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Environment, Space, Place
Environment, Space, Place
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Author(s):
Elsa M. Lankford
Title:
Urban Soundscapes as Indicators of Urban Health
Urban Soundscapes as Indicators of Urban Health
Issue:
Vol.1/2/2009
Citation
style:
Elsa M. Lankford. "Urban Soundscapes as Indicators of Urban Health". Environment, Space,
Place Vol.1/2:27-50.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=124127
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URBAN SOUNDSCAPES AS
INDICATORS OF URBAN HEALTH
Elsa M. LANKFORD
Towson University
ABSTRACT: Cities of the past enjoyed rich soundscapes full of organic
sounds. Such sounds can be hard to hear, even for those that are listening, in many of today’s cities and neighborhoods. Evaluating the sounds
of life in urban neighborhoods can be one method of determining the
health and vibrancy of an area. A silent neighborhood, one not devoid of
sound or noise, but rather missing the sounds of human and animal life,
can be detrimental to the community and its residents. This paper both
investigates the history of and loss of the diverse urban soundscape and
how it can be reclaimed in modern cities.
Introduction
Urban history is made up of an ebb and flow of population and popularity, rise and fall, death and life. Although methods exist to systematically
measure cities’ peaks and valleys, aesthetic qualities can also be indicators of
the health and vibrancy of urban areas. As cities attract more suburban and
exurban visitors and residents, urban populations have been rising, but like
blood pressure, this is not necessarily a sign of good health. The sounds of
the city, as the city’s sonic heartbeat, indicate the status of health.
“Sound provides an often-ignored element of our conceptualisation
of the urban fabric” (Atkinson 2007, 1905). While noise codes have been
implemented for hundreds of years to silence or lower the volume of certain unwanted sounds, there has been little done to protect and encourage desired sounds. One possible reason is the ability of vision to separate “objects as distinct things, but the heard object is often unseen and
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ELSA M. LANKFORD
unidentified” (S. Adams 1989, 44). Perhaps without the practiced and
cultural ability to classify and view each sound source, the desire to protect is lessened.
The creation of sound involves an action by a person, animal, or machine.
It is difficult to protect an action. It is simpler to protect a cityscape, skyline,
or building, an object onto which a gaze can be affixed. Aesthetic protections
and guidelines apply primarily to visual landmarks. Traditionally, cities offer
protection from sound rather than protection of sound.
Soundscape and Sound Terminology
“Through its complex orchestration of time and space, no less than
through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instruments,
give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality,
could be achieved by any single piece” (Mumford 1938, 4).
While the word soundscape did not exist during his time, Lewis Mumford, among others, heard beyond the increasing noise of the modern city
streets.
R. Murray Schaefer, a composer and author, developed the term and
the concept of soundscape in 1977 in his book, Tuning of the World. A
soundscape is made up of multiple layers of sounds, just as a landscape
is made up of layers from foreground to background. Schaefer uses the
term “sound signals” to represent foreground sounds, sounds that have
differentiated themselves from the background. “Soundmarks,” like landmarks, are unique features to a soundscape (Schafer 1994, 10).
Listening to a soundscape “provides a means of exploring the more
ephemeral and shifting elements of urbanism” (Atkinson 2007, 1,905).
Sounds cannot be concrete. They exist in time for a short while, unless
they have been etched into vinyl, iron, or ones and zeroes. An urban
soundscape can instantly let listeners know what life there is in the city,
should they choose to listen.
Recording of sounds and soundscapes of cities has been going on for
years, far before Edison invented the phonograph. Authors and writers
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have documented and fictionalized the sounds that surround them.
These interpretations are affected by many factors, including the listener’s class, race, gender, and education. Even with these recollections and
descriptions of what sounds enveloped an area, the consumption of the
sound now is different because of the differences between a listener at
that moment in time and a current listener. Hearing, as with all senses,
is a perception and as such, it is interpretative. Mark M. Smith writes
“it is impossible to consume, to experience those sensations in the same
way as those who heard the hammer or music, smelled the dung, or experienced Gettysburg” (2007, 846). This is not to devalue these written
experiences, but rather to note that a written interpretation or recorded
soundscape would be read or heard differently.
Sound levels are measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale that did
not exist until the 1920s. This scale showcases the dynamic range, or the
difference between the loudest and softest sounds our ears can handle.
The threshold of pain, 140 dB, is 10,000,000,000,000 times greater than
the threshold of hearing, 0dB. It was “both telephone technology and
experimental psychology” that created an objective and scientific form of
measurement that had been missing and was previously subjective (Bijsterveld 2001, 52).
From its inception in 1925 through now, decibels have been used to
measure noise, through a telephone cable or the air. Noise is idiosyncratic, and can only become objectified when written into law and enforced.
While unwanted sound has always existed, major changes in technology,
private and public space, and class development brought noise to the
forefront for some starting in the nineteenth century. In modern cities,
the combination of loud sounds and the white noise of machines, from
cars to refrigerators, “mask low frequency noises and reduce the distance
at which this end of the spectrum is heard” (Dennis 2008, 8).
Ambience and Machine Noise
Ambient sound or ambience is made up of the background sounds, typically considered noise. With a few sounds occurring at the same time, each
sound can be properly identified. In most cities, the ambience consists of
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ELSA M. LANKFORD
so many simultaneous sounds that the more interesting sounds of the city
are masked and hence not heard.
Ambience determines location and in doing so “envelops a scene and
inhabits its space” (Bijsterveld 2001, 52). Ambience, by its very essence
in sound mixing and within a soundscape, should support and give life
to dialog and other sounds of life, not overtake them.
Our ears search for interesting, non-repetitive sounds. Just as the visual scale in cities and beyond has changed because of the automobile,
the sonic scale has changed as well. Schafer has classified two types of
soundscapes: hi-fi and lo-fi (Schafer 1994, 43). In a hi-fi soundscape, the
individual sounds can be heard, because the ambient sounds are lower in
volume. While in a lo-fi soundscape, the ability to localize self and the
soundscape is more difficult, as “there is no distance; there is only presence” (43). There needs to be a careful aural balance within the urban
soundscape: too much sound becomes a cacophony, too little and the city
or neighborhood appears sonically dead.
In contrast to complex soundwaves found in a hi-fi soundscape, many
machines create what Schafer refers to as a “low-information, high-redundancy” sound (1994, 78). This is a continuous drone that is easily filtered
out. Machines create continuous sounds that do not allow periods of
silence to occur. Some level of silence can allow for “listening, expressing, and experiencing” (Miller 2000, 21). The sound of traffic, of a lawn
mower, of an air conditioning system, these are all sounds that make up a
majority of the ambience of an urban soundscape. Not only can they make
reflection difficult, they make the act of listening to be an uncomfortable
experience. However, these sounds have not completely alienated us from
the soundscape. Sophie Arkette suggests that “isolation or displacement
from an acoustic environment” has been caused to a greater degree by personal listening devices and the mobile phone (Arkette 2004, 163).
Silence
The term “deafening silence” is oxymoronic, particularly when applied
to an urban soundscape. Anywhere in a city, the sounds of traffic, sirens,
and construction create a sonic barrier to silence. The composer John Cage
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theorized about the nonexistence of silence, stating that if there is literally
nothing else to hear, then we will hear the life in our bodies (1961, 51). An
indicator of the health of neighborhoods, of an entire city, is the diversity
and vivaciousness of the sounds heard. While it is unlikely that an entire
city lay silent, there can be a deafening silence in distressed neighborhoods that are plagued with abandoned properties.
Silence denotes a lack of activity, or is associated with obedience or
death. The absence of sound is feared by man “as he fears the absence of
life” (Schafer 1994, 256). Jacques Attali writes, “Nothing essential happens
in the absence of noise” (2004, 10). Silence also can be “the sound of authority” in the family, church, or state (Bailey 2004, 26). Not only can loud
sounds signify power, but silence as well, particularly upon “those lower
in rank (women, children, servants) were supposed to keep silent, or were
under suspicion of intentionally disturbing societal order by making noise”
(Bijsterveld 2001, 44).
While silence implies lack of motion or movement, the opposite can
also be true. As the creation of a sound requires an action, so does the
creation of silence (Bailey 2004, 26). Abandonment of a neighborhood
takes both action and inaction, and in doing so creates silent, unhealthy
communities. A silent community is not unachievable silence, but rather
a soundscape of solely ambient noise.
Most urban soundscapes are far from healthy. This article examines
what cities of the past have sounded like and what healthy cities should
sound like today.
Medieval City Soundscapes
During the medieval era, listening was crucial to life, as most information was shared through sound. Sounds traveled further in medieval
cities, due to a quieter noise floor and a greater number of sounds in the
frequency ranges to which human ears are the most sensitive. During
this time period, both sight and hearing were important but most “premodern societies were predominantly phonocentric, privileging sound
over the other senses in a world of mostly oral-aural communication”
(Bailey 2004, 27).
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The combination of more acute listening skills and less broadband
noise allowed for individual sounds to be determined and picked out,
rather than a broad mashing of indeterminate sounds. Emily Cockayne
writes of a different interpretation of noise in the medieval era: “Noisy
sounds irritated the hearer because they were loud, clamorous, importune, irregular, intrusive, disturbing, distracting, inexplicable or shocking” (Cockayne 2002, 36).
Medieval cities were unplanned, and as such, the population and
housing stock was rather fluid. The soundscape grew organically as well.
The size of a medieval city was limited based on a number of factors. The
city had to be walkable, as it was the primary method of transportation.
Many cities were built from Roman towns, and utilized their walls. The
church bells provided an aural boundary to the city and hence the parish
(Schafer 1994, 54).
Bells were crucial to a medieval city. Bells told the time, when to get up,
when to start working, and when to sleep. Bells rang out every four hours,
to tell the time and to accompany every medieval day. They rang the curfew
from the eleventh through the nineteenth century, and a “nine o’clock bell
in London signalled the closing of shops” (Woolf 1986, 179). Not only
did bells mark the time, but in a society where a clock face was unlikely to
be found, bells “could not but weave the individual’s sense of sound into
the fabric of the communal sense of past and present” (Woolf 1986, 181).
Street transportation was limited to carts, oxen and horses, but the
most common transportation was walking. Farmers from outside the city
walls would bring their wares to market in carts. Most medieval streets
were dirt, but some consisted of cobblestone. As Italian streets were
paved with cobblestones “the resonance of sound altered depending on
road surface or the breadth of a thoroughfare and therefore varied not
only from street to street but from city to city” (Dennis 2008, 9).
The medieval street was the market, the meeting place, and the theater. Much time was spent on the street “buying, selling, talking, fighting”
(Nicolas 1997, 335). News was gathered on the street, from criers and citizens. Adding to the street scene were jugglers, peddlers, poets, and animal
trainers, which created a more vibrant sonic streetscape (335).
Most medieval buildings were constructed of wood, or from the late
twelfth century on, stone or brick. Stone and other flat surfaces encourage
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echo and reverberation, allowing the sounds to bounce off and around.
Houses had paper-thin windows and ventilation for smoke to escape
from central fires. There was little differentiation between public and private soundscapes in the medieval era.
There were sounds of work in medieval cities, providing a rhythmic accompaniment to the day. The sounds of craftsmen, particularly metal smiths,
were often heard. Blacksmiths would pound the steel “hour after hour the
two swing their heavy hammers in rhythmic alternation” (Gies 1999, 271).
Songs of work, from the market to the maid to the apprentice were also
heard on and off medieval streets (Mumford 1938, 50). These work songs
“distinct for each craft” were often “composed to the rhythmic tapping or
hammering of the craftsman himself” (50). The rhythms of work “were synchronized with the human breath cycle, or arose out of the habits of hands
and feet” (Schafer 1994, 63). In addition, the sounds of animals resounded
on the streets, from birds to livestock to dogs and cats. Emily Thompson in
The Soundscape of Modernity defined these and others as organic sounds “created by humans and animals at work and at play” (2002, 116). All of this is
difficult but not impossible to imagine in a global capitalist economy today.
While most trade and the sounds of the market were to be found in
the medieval marketplace, vendors were “repeatedly jostling for market
share and aural space” (Wilson 1995, 25). The business of buying and
selling did not just occur within the designated market area, but “exuberantly spilled beyond these designated sites, entering the street, the tavern,
the home, and the church” (Arnade 2002, 543). The ability to have commercial trade anywhere would be illegal in most modern cities as zoning
restricts the location of houses, commercial enterprises, and industry.
Victorian City Soundscapes
Many sounds of medieval cities were still to be heard in Victorian times:
“clanging bells, cracking whips, clattering carriages, clamoring hawkers and
cabmen, roaring crowds, howling dogs” (Picker 1999, 427). The balance of
sounds in Victorian cities was still mostly organic.
During the nineteenth century, however, major changes were occurring in cities, from population booms to transportation technology to
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the distinction of a professional and middle class. These changes created
a transitional urban soundscape, more open to interpretation based on
the listener’s class than in previous generations.
Contention flared between the burgeoning professional class and street
musicians. While symphonic music was becoming more respected by the
audience in dedicated spaces, street music continued to be available for,
and played by, the lower classes. While musicians had been a part of the
street scene reaching back to the medieval cities, middle class professional
artists and writers singled it out as a primary source of annoyance and
frustration.
The professional class made “one of its more elaborate, forceful efforts
toward collective action and self definition,” by introducing legislation to
protect the workplaces of these artists and thinkers, which happened to be
their homes (Picker 1999, 428). Dickens, Tennyson, and a number of artists, authors, and scientists fought unsuccessfully to quiet the streets. Their
concern was not just for silence, but to be considered equals, to “stand
alongside doctors, lawyers, and the military, and who were equally worthy
of deference, legislative action, and, of course, quiet” (Picker 1999, 435).
The fight against street music also represented a growing “distrust of people
who crowded the urban streets, and highlighted a growing gulf between
polite and low society” (Cockayne 2002, 47). As the resistance to noise
increased, silencing the street became an exercise in control and in doing
so created “a new rhythm in city life” (Bijsterveld 2001, 44).
Street music and organic sounds were not the only sounds to be found
on Victorian city streets. Railroads had begun running freight in the first
half of the nineteenth century and the sounds of the machines of the
Industrial Revolution had already begun to compete with the sounds of
life in the cities.
Effect of Industrial Revolution on Soundscapes
The Industrial Revolution gradually made a drastic change to the urban soundscape. For the first time in urban history, the sounds of “animals,
peddlers and musicians were increasingly drowned out by the technological crescendo of the modern city” to which there were mixed reactions
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(Thompson 2002, 2). This was at a time of dramatic population increases
in cities. As urbanization accelerated, many cities physically expanded
their area through annexation. Even so, many urban population densities
starting in the mid nineteenth century were historically high and rising.
Factories created the promise of mass production, which needed great
quantities of raw material, from wood to metal to workers. Factories ended the “song and sociability of traditional craft production” as workers
neither had the time nor likely the ability to even hear the song of others
(Bailey 2004, 29). This created a cacophony of machine noise in contrast
to the silence of the factory workers. There was still a rhythm to the work,
as there had been in the earlier days, but the “tempo of production accelerated, punctuated by the alarms of steam whistles” to be heard inside
and outside the factory doors (Bailey 2004, 30). The rhythm of the work
was no longer set by the craftsman, but rather the machine.
As mills in past cities needed workers and worker housing, factories
needed even more. Dependent upon mass transit or more likely walking, cheap housing was needed near these industries. As factories were
typically in the central business district, they tended to be near more
expensive housing, many owners of which would soon likely move out
to the suburbs to be away from the factories that they themselves owned.
Lewis Mumford noted, “Wherever the steam engine, the factory, and the
railroad went, an impoverished environment usually went with them”
(1938, 183). Communities of factory housing, the tenements, were typically crowded and interior walls, if not also exterior, were constructed
with shoddy material. This brought the public soundscape into the private realm of the factory worker, the home typically being the only place
for privacy.
Even before the invention of the automobile, urban renewal, a process
of drastically changing part of the central business district, was taking
place in Paris in the 1850s. Under Napoleon I and Baron Haussmann,
parts of historic Paris were transformed into boulevards, removing curving streets and older architecture in order to incorporate straight, wide,
boulevards. This “Haussmannization of Paris may be seen as both the end
of urbanism and its beginning” (Vidler 1978, 87). The boulevard, the
imposition of control over the landscape and the city, as a cross of “art
and technique[,] was perhaps the most urban product of the nineteenth
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century” (87). The boulevard was visually impressive, but in doing so
“was changing sound culture, and street criers were increasingly confined
to the older neighborhoods of Paris” (Boutin 2005, 68).
While the Industrial Revolution did create major changes inside and
outside of cities, the sounds of life were still present through the turn of the
twentieth century. The Haussmannization of Paris was a sign of things to
come after the automobile age was born.
Modern City Soundscapes
The soundscape of the modern city had already begun to transition
from primarily organic to machine sounds through the end of the nineteenth century. The railroad and streetcar were not only making suburbia
possible for more people, they were becoming a major part of the soundscape. These forms of mass transit were necessary for travel within the city
to work and shop downtown as well as to the suburbs. U.S. ridership on
streetcars peaked in 1920 with 13.77 trillion passenger rides, with bus ridership beginning two years later (APTA 2007, 1). The overall number of
transit rides peaked in 1946, with 23.46 trillion passenger rides (1). Even
with this peak ridership, total transit riding decreased by a third between
1935 and 1968 while the country population increased by half (Wolf
1978, 190). To put this in perspective, the preliminary ride numbers for
2005 were at an almost fifty year high, of 9.8 trillion (APTA 2007, 2).
The automobile was a huge factor in changing city streets and soundscapes. During the second half of the twentieth century, cities received
90% federal funding for highways, which was too tempting for many city
governments and business groups to turn down. Tall office buildings fed
with urban renewal money displaced housing in the central business district (CBD). City highways combined with urban renewal created gashes
in downtowns across the country and the world across historic and poor,
typically black, neighborhoods. Citizens reacted to the changes, and in some
cities, like New Orleans, Boston, Toronto, and San Francisco, there was success in stopping the highways from coming through. In Baltimore, though
the East-West Expressway was not built, many houses were torn down,
people displaced, and neighborhoods ruined, for a small piece of highway.
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As the number of suburban developments grew after World War II,
shoppers visited downtown department stores less and less frequently until they stopped coming. The urban highways, designed to bring people
in to downtown, allowed the downtown to be bypassed.
Heating and cooling technologies of urban and suburban housing
created an additional type of divide between the urban resident and the
soundscape. Air conditioning, particularly central air, sealed windows
and doors, preventing most of the soundscape from entering the private
space, save for the dull roar of traffic.
The automobile age was not simply an American phenomenon. While
talking about changes made to Paris in the 1960s, Louis Chevalier wrote
that before the policy makers had a chance to attack “the city in its very
heart and essential arteries, the automobile had already done considerable damage” (1994, 52). Parts of Paris were butchered, including les
Halles, the historic marketplace in the heart of Paris. Urban renewal did
not just happen in American cities, it happened in Europe as well. The
desire to attract business without apparent concern for the historic nature of an area or the visual or sonic landscape happened in cities around
the world. Planners and engineers, who understand the scientific matters
and could physically make a project work, did not seem to ponder the
aesthetics of the matter, or the future of the project. Urban development
over the past forty years “has systematically attacked, and often successfully obliterated, the ‘moving chaos’ of nineteenth-century urban life”
(Berman 1988, 168).
Noise
Noise has changed in definition and reaction since the days of medieval cities, as noise was “often regarded as being synonymous with ‘sound’”
(Cockayne 2002, 36). As we have retreated to private spaces, noise can
“intrude and disempower us in those spaces where we may otherwise feel
sovereign” (Atkinson 2007, 1,908). The first wave of campaigns against
noise was between 1906 and 1914 while a second occurred in the early
1930s (Bijsterveld 2001, 50).
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Noise affects lower class neighborhoods more than upper class due to
population density, building materials, greater likelihood for increased bus,
automobile, and highway traffic, and smaller setbacks from public areas
such as the street and sidewalk. Noise regulations will likely not change
this situation drastically and additional work needs to be completed on fixing and understanding “why the aural environment of the urban poor has
become so toxic” (Meszaros 2005, 119).
Noise suppression became an important issue to cities like New York,
but noise from vehicles was more loosely regulated than the organic
sounds. Emily Thompson writes of the resulting silencing and arrests
of street vendors, newsboys, peanut roasters’ whistles, and roller skaters
from a 1908 General Order in New York. By stopping the peddling,
sidewalk, and street sounds the act of doing so “only cleared the way for
the more powerful noises of motorized traffic” (Thompson 2002, 125).
This sort of noise legislation against people, specifically the lower classes,
was not strictly a modern phenomenon.
The first federal noise regulation, the Noise Control Act of 1972 was
enacted during a time of growing environmental concern for air and water.
It was recognized that “inadequately controlled noise presents a growing
danger to the health and welfare of the Nation’s population, particularly in
urban areas” (United States Congress 1972, 1). In 1982, it was decided that
noise was a local issue, and while the national policies were never rescinded,
they remained unfunded (Environmental Protection Agency 2009).
Household appliances and equipment create noise concerns for residents inside and outside of the home. Mowing a quarter acre lot with a
gas mower can create noise pollution for up to 100 acres (NPC 2005, 1).
The noise of gas-powered mowers ranges from 85 to 90 decibels while
riding mowers are even louder, reaching up to 95 decibels (2). It has
been recommended by both the World Health Organization and the Environmental Protection Agency to limit exposure to these high decibel
ranges to as little as five minutes for the loudest mowers, assuming that
no hearing protection is used (2). There is an issue with lawn equipment as well as road traffic regarding noise versus necessity. Jonathan
Gunderlach made an interesting point, writing, “At what point does the
desire to have a clear soundscape interfere with the need to cut the grass?”
(Gunderlach 2007, 20).
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Noise is a side effect of power, whether that is of machines or men.
“The loudest noises in the soundscape are created by those who hold
greatest power over it” (S. Adams 1989, 54). The noise of transport and
work “dominate a society controlled by industry and commerce” (54).
The sound of transport has drawn many complaints in London. The
Sounder City campaign began in 2004 with three key issues of reducing
road noise, having a nighttime aircraft ban over London, and “reducing
noise through better planning and design of new housing” (Sounder City
2004, xvii). As stated in the Mayor of London’s Ambient Noise Strategy,
“Big cities have buzz, but they also need balance” (xvii). London’s strategy targets ambient or environmental noise, related to transportation,
but also neighbor noise, ranging from appliances to stereos to parties
(Sounder City 2004, 2). According to the Greater London Authority’s
2002 London Household Survey, the top three noise complaints were
about road traffic, aircraft noise, and noisy neighbors (14).
Noise Codes in New York City
“It is hereby declared to be the public policy of the city to reduce the
ambient [noise] sound level in the city, so as to preserve, protect and
promote the public health, safety and welfare, and the peace and quiet
of the inhabitants of the city, prevent injury to human, plant and animal
life and property, foster the convenience and comfort of its inhabitants,
and facilitate the enjoyment of the natural attractions of the city” (New
York City Council 2005, 1).
Due to the high density and overall population of New York City, noise
codes and complaints are constantly updated. The newest noise code for
New York City was implemented in 2007, with strict regulations for households, businesses, and transit. An estimated 275,000 noise complaints were
recorded each year for 2005 and 2006 (Lueck 2007).
Starting with the older 1998 noise code, ambient noise quality zones
were created with different day and night standards for low density, high
density, and commercial or manufacturing zones. The 2007 code was
even more specific in using octave bands where ranges of more sensitive
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frequencies have a lower decibel threshold. The 2007 code also sets thresholds on a certain lo-fi sounds, including air conditioning and cars. Even
ice cream and other vending carts or trucks must silence their “electrically
operated or electronic sound signal device” while idling at the curb (New
York City Council 2005, 21).
In a 2005 study of 1752 people, approximately 13% of which live in
New York City, transportation was found to the primary source of noise
for New Yorkers (Bronzaft 2006, 3). Specifically, the New Yorkers were
“most often bothered by honking horns, car alarms and boom cars or stereos” (3). This is not drastically different than the complaints from New
Yorkers in the 1920s, where traffic, transportation, and radio were the
main sources of noise (Brown 26 cited in Bijsterveld 2002, 53).
In addition to the population density, New York and other urban areas
contain many neighborhoods ripe for gentrification. These gentrified areas
can pit older neighbors against newer, provoking class and racial issues.
A recent example cited in the The New York Times concerns a drumming
group who played in a Harlem park to provide entertainment and protection for children. They began playing when the park was rundown, and
safety was a concern. The park was exhibiting features of an unhealthy
urban soundscape. The silence resulting from the disuse and misuse of the
park made it unsafe for children. These musicians worked rhythmically to
rebuild the soundscape, creating an aural boundary of safety, as medieval
cities gathered within the aural boundaries of their church bells.
With increased usage, the signal to noise ratio increased. The park and
its soundscape began a healing process. The children can now play in the
park, and the musicians still drum as they have for years. As residents of
new luxury co-op apartments nearby have begun to complain about the
noise, the “stalemate has bubbled over into a dispute about class, race
and culture and has become a flash point in the debate over gentrification” (Williams 2008). What is music and more to the older residents is
considered noise to the newer gentrified residents of the neighborhood.
Mobile Soundscapes
An increasing number of us demand the intoxicating mixture of noise,
proximity and privacy while on the move and have the technologies to
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precisely and successfully achieve these aims. The use of these largely sound
technologies informs us about how we attempt to ‘inhabit’ the spaces within which we live (Bull 2004, 243).
For centuries, sound and music were only possible to hear in realtime. Presence was required at the creation of the sound. The end of the
nineteenth century opened up immense possibilities for listening inside
at a time when people were listening to the outside less.
The phonograph allowed for a previously recorded performance to be
brought into the living room. Radios and record players joined later by
television were a few of the technologies for private media consumption.
Portable and car radios created a mobile soundscape that challenged the
sounds of the city outside. As radios became smaller and turned into
Walkmans, CD players, and eventually iPods, it became possible to listen
to literally anything at any time.
Driving, already a method of control over place, space, and time, also
allows for command over the drivers’ soundscape. The automobile creates
a zone of quasi-privacy around the driver. The combination of the radio
and the automobile created a win-win-win situation for broadcasters, car
manufacturers, and the consumer. With the radio on, the act of driving becomes an act of spectatorship “through the simple act of looking
through a windscreen” (Bull 2004, 248).
As technology miniaturized radios, cassette, CD, and MP3 players, the
listener gained the ability to “achieve a level of autonomy over time and
place through the creation of a privatized auditory bubble” (Bull 2005,
344). MP3 players, in particular, offered a private audio world, with speakers literally inside the ears of the listener. These private audio technologies allowed the user to participate in public activities while creating their
own private soundscape. Instant gratification is possible when music can
instantly be played to accompany the public scene. The listener creates
“spaces of freedom for themselves through the very use of technologies
that tie them into consumer culture” (346).
While mobile listening technologies may not discourage walking, walking with headphones on creates a different experience of walking through
the city. Observation of the public, and of the other, may take place, but it
is not the same experience as walking in a public space surrounded by the
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sounds. Michael Bull highlights the key difference between an iPod user
and a flâneur, in that flâneurs “traditionally imagined themselves in the
shoes of those they observed” (350).
Going Beyond Noise Codes and Rebuilding the Urban Soundscape
To repair the urban soundscape will require, in many cases, repair of
a community or even entire cities. This is not to say that cities are broken, but there have been far too many policies that have, inadvertently
or not, taken away from the city and given to the suburbs. After World
War II, cities once filled to capacity and bursting at the seams entered a
new phase of life and a new soundscape. This fall should have come as
no surprise. As Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961 in The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, “no other aspect of our economy and society has been
more purposefully manipulated for a full quarter of a century to achieve
precisely what we are getting” (Jacobs 1961, 7).
Planning from post-World War II to now has done little to help cities, instead it has “systematically attacked, and often successfully obliterated the ‘moving chaos’ of nineteenth-century urban life” (Berman 1988,
168). While the idea of removing chaos might seem like a positive step,
much of the past has been removed from cities. In order to regain health,
population, and a soundscape worth listening to, it is best to return to the
basics, the sounds of older cities: the streets, the markets, and the homes.
The street, once a meeting place, marketplace, and playground, has
become dedicated to not just transportation but automobile transportation. In neighborhoods that have unhealthy soundscapes, it is likely
that the sounds of cars and busses might be the only sounds to be heard.
As opposed to the lo-fi drone of automobile traffic, early modern London’s streets fostered a smorgasbord of sounds, “a scatter of jingles, bangs,
crunches, clops” and above all the sounds of people talking to each other,
an unusual feature for most post-modern cities (Smith 2004, 90).
Electric and hybrid cars are one way to confront traffic noise. Both
types of automobiles are silent at red lights and at slow speeds. This silence
has caused alarm within the blind community and is currently being discussed in Congress. In a recent New York Times article, three companies
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were discussing what type of sound should be added to hybrid and electric cars going low speeds (Zeller 2009). One company has already trademarked the word “drivetones” to represent a personalized sound, similar
to a ringtone (Zeller).
Cars are detrimental to any soundscape, not only because of the levels
of noise they introduce, but the number of drivers and passengers who
are lost as possible listeners. Walking does not imply listening or even
hearing, for that matter. In the age of cell phones and MP3 players, there
are quite a few covered and distracted ears on a typical urban street. A
question that arises is: was the urban soundscape ignored before or because of this mobile technology.
For many centuries, walking through the city was important for business and consumption. There were social reasons to walk as well: to meet
and talk, to see and be seen, to “absorb the social knowledge offered by
streets, shops, cries and street sellers, outdoor theaters, passersby” (Newman
2002, 206). In some urban neighborhoods, these activities continue.
However, in most neighborhoods, cars make it difficult to walk.
Walking allows the details of place to sink in and be considered, while
other forms of transportation require a ramping up of the visual and aural
scale of features to even be noticed. The question is can walking be possible in a society where distance is measured in minutes rather than miles.
When work is closer to home, and home is closer to shopping, then walking becomes a valid method of transportation in a post-modern society.
Lexington Market, on the west side of Baltimore, is an example of a
market that is walkable to many. It has been operational since the late
1700s, after its start as an open-air market. The market attracts a diverse
group of vendors and customers, resulting in thousands of daily customers. Many of the sounds heard in markets like Lexington and Reading
Terminal Market in Philadelphia are quite similar to those found in medieval markets over a thousand years ago. The sounds of selling, buying,
laughing, talking all in relatively close proximity is not something that
happens on many city streets anymore. A market also encourages local
products to be sold.
A marketplace, more so than a supermarket, encourages diversity.
Helen Tangires, author of Public Markets and Civic Culture in NineteenthCentury America, has said “If I see a market that seems to be well run,
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thriving, crowded, organized, and well supplied, that says something to
me about the larger environment of the city” (Kreiger 2008).
Even with thriving markets, Baltimore is a city that has seen a 31%
decrease in population since 1950 with a massive number of vacant houses (Cohen 2001, 415). Across the country, there were almost 4 million
vacant housing units in central cities, with more than 5 million in the
suburbs (United States Bureau of the Census 2007, 1). A vacant house
can include housing stock that has not sold or rented yet; an abandoned
house is likely not on the market. An abundance of abandoned houses in
a neighborhood makes it difficult for that neighborhood to rebound and
the likelihood of hearing organic sounds are slim.
Creating safe public spaces with abilities to live, work, and play takes
money and alternative transportation methods. Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is not a new concept; it has theoretically been practiced
since cities began. During the twentieth century, urban and suburban planning began to revolve around automobiles rather than the people that drive
them. Combined with zoning, it became easier, and in some cases, necessary
to drive to work, to shop, and to play. TOD allows for relaxation of zoning
regulations, in terms of having housing, shopping, and work areas all in the
same area, surrounding a transit hub. This concept of diversity, again, is
crucial to healthy cities, neighborhoods, and soundscapes.
Residents of large U.S. cities, with populations over 3 million, are twice
as likely to not own a car, than residents living in smaller cities or the suburbs (Hu 2001, 36). Globally, as of 2006, there are over 750 metro, tram
and light rail systems, 94 of which are in the United States (LRTA 2006). In
New York City alone, there are approximately 7 million riders a day (MTA).
A city with fewer cars is desirable for the soundscape and for the air, but
transit systems need to be respectful of the soundscape as well. In a May
2000 The New York Times article, several stations were monitored at having
readings of over 100 decibels (Steinhauer 2000). Some measures to silence
subways include straightening tracks and wheels and rubber pads “installed
beneath nearly all elevated rails and many underground rails, to quiet rumbling by reducing the vibration transferred to rails and trestles” (Steinhauer).
Diversity is a key ingredient to a healthy city and soundscape. The diversity needed is not limited to people. People and buildings of all shapes,
colors, and sizes are necessary to stimulate the eye and the ear. Multiple
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forms of transportation are necessary, not just the automobile. And as in
cities of the past, people need to be outside, living, working, and playing in cities at all hours. Safety in urban communities is a major factor.
The more people out and about at all times, the more eyes and ears to
keep trouble at bay, but they need to be able to walk around. Jane Jacobs
beautifully describes this as a ballet: “The ballet of the good city sidewalk
never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always
replete with new improvisations” (Jacobs 1961, 50). This implies that a
community is walkable and that there are reasons to be walking, such as
shops or markets to visit. Beyond the eyes and ears of the people walking
outside, people in their buildings need to have a reason to care to look
out the window and when they are outside, to listen.
Conclusion
Using the urban soundscape as an aesthetic measurement of urban
health is a qualitative and subjective measurement, and as such a sound
level measurement is inadequate. It is simple to measure when a piece of
construction equipment is too loud and has broken the law; it is far more
difficult to measure the overall soundscape of an area. Even more difficult
still is to restore sounds lost and add new interesting sounds.
Almost ten years ago, the National Park Service created a Soundscape
Preservation and Noise Management order, where the requirement of
“the protection, maintenance, or restoration of the natural soundscape
resource in a condition unimpaired by inappropriate or excessive noise
sources” was declared (NPS 2000, 1). Through a survey of park visitors,
almost as many visitors visit for the soundscape [91%] as for the landscape [93%] (2).
Restoration of a natural soundscape is, in one sense, easier. There exists, what Sophie Arkette terms the “urban prejudice” where sounds of
the city are “deemed sonic pollutants, and subsequently allotted to the
garbage heap” (Arkette 2004, 161). There are city sounds to save, but
they are masked by the lo-fi ambience, made up of sounds that should
be thrown away. The challenge is not only to sift through these sounds
to determine what should be saved and what should not, but also to
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deal with real problems that have been affecting cities. These problems
include: lower population densities, lack of local economies, zoning, loss
of craftsmanship, and a growing number of apathetic citizens.
Some changes that need to be made are substantial and require much
in the way of funding and policy changes. Infill and TOD development
could restructure and restore silent neighborhoods with a high number
of abandoned houses. Zoning changes could be implemented that allows
shopping and work to be near housing and vice versa, allowing for more
diverse sounds and life across a greater range of hours.
Not all changes to create a healthier neighborhood, city, or soundscape, however, need to be drastic. Small steps can be taken at a neighborhood and individual level that can do much to diversify the urban
soundscape. A healthy soundscape needs both sound creators and participants, both of which require actions to take place. Involvement in the
local community through slower, quieter modes of transportation allow
for increased interaction in the local economy, a heightened awareness of
the area, and a healthier neighborhood and soundscape.
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