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.

 

It’s not time travel: sound modeling of 1622 St Paul’s (10/31/24)

1625 Woodcut of St Paul's (from Wall 2014)

Wall, John. “Recovering Lost Acoustic Spaces: St. Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard in 1622.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 3.3 (2014). https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/

Sound modeling offers powerful insights about the past, but it’s not time travel. We can tell important things about our past and query our assumptions about it, but we never get to recreate an exact experience of what “really” happened. 

The NEH-funded Virtual Paul’s Cross project focuses on sermons as performance by examining sound as a component of the sermon experience. Using architectural modeling and acoustic simulation, they take a specific sermon from November 5th, 1622 – delivered by John Donne – and explore its sound signature. 

One of the key questions is “the audibility of a sermon delivered without amplification in a large open space for people positioned at different places in the crowd” – a question interesting for my own work on graveside ceremonies. Relying on a full team (“architects, visual and acoustic modellers, linguists, actors, recording engineers, and historians and literary scholars”) they put together a simulation – the fun part of scholarly productivity! http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu

Their assessment of the world of John Donne comes with important caveats: 

The purpose of digital modelling is not to give direct access to a world that is forever lost to us, but to enable us to organise and experience in new ways the data that come to us from the past and to evaluate from new perspectives both the scope and limitations of our understanding of that data. The outcome of a project using digital modelling is not an exercise in time travel… They are instead constructions based on interpretations of existing data 

That distance from the experience is one I have thought about as I have climbed hills surrounding churches of interest for my own work; without the pastoral provisions of the 15th century, how much even of topographically-shaped work is reflective (a carefully chosen pun!) of the soundworld my communities might have experienced? Since pasture and forest and field each have their own acoustic signature, the modern mix and familiar pathways of a 21st century hiker cannot replicate the historical past. But perhaps there are elements that DO point towards experience – rounding the corner with that glacially-deposited boulder is going to change the church-bell ring. 

In short, I agree with the authors that we use these replicated experiences “to reconceptualise the subject of our study, re-evaluate the usefulness of our existing approaches, and reconsider the kinds of questions we bring to the discussion.” Models help us think better. 

 (And I could use help thinking, for sure!) 

The St Paul’s team has the benefit of a treasure-trove of visual evidence, largely absent for those of us working at the level of town or country, and the authors have paid careful attention to the relative authority of various evidence types. And, since architecture has implied acoustics, they can move from visual parameters to acoustic models. Here, they follow Vorlander (2009), Longair and Boren (2010), and, expecially, Howard and Moretti (2010) on early modern church practices. 

As they note, large crowds, banners, and tapestries on festive occasions increased acoustic absorption. The practices of religion shaped the acoustics of religion, with impacts both on reverb and on musical clarity. 

After explaining why they chose their space-- the north east corner of the churchyard – the authors explain the ambient noises under consideration and the crowd sizes that they used in their modeling. 

They also give details about the kinds of things that the models “do” for them. They ask: What coheres (and what does not)? What assumptions are WE bringing to our experience? In part, the model becomes a useful filter for understanding our data – and even more importantly, its limits. 

One thing I’m noting just for my future attention: the authors distinguish between “representative rather than specific examples” – the absence of a detailed diary entry means that the generic category supplies information for the site that would not be available from the data inherent to the site itself. Thus, the ambient noise is representative randomly occurring sounds. (A background of silence would obviously have been inauthentic.) 

The discussion of their visual modeling is definitely worth a read https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/, but here I’m just going to mention a few things about their sound model: 

1. an accurate model depends on 3 things; the space’s dimensions, the various disrupting forms (“geometric forms”) that are present there, and the materials of which they’re made 
2. in particular, they had to consider the materials of the space: stone, wood, plaster, brick, dirt, and the bodies and clothing of the congregation. This matters in my graveyard ceremony discussions, since so many material goods are mentioned as part and parcel of the ceremony itself. 
3. their model revealed that sound reflections from the buildings SIGNIFICANTLY amplified the speech – it would still be audible 140 feet or more away, instead of dying out at the 96 ft mark. 
4. the ambient noise is, they estimate, 35 Db – far less than the 45 Db of the modern urban environment 
5. bell-based pauses probably have remnants in the text, since a before and after would be necessary to stitch the performance across the bell-peal hole. That’s a really interesting stylistic feature and probably applicable to other kinds of texts as well! 
6. One has to imagine the voice, but a strong and measured cadence would be most effective given crowd size (and public expectation) 

As we are less than a week out from the anniversary of the Gunpowder Day sermon, I thought now a good time to review the process that the group took to a plausible reconstruction of Donne’s sermon as planned. 

But there’s one last twist to share: As every good hiker knows, outdoor delivery of program is beholden to the weather gods, and they did not smile on that Tuesday back in 1622. After all the planning (and reconstruction), that particular sermon had to be moved indoors as the storms rolled through. And that’s the kind of thing that REALLY mucks with your model!