online from that oh-so-long otitis media), I spent some time gathering samples of sound that struck me in particular ways. 

I’ll start with the sounds 

Example 1: Rain, in the middle of the night, in a tent:

 

Example 2: NYC, with honking cars and the murmur of the VERY crowded street:

Example 3: NYC, the background "swoosh" of street noise:

Example 4: LIRR (Long Island Rail) and its clackety clackety:

Example 5: Bird babbles on suburban Long Island:

What is interesting to me is the different emotional import of the various sounds. Rain is entirely soothing (except for the fact that it woke me up!); the randomness of it is restful, and quickly lulled me back to sleep. (It helped that the waterproofing worked!)

The NYC background noise of example 3, on the other hand, has much the same pattern of noise, with a relatively steady state of largely indistinguishable noises -- that city mix of traffic, the building being worked on, the walking noisy crowd, and so on. But the volume of that "swoosh" of noise is read by my viscera as a threat; the sheer volume (running at 70-90 decibels) is a pressure on my soul. Given my 'druthers, I'd rather listen to Example 2, the same ambient noise but with the disruptive honking of an aggressive cab. Why? I suppose it is partly because the spike in sound "fits" with my ground-level assessment of the city. It's at that level of "having a reason" for discomfort -- one can complain about the taxi, but it's harder to justify complaining about background sound -- even if it's nearly overwhelming.

The clacking railroad is back toward the comfortable zone of neutral noises; the cyclic nature of its sound is part of storytelling, after all: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Repetition is soothing, when it has a shape. Perhaps that puts the "swoosh" of street noise into context; being shapeless, there's nothing to listen for, just the inevitability of having to listen to the noises in an ongoing, unending way.

And then there's the recording of the bird babbles. These are happy birds (and some random squirrel tussling with a bush, click click), and they aren't particularly loud. There's an up and down to their individual calls, but they layer up as a mass of simultaneity. In music, it would be relatively dissonant; read as nature noises it fits into a category of the familiar. It's soothing, even if the assemblage is about as complicated as that of the city noises, with everyone talking at once.

The sounds we encounter at random shape us in ways we often don’t always consciously realize. They thread their way through our emotions and perceptive habits with their textures, patterns, and (especially) volumes. Reflecting on November's sound samples, I've been struck by the tangible interplay of smoothness and spikiness, and especially by how their combinations "read differently" depending on context. Repetition can soothe or grate depending on the narrative we assign it; randomness too can comfort or unsettle. Context lets us transform noise into music (sound organized in time) or cacophony (random unpleasantness), drawing on our emotions to do so. This is why the music sounds in clubs or restaurants can excite some patrons and utterly annoy others; they are placed differently within the internal narrative each listener brings to the moment.

This exercise in intentional listening has reminded me that soundscapes are as much about how we listen as about the sounds themselves. Rain becomes restful because I associate it with shelter and safety; honking cabs feel less intrusive than the city’s unrelenting roar because they narrate a story I can respond to. Even the chaos of bird babbles draws me in, not for its order, but for its vibrant vitality. (That dad’s a birder brings those sounds special meaning, and that’s relevant too!)

Sound, whether smooth or spiky, asks us to tune in—to its rhythms, to the silences (sometimes) interspersed within, and to the ways it resonates within us, both in a physical sense of vibrating WITH the train, and in an emotive sense of what memory/memories it pokes into recollection. Each sound carries its own emotional baggage; in listening carefully, we not only hear the world more clearly but perhaps hear our own inner thoughts as well.

Earlids of the early 1900s (11/21/2024)

Earlids of the early 1900s (with image of an ear)

The question of earlids being on my mind, and the airport being boring so boring, I decided to troll around the historical corpus of writings and see what earlids meant to the world before R Murray Schafer brought them to our habits of modern thought. I have five examples for today’s post, each doing something different.

EDISON – EARLIDS AS CONCENTRATION
The first is an anecdote about Thomas Edison. Many of us remember that he had been made partially deaf by maltreatment – a box to the ears from which he never fully recovered.

In our “earlid” anecdote, the interviewer asks Edison about his deafness, and he (like my exam-taking sister of my earlier earlid post) finds the concentration that partial deafness affords to be a strength. He’s asked if he plans to take the surgery which medical wisdom of the day thought would provide a “cure.” His response? “What! And give up the great advantage I have over the rest of you fellows!”

The interviewer then opines: there is a strong need, he thinks, for earlids as well as eyelids in this world.

In this world, then, earlids provide a form of concentration. They’re akin to headphones, filtering out the irrelevant so one can think one’s thoughts in peace.

TELEPHONE – EARLIDS AS SHUTTERS
Another take comes from the same journal, responding to the new technology:

This telephone business brings out strongly another of those little defects in the design of the human body which are becoming apparent nowadays. The ear is an exceedingly intricate and generally satisfactory piece of apparatus, but it was its limitations. Occasion has been taken before to speak of the regrettable absence of earlids for the shutting out of unpleasant sounds. The man at the telephone to whom some one else is trying to speak at the same time suddenly discovers that although he has two ears they will not work separately. It looks like a waste of natural material for a man to have two ears and to be obliged to listen with both at once. How much better it would be if he could listen to the telephone with one and take in conversations in his immediate neighborhood with the other!

So, if earlids could shut out unwanted sounds, we could use them to mute the external world while we communed on the telephone. Of course, here a century later, that’s such a habit that it’s now practically invisible. The anonymous observer of the earlier 20th century had a better outcome in mind, though: wouldn’t it be better if we could listen to two conversations at once? (I suspect that our Gen-Z colleagues would think that under-ambitious! So much swiping! So many intersecting worlds! So many simultaneous windows open!)

GOSSIP – EARLIDS AS A MORAL TOOL
Medical doctor and essayist George Abbott, on the other hand, is thinking about earlids as a doctor’s tool – to handle preventative moral intervention. In a column devoted primarily to the glass dropper method of cleansing the ear with enzymol, he tells a story about earlids that he suggests be shared with the child patient. Two college co-eds were talking, and one asked the other, “would it not be fine if there were earlids as well as eyelids? Then when anyone said anything against one, they could shut their earlids.” Her interlocutor is having none of it: “yes, but who’d shut them?” We’re nosy, in other words, we want to know.  

Ah, Abbott encourages us, the skillful doctor could then use this story to reinforce the important moral lesson: the pus he’s cleaning out with the enzymol is not as poisonous as vile stories, and the caring doctor should thus tell the child: stay clean and pure; close your earlids against gossip. To him, pretending you have earlids is the moral choice. He wants his colleagues to share both story and lesson, because a doctor is like a godfather to the child. He’s bowing to Ovid’s discussion of rumor (Metamorphoses, Bk XII), of course, and for him, earlids (Ovid’s closed doors on the threshold) are about ignoring “vile stories” and tending only to good and moral thoughts.

BABIES AND THE ABSENCE OF EARLIDS (Saleeby’s theory of 1905) – EARLIDS AND URBAN NOISE, EARLIDS AND EVOLUTION
A surprisingly influential observation about the human absence of earlids was made by eugenicist and physician Caleb W. Saleeby. Two years before he helped to launch the Eugenics Education Society (yeah, ick), he had already developed a popular presence in the press with his medical opinings. One of them, that received quite a few follow-ups, was an essay that investigated (and I use that term loosely) why it is that humans lack earlids:

For sleep it is desirable to exclude light and sound: but whilst we have eyelids, no apparatus for closing the ears is known save, I believe, in certain animals which inhabit the sea, and whose ears are of small auditory importance. In these days, when barrel organs assail us with the “Ave Maria,” playing Bach’s accompaniment in G and Gounod’s air in somewhat more than G, and when the motor car makes night hideous, one sighs for earlids.

And I have even wondered why natural selection has not so endowed us: for it might seem an advantage to be able at will to protect one’s nervous system from sound as from light.But it occurred to me that I had not appreciated the significance of the “infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry” – crying, however, not for the light but for its food. It would be a sorry business if a child had to rely for its nocturnal refreshment upon the willingness and ability of its mother to keep awake, or to waken spontaneously when wanted. This, perhaps, may partially explain our deprivation of earlids.

Crocodilian researchers would protest at the characterization of their field as “small auditory importance” since, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the excellence of hearing, its tracking ability which has proven to include directional hearing via pressure differential in the middle ear cavities – which is cool! A single alligator ear can tell direction! Wow! (Bierman et al. 2014).

But also, Saleeby gives us context. We want earlids because of urban noise, and that noise is defined in part in musical terms – the oppression of an out-of-tune barrel organ playing a too-popular hit – and then in technological ones, with the nighttime noise of that newfangled automobile a contributor to what we moderns might call noise rot – the ugly deterioration of a once pristine soundscape.

And why don’t we have them? Because mothers need to tend to crying babies. It’s an adaptive trait, he’s claiming, to not be able to shut out noise at night.

Of course, people pushed back on his claims of sleep; his notion that humans only indulged in surface sleep is easily debunked, and his gendering of the nighttime-listening claims are equally fraught. But one didn’t need evidence to be influential, and that influence even made its way across the channel into France.

PARIS 1907: EARLIDS, URBAN NOISE,  AND THE LUDDITE PERSPECTIVE
In a short column for The Musical Courier, an anonymous essayist picks up Saleeby’s complaints about urban noise. In doing so, he evokes “the agitation over here [Paris] on the noises of cities,” and claims that concern about these intruding noises “has reached a point of insisting upon official investigation.” We’re in crisis because, he points out, “The automobile and the motor-bus are not respecters of the public ear.” Once upon a time, the horse car ran with “a minimum of noise,” but now all those modern inventions are a hazard, “both as to dust and to noise.” The essayist notes that there’s been scientific investigation of the sanitary aspects of noise, and calls (sensibly) for tires that will minimize noise in the landscape, but he’s also quick to jump to the “nervous ailment” that is the result of all that newfangled stuff. Our health is at risk from all these infernal machines.

The author cites Saleeby by name (and preaches his brand of evolutionary thinking), but is perhaps a bit more nuanced (or more aware of others’ critiques about sleep) than was Saleeby himself. The Musical Courier correspondent reminds the reader that the noise “of the ‘bus, of the elevated, of the milk cart, of the rumbling coal cart, can be dismissed by the mother and will not affect her sleep, but only a movement, a change in the rhythm of the breath of the baby, and she is awake.”  We can tune out the systematic background noise, but the unexpected or the worrisome sound will intrude and poke us awake by way of our sense of hearing.

What the author does do that is important (and approved by OSHA, I’m sure!) is to consider the way in which urban noise might impact the musician. The delicacy of the musical ear, he claims, and especially its need to differentiate “infinitesimal tonal allusions,” is at risk by all this landscape noise. Even talking loudly can lead to the “corruption” of the listening faculty. How much more dangerous is that “havoc” from the technological noises descending “into the streets and roads every day.” This is at heart a Luddite perspective; the new technology is bad and damaging, and we should do what we can to shut it down. The early call in the essay for better tires (that would make less noise) gives way for an imagined future of air travel, the “only relief” that the writer can imagine.

(He’d clearly never yet heard an airplane’s roar! On the early development of flight in Europe, see https://applications.icao.int/postalhistory/aviation_history_early_developments_in_europe.htm. The air is imagined more as a hot-air balloon kind of space than one with motors and engines to clutter up the soundwaves. Oh, the irony of thinking about this in an airport context! Sooooo much noise!)

I spend time on the Musical Courier essay because it does raise the issue of soundscape in the context of the earlid theme that’s got my attention at the moment. This author positions the earlid as a kind of Luddite tool, one that could have blocked technological noises specifically, not just urban ones. He isn’t interested in blocking out “unwanted” noise, but rather the damaging noises that come from these newly invented tools that are overrunning the landscape. Motors cause noise and dust. The practical solution is to investigate and regulate them; the fantastical solution is to invent our way out of the damaging sound-moment in history. This isn’t pure Luddite --there’s perhaps a salvic capacity in technology of the far future – but it’s at the least a technology-resistant perspective. Motors here are all noise and no benefit, and their appeal is invisible. We are left to their noisy consequences.

CONCLUSION
These five glimpses of earlids from the first decade of the twentieth century are interesting to me for several reasons. 

First, the conceptual notion of the earlid is clearly in the early twentieth-century conversation; it’s coming up in engineering, in medicine, and in music. That cross-disciplinarity suggests the power of metaphor as meme, spreading and shaping thinking of the period. (Thank you Peter Bailey 1996 -- important legwork on how to think about such things in history!) 

Second, the multivalency of earlids is important too, for they are at once moral filters and anti-technology assessments, a screening tool or a focusing one. They – in their absence -- are even read as an evolutionary tool. The earlid as a point of reference shows the crossover of various strains of thought in a time of intellectual ferment. 

Third, these imagined earlids reflect early 20th-century anxieties about controlling soundscapes and are in a way a precursor to today’s focus on noise-canceling technologies. We have headphones and those little foam dispensaries in libraries and at construction sites; we practice mindfulness and build apps that let us move away mentally from noise and chaos to at least an inner stillness. They had words, and complaint processes, and regulations, and essays. But what is clear to me from the earlid discussions then and now is that we all share a concern about the soundscapes we inhabit.

A BRIEF EARLID BIBLIOGRAPHY

1900s literature on Earlids, a sampling:

•  [Anon.] “Reflections: On Paris, London, Nordica and Mahler.” The Musical Courier No. 1424 (July 10, 1907): 5.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on Edison].” Electrical Review 38 No. 17 (April 27, 1901): 520.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on the telephone].” Electrical Review 38 No. 26 (May 18, 1901): 626.
•  Abbott, George E. “The Doctor and the Child.” The Southern California Practitioner 22 (1907): 15.
•  Saleeby, C.W. “Helpless Infancy.” The Academy (28 Jan 1905): 87.

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

•  Bailey, Peter. "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise," Body & Society, 2(2) (1996): 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X96002002003
•  McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
•  Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000)
•  Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.

19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill:

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213
• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.