Klong Toey market is a sprawling way station for something like half of the produce that reaches Bangkok’s restaurants every day, and no small amount of its meat and home goods either. Industrial-sized clear garbage bags full of limes are tossed from the backs of trucks, palettes of morning glory and parsley block the footpath, and whole pigs dangle freshly- swaying gutted at face level. It’s a bit horrific, not to mention a surrealist triumph of sorts.

Klong Toey is not at all for tourists. I saw no others and felt more than a few confused vendors’ eyes on me. The real action happens around four or five in the morning, with a noticeable slowdown by seven. As eight rolls around, the choice stuff is long gone. Some of the vendors, all but sold out, fold up their tables and enjoy a beer after a long night’s work. Come eleven AM, the place is a ghost town.

In addition to being gory and temporally inconvenient, Klong Toey is situated near one of the rougher areas of the city, a slum by the same name. The market is generally under the influence of the mafia and drug dealers who hold power in much of the slum. Every couple years, a bomb goes off late at night in the market, often with fatal results, as a warning shot in a turf war over stall position.

Given this humorlessness, it is undoubtedly a luxury to be able to aestheticize the sights and sounds of the market. And yet those dimensions are compelling. Like any tight and crowded space with a lot at stake, the vendors have refined a system of niche-based shouting to convey meaning amid the noise. What sounds like utter chaos to outsiders actually involves many layers of address – product pitches come one way, warnings to clear the path another, and machines another still. There is a kind of ecosystem at work:

Airline toothbrush seller, Klong Toey Marker. November, 2010. 3:01.

In this, a woman who got her hands on a bunch of airline freebies – toothbrushes, toiletry cases, eye pillows – is selling them for rock-bottom prices near a cooler of cold drinks, aided by a tape-recorded advertisement plugged in to a little bullhorn.

The repetitive, mechanical voice of the recording occupies a unique niche adjacent to the warmth of human chatter. The vendor echoes and so punctuates her own tape.

–

Many vendors also keep pets in the market. Cats and dogs, just like on the side streets in the rest of the city, may or may not have homes, but people look after them as a good deed, a means of what’s often called making merit. (This commitment is motivated, to varying degrees, by Buddhist principles). Thus the market is filled with mangy, un-spayed or -neutered, but nevertheless well-fed animals.

In addition to cats and dogs, people keep songbirds in wooden cages above the front of their stalls. These are kept specifically for the beauty of their voices, as aural trimming:

Songbirds in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 2:01.

—

The market, having been active for decades, is … seasoned. The people and objects that make it up have spent many years jostling for space (physical, political, sonic) until things have settled into a raging stasis. The result is not pretty in a conventional sense, save for the odd perfect pineapple, but there is grandeur in the coexistence of messy details, in the way that everything manages to work.

A vendor rolls coconuts into a basin:

Rolling coconuts in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 1:51.

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
by Gordon Hempton
Free Press, 2009
368 pps., $26 ($4.20 used on Abebooks.com)

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
by Steve Goodman
The MIT Press, 2009
240 pps., $35 ($25.20 on Amazon)

“As for cost-benefit analysis,” Gordon Hempton begins a climactic soliloquy to an audience of frowning Federal Aviation Administration agents, “we have three million visitors to Olympic Park each year. We’ve had two timber mills close. I have seen the poverty in the town of Port Angeles. I live there at the park. To be designated the world’s first quiet place and to develop quiet tourism in that area – let me tell you, I do a lot of traveling and it is so noisy. There is a tourist need for this quiet place. It would be a tremendous benefit.” ^[1]

Hempton is a professional sound artist with a Utopian environmental streak, and he arrived in Washington D.C. with a mission. His conversation with the FAA concludes a cross-country funeral for a time when you could still hear yourself think, damn it, a death he’d like very much to undo. He blames noisy machines and an etiquette deficit for the deadly din, but is pitching his one square inch of silence campaign in an effort to turn things around and restore some peace and quiet.

^[2]

The proposition is simple: reroute a few planes each day, and the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park will be perfectly free of man-made noise, especially the mechanical kind, at all times. According to Hempton’s empirical calculations – and he is an impressively-credentialed listener – the Hoh is the last place in the United States where this condition might yet be possible. But if one place can reach that state, perhaps visitors will awaken to the value of silence, and spread the word.

Hempton’s mission is deeply sincere, and he can be convincing. His field recordings in national parks are among the loveliest I’ve heard, infinitely more attentive to species and their spaces than garden variety “nature sounds” recordings. (The book comes with a CD that aurally annotates each leg of his trip.)

The most urgent argument in the book is that human beings are not the only sonically-aware species on the planet. When a given ecosystem gets noisy, animals that communicate through sound must either compensate or leave. A substantial body of research attests to these ecological effects; Hempton gives us a visceral sense. Further, for species that instinctively associate loud noise with predators, industrial sound will always compel them to flee – there is no potential to rationalize the source, as there may be with humans. Without question, sound needs to be folded into any environmental conversation that wants to consider other species.

Unfortunately, in the move from awareness to political action, things get murkier. Except for brief passages where he admits a nostalgia for the quaint aurality of trains, baseball, and local restaurants, Hempton paints all human sound as a blight. If you’d never lived in a city, you might think they existed to steal your hearing – thank goodness the trip doesn’t run through New York. Bluntly, the wholesale dismissal of urban space for containing too much human sound is a brash move when more than half the world’s population lives in such places.

The reader may want to know: What options exist for urbanites? This isn’t really Hempton’s concern. During the meeting with the FAA, however, something predictable happens, suggesting that perhaps it should be: the conversation turns to money. Flight patterns cannot be rerouted, the FAA reps insist, because even a brief deviation from a straight line costs precious minutes, which means burning extra fuel, which means significantly higher ticket costs in a climate where even pretzels are a luxury.

Hempton fantasizes that airline passengers might be willing to pay more for the knowledge that their flight was not disrupting a delicate serenity below. Even if that were true, this moment in the book compels us to reflect on the entire journey: the journalist drove a rattling VW bus across the entire United States, with a brief intermission to fly back to Washington state from Chicago, and at the end shipped the bus back coast-to-coast to avoid it breaking down on the way. The amount of noisy travel time logged in the name of silence here was tremendous. And that is not to mention the equipment – cell phones, laptops, noise meters – that had to be manufactured and shipped, nor the importation of gas, and so forth. I mention these things not to paint Hempton as a hypocrite, which I have no reason to think him, but to suggest that in a globalized, capitalist world, human noise (and pollution more broadly) is a consequence of everything we undertake – including activism. There are simply too many people on the planet, with too many modern tendencies that speak to plenty of legitimate needs, to think that we can return to a noiseless Utopia. Even the success of Olympic Park as a mecca for quiet-seekers would be self-defeating, once too many people showed up. The only way around this would be a capitalist dystopia in which everyone was isolated, all the time, in their own soundproof pod, a future that Hempton is too much of a humanist to be tempted by.

The challenge thus becomes creating a thoughtful and ethical soundscape, one that doesn’t bother portraying human sound as unnatural since we all know it’s inevitable – one that thinks about the modern sonic environment like an architect and a good citizen.

The book that takes us there remains to be written. (If it arrives as a book at all.) But in the meantime, Steve Goodman offers an opening. The appeal of his new monograph, “Sonic Warfare,” is to consider the politics of sonic frequency in addition to volume, specifically within capitalism.^[3] Though the distinction between volume and frequency may seem merely technical, it certainly has its consequences. Differently pitched sounds do different things to bodies, within the audible spectrum as well as above and below it. Unfortunately, the recent history of research on the effects of frequency has largely taken place within the military and industry for the sake of coercion. Paranoid Cold War technicians failed to find a sonic magic bullet that might paralyze the enemy’s will, but modern security forces make liberal use of illiberal technologies like the Mosquito, the LRAD, and the Rumbler. This is an addition to Muzak and other vaguely musical decorations meant to keep consumers docile.

If noise, for Hempton, is the consequence of neglect – a mound of radioactive garbage that humanity refuses to stop feeding – for Goodman it is itself an ecosystem in need of tending. He argues that the human sonic environment has been polluted not only by sound that moves bodies through space (a “sonic architecture of control”^[4]), but by sound that conditions people for things that haven’t even happened yet – a creepy futurity that fills us with dread. Instinct and culture here are separate but complementary domains: Noise above 80 decibels activates a low-level fight-or-flight response in the human body, making us jittery, and the effect is enhanced through specific sounds: “burglar alarms, ring tones, alarm clock, fire alarms: a whole directly affective asignifying semiotics of emergency, a call to action, the inducement of a state of readiness, initiating a kind of technical antiphony. Wake up! Run! Beware! Respond! Act!” ^[5] Noise suddenly sounds less like a pollutant and more like a deliberate form of control, rewarding some while limiting others.

In less intentional moments, sound may also behave like a virus, moving among hosts. Earworms, for example, extend the ubiquity of sonic logos (Goodman suggests that corporations are well-attuned, these days, to sonic branding) long after they’re played aloud. This type of virus is a mild but not insignificant problem for the host, who during infection may pass the worm on to others. Meanwhile, the viral metaphor is an apt description for modern music distribution, in which piracy and traditional control are harder and harder to tell apart. To his credit, Goodman does not commit to an equation of pirate resistance with liberation – like a virus, sound mutates, and will certainly have unintended effects, both good and bad. The book ends with a strong rebuke to the techno-optimists: “The military makes nonstandard use of popular music, while underground music cultures make nonstandard use of playback technologies, communications, and power infrastructures.” ^[6] Once technologies exist, they are politically up-for-grabs.

However, he is sensitive to the fact that sounds are not only made to control, but also to empower. Special consideration is given (a la Kodwo Eshun and Paul Gilroy) to figures in black music who thematize race as an ongoing history of alienation, including the least-literal-luminaries of free jazz, Detroit techno, and DJ culture, and who offer their art in all sincerity as a means of short-circuiting the system. Deep bass, for example, felt more than heard, can be euphoric, resulting in the precise opposite effect of crowd-scattering security devices.

Still, as much considered attention as it pays to artwork, “Sonic Warfare” is neither a piece of music appreciation nor a map, through music, to liberation. Rather, it offers frequency as a much-needed addition to the field of sonic ecology, and draws our attention as ecologists to the realm of human relations. It is in fact tempting to say that, despite their often profound differences as writers and philosophers, Hempton and Goodman actually complement one another as sonic ecologists. They share, if nothing else, a defiant stance toward the predatory tendencies of capitalism. And Goodman’s gesture toward frequency is one that cannot be taken too seriously by someone like Hempton. Simply put, this is because other animals hear at different frequencies than we do – a dBA reading says little about how human noise affects bats, since the bulk of their communication occurs too high in the frequency band for us to pick up with our ears.

The trick, now, is to develop a sonic ecology sophisticated enough to tell us something about the interworkings of biology – not just human biology – and capitalism.

Footnotes

^[1]
Hempton, p. 311

^[2]
Hempton, CD accompanying “One Square Inch of Silence.” Track 5.

^[3]
Hempton measures everything in dBA, a variation on standard decibels that assigns different frequencies specific weights according to how loud we hear them, rather than as absolute pressure in the air.

^[4]
Goodman, p. 64

^[5]
Goodman, p. 66

^[6]
Goodman, p. 194

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/04/review-3-sonic-ecologies/feed/ 11 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/12/21/sea-bass-sound-as-an-oceanic-environmental-issue/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/12/21/sea-bass-sound-as-an-oceanic-environmental-issue/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:26:23 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=823

Increased CO2 emissions caused by marine shipping have made the ocean less acoustically absorbent. As a result, animal sounds travel further, creating an underwater cacophony that may affect marine life.

The journal Nature Geoscience published a letter online yesterday suggesting these findings.

The researchers claim that oceanic pH levels have declined (i.e., become more acidic) due to a greater prevalence of CO2, especially in regions such as the North Atlantic that have lots of commercial ship traffic. As the water becomes increasingly acidic, a number of key sound-absorbing chemicals are broken down, and the marine atmosphere becomes far more resonant, particularly at low frequencies, near what human beings hear as bass.

For animals that communicate in this frequency range, the sonic environment may thus become cluttered and confusing. We can imagine an analogue of mass amplification on land: it is as if, gradually, the air began to carry people’s voices further and further, until conversations a block away were audible in our living room. We would feel stress, frustration, a compulsion to move to more remote places, and a need to reformulate our interactions in significant ways. Although the recent study does not include any behavioral research (though such research has been conducted elsewhere), the authors clearly imply that animals could act on similar impulses, with consequences for ecosystems.

For Sound Studies, these findings demonstrate the relevance of sonic material to any robust understanding of environments. The aural field is not absolutely divided from the chemical one. In fact, changes in either can affect the other directly. But because of a general prejudice about the distinction between senses (hearing and feeling, for example), the materiality of sound is not empirically obvious. As a result, sound is mainly interpreted as a source phenomenon, rather than as stuff that propagates and accumulates – that itself constitutes environments, and that thus should be a site of empathy. This connects to earlier discussions in the present space.

Finally, the situation underwater resonates with the actual situation above it, albeit owing to different causes. Technology – subwoofers, heavy traffic, air conditioners – is often the culprit when we complain about noise. More powerful devices mean that our everyday actions are broadcast further and further to a wide, if inadvertent, audience. Like seals and whales, we have to adapt our communications in response to the increased volume and density, inevitably faring better in some efforts than others.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/12/21/sea-bass-sound-as-an-oceanic-environmental-issue/feed/ 0 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/05/my-favorite-recordings-ever-2-the-syrinx/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/05/my-favorite-recordings-ever-2-the-syrinx/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:19:47 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=287 The physiology of the avian vocal apparatus is a lot more complex than the human’s. Birds have an organ called a syrinx (named for the Greek nymph – this is a human name, not a bird one – ed.) that sits at the bottom of the trachea. The human larynx, by contrast, is at the top.

The membranes of the syrinx are controlled by muscles with a degree of nuance that humans cannot match. Furthermore, the lower anatomical position of the vocal organ – at the base of the bronchi – allows all kinds of neat tricks, including the ability to make two totally different sounds at once. This is employed in birdsong to neat effect.

Thus, whereas humans mimic environmental sounds with relatively low fidelity (a few outstanding exceptions aside), certain birds (passerines, or songbirds, in particular) can instantly produce dead-on impressions of anything they hear, from the calls of their relatives to the voices of other species to man-made machines in operation. Evolutionarily, this seems to be a means of demonstrating physical health for mating and combat, as well as communications. The birds with the loudest and most complex voices are obviously the fittest.

This is a famous video from David Attenborough’s BBC Wildlife series showing the superb lyrebird in action. It starts cool and then gets unbelievable, but you can believe it now because you understand a little about how it works:

Many questions open up after watching this bird imitate cameras, chainsaws, and car alarms. One of these is cognitive – how do birds process and store environmental information in order to reproduce it themselves? Another is philosophical – if humans, like birds, are material beings that respond throughout their lives to external stimuli, then where can we locate such precious concepts as agency, creativity, and inspiration? Are these really only human things, or do birds have them, too? Or are they suspect?

A third question, perhaps most germane to sound studies, is about the role of vocal mimicry in environments and ecosystems. The superb lyrebird’s speech not only suggests certain behaviors that evolution made inherent, but also makes clear just how closely the nonhuman world listens to our every action. The environmental movement has gotten us used to thinking about the consequences of our garbage, but we have only just begun to investigate how less tangible phenomena like sound can also affect living things. There is a small but growing body of work about how human and mechanical sound affect migratory patterns and stress levels in birds, particularly in urban areas.

Birds not only have more flexible vocal apparatuses than humans, but they also hear both above and below our range. As a result, much of what affects them will not be immediately obvious to us – we simply lack the anatomical means to be sensually sympathetic without further intellectual effort. The fact is that other beings, with different sensory equipment, inhabit sensory worlds that we do not. These sensory overlays, however inaccessible they may be to us, are nevertheless a critical part of ecosystems. In issuing sounds that we perceive as irrelevant, minimally intrusive, or simply necessary to development, we may well be wielding little bird LRADs, intruding on sensual territory in ways that can induce significant behavioral and environmental change. This is a process that we’ve only begun to study with any specificity, but the lyrebird’s imitations should alert us to its depth.

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