On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (27 page)

In front of her building she turned to shake my hand. “Nice to see you,” she said. And then, as if noticing my smile in response, she added: “There’s someone in my building who asked me, ‘How come you use that word, “see?” How can you say “I see it”?’ Well, I do see it. I said, ‘see’ has many definitions.”

¹
In normal conversation people gaze at each other only about a third of the time, with the listener looking at the speaker about twice as much as the reverse. When speaking, we mostly look not at the person we are talking to, but anywhere else—up to the sky, at our hands, out toward an indefinite segment of air. Many utterances begin with a brief look, then a turn away. (If you are speaking and you want a moment to hold someone’s attention before they blast in with their thoughts, look away. Your eyes are signaling that you have got the floor.) We can pass the conversational baton with gaze, too, by turning and looking at our partner in conversation when we are finished speaking. Just by using eye contact, it is taught in improvisational theater, you can wordlessly establish a relationship between two actors, marking higher status or dominance, for instance, by holding eye contact while speaking.

²
All else is never
exactly
equal: even the same genome will be expressed differently given the slightest difference in environmental exposure, which every twin has from the time he is in the womb.

³
This is especially so along Manhattan’s westerly edge, as much of the country’s weather pattern flows west to east.

“Sound comes to us; noise we come upon.”

(Hillel Schwartz)

“. . . the only sound was the hum of air conditioners . . .”

What was the first sound heard?
The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who wrote about the natural soundscape, answered his own question:
It was the caress of the waters.
As a species, our ancestors rose from the seas. We developed ears even earlier than we developed the ability to breathe on land. As individuals, the first sound heard by each one of us was watery again: we all began hearing the world filtered through the splashes of amniotic fluids. A fetus twenty weeks grown in her mother’s belly has only enough sensory equipment to hear relatively low-frequency sounds, around 500 Hz or below.
¹
It is speculated that the developing ear, with its first few nerve fibers grown, can fire only up to a few hundred impulses per second, so that defines what the
growing baby hears (not a lot). Still, it is enough to capture her mother’s voice, important for her survival and development, as well as the sounds of the placenta, the gurgle of intestines, and the coursing of Mama’s blood around the womb. Later in the fetus’s development, more nerve cells will begin to fire together at rates representing a wide variety of frequencies, from 20 to 20,000 Hz. Before birth, as well as after, these young ears will hear sounds from speech to birdsong, from the rumble of distant thunder to the high hum of fluorescent lights.

As I headed out onto the street with Scott Lehrer, a sound designer for theater and a sound engineer for everything from vocal recordings to museum installations, the first sound heard was a bus idling loudly by the curb. This was not entirely unexpected. We were in the city, after all, and any urban dweller grows accustomed to being barraged by an unwelcome clamor. In this case, the sound seemed designed for our consideration. Which is not to say
well designed
. The engine made a bubbling, roiling sound—noisy, slightly interfering with sidewalk conversation. We would be happy when it, or we, moved away: the cumulative effect of the sound was to make me feel increasingly uneasy. I wondered aloud if anyone could think of a way to like that sound.

Lehrer could.

“If you were just listening to it
for itself,
it could be a soothing sound, I think: it’s a steady-state sound. And actually, if I recorded that sound and brought it into the studio, dropping down the pitch four octaves, you’d end up having this deep low repetitive sound, like a kettle drum.”

The idle was just percussion, Lehrer was suggesting; just rhythm. Without knowing the sound came from a tourist bus; without seeing the bus’s girth, overly large for a city street; without smelling the bus’s diesel spewings, the bus sound was just a waveform moving through the air. At a “steady state,” meaning
the shape of the wave is somewhat predictable, constant—and made up of low frequencies, below 500 Hz. In other words, it was hitting us with tennis-ball-sized packages of air pressure at a rate of a couple of hundred a second. “Constancy” distinguishes it from the varied, changeable sounds that usually attract our attention. And it was a loud sound, but not overly so in a city full of sounds.

I welcomed the idling sound-ball–throwing bus because today we were walking to hear what we could hear. My time with Arlene Gordon had gotten me interested in listening. Most of my walks had focused on attending to the blocks visually. While some sounds have slipped through to my attention, I was struck by how unimodal I had become, trolling for the new thing to see and ignoring anything that I could not detect with my eyes (or nose). The human ear is open all the time; it has no lid to naturally refresh the auditory scene. Even holding our hands over our ears in the way children do, elbows akimbo and face a-grimace, many sounds get in. But while our ears are always open, we only half attend to sounds they carry, given the racket coming from within our own heads.

To walk and listen. To some extent, this would be an exercise in paying close enough attention to name what we hear. Simply giving a name to a sound can change the experience of it: when we see the thing that clatters or moans or sighs, we hear it differently. Naming, though, is not the exclusive reason for listening. Indeed, at times naming a sound aborts the experience of hearing altogether, shutting us off from continued listening and exploring the nature of the sound.
Oh, that’s just a downy woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting
. (
Now we can move on.
) Satisfied with our identification, we shift from attending to the downy ruckus to ruminating on dinner plans. So, too, goes the safari phenomenon: looking out over a savanna, patient observers will finally see a majestic creature
appearing . . . then another . . . then a herd. The first thing we tend to ask is, what is that? To identify it—to name it—gets us no closer to understanding the creatures we have spotted, but it is often taken as a stand-in for that understanding. So named, the animals move on, and we move on to the next animal on our lists.

To be sure, it is difficult to describe a sound without invoking its name or source. “What’s that funny sound?” my young son asks me about almost everything. I tell him, “It’s a jackhammer,” or “It’s coming from that pipe.” I default to an answer about the content of the sound. But another answer might be, “It’s a
wocka-wocka-rattle-tattle
” or “It’s a
fffssssttttsss
.” With his unbiased ear and lack of vocal inhibition, my son will blow and toot a surprisingly accurate echo of what we are hearing. I am hopelessly bad at mimicking sounds with my own voice. I suspect my son will soon be just as bad: rare is the children’s book that does not teach him that the dog says
bow wow
and the pig
oink oink.
This does not resemble what comes out of any dog or pig I know.
²

So on this walk with Lehrer I was also aiming to listen to the sounds in and of themselves, to hear beyond their names. This is easiest to do as a tourist in a new environment, when even ordinary sounds are slightly off: the siren screams in discrete descending tones (as in the UK) rather than rending the air with a continuous ascending and descending peal (as in the United States); the telephone rings with a different ring. In an old city, a tourist hears the rumble of wheels over cobblestones that the native does not and notices sound bouncing differently between walls more tightly constructed than in spacious American cities.

 • • • 

I met Lehrer while he was working, on assignment tracking a sound. In a creative turn, he was looking for the sound in a palace of visual art: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the Upper East Side. His project was to find a sound to fit into a documentary film about a museum show in Vancouver. As he described it, one sequence taken of the museum’s atrium was unaccompanied by realistic “museum atrium” sound. Lehrer was now in search of that sound, based on an appreciation of what the atrium
should
sound like, given its size, height of ceilings, construction of floors, and density of structures and persons. I shadowed him as he moved through the Met, quickly scanning each room before judging it useless—a central room that served as passage to other exhibits was “too busy”; a fountain in a large, atrium-like room was disqualified because “the water is pretty specific”—or promising. In the latter cases, after surveying the scene, Lehrer stood out of the way, spoke a description of the room into a small audio recorder, and then stood quietly recording the room. To all who passed he would have looked like a man in reverential contemplation of a distant sculpture.

When Lehrer had gathered an audio-recorderful of atrium sounds, we left the museum. That was when we encountered the bus. We crossed the avenue and left it behind. On a side street on the Upper East Side, we were wrapped in relative quiet surprisingly quickly. It was an early spring day, and the streets were full of the humanity that emerges after a winter’s sleep. But in this part of the city the humanity is remarkably peaceable and hushed. I worried that we would only hear the rustle of expensive silk undergarments from this neighborhood.

The morning had seen rain but the afternoon had forgotten it. Trees were in hopeful bloom; children ran up and down the steps
in front of the museum. Their gleeful shouts grew faint. We heard birds cheeping above our heads; our footsteps were again audible. Lehrer paused and looked back out at the street. “It’s dry now, but did you hear the sound of the tires earlier?”

I had not.

“Tires actually stick to the pavement more because of the water” when it rains, he said. “You can actually hear the sound of rubber on water; it’s different than rubber on pavement.”

I felt for a moment like someone who just discovered she had ears. How had I never heard this sound? It was not just the sound of water splashing; it was not just the sound of wetness; it was the sound of tire rolling over water. I had not heard it! A barreling taxi, its tires probably making the regular old rubber-on-pavement sound, broke through my reverie as its driver rode his horn. Another car horn responded with equal outrage. I smiled:
there
was the noisy city I knew.

Utter noise
: this is the familiar acoustic impression left by a city. Even standing side-by-side, two city dwellers attempting conversation must make an effort to be heard; a mumble would disappear into a passing truck’s braking sigh, or the white noise of street traffic. The landscape of the city is filled with broadband sound drawing from a wide range of frequencies. While we may be able to attend to particular sounds, our experience is of a clamorous, unintelligible din—what has been called a lo-fi soundscape.

What makes that “noise” and not just neutral “sound” is another question. The avant-garde composer John Cage famously declared that “music is sounds,” and thus appropriated ordinary sounds to be his music. In one of his compositions, the orchestra is silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds; whatever sounds come in through the window of the concert hall or emerge from the increasingly restless and puzzled audience constitute his music. Still, if Cage was right, it need not follow that all sounds
are music(al). Any sound we do not like we call
noise,
thereby introducing a subjective assessment to the din. That subjectivity is always there in talking about noise. Despite the precision of his science, the early physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz characterized “noises” as sounds “tumbled about in confusion,” bothering mind and matter alike. Others invoke simply “interruptedness” as the character feature that makes a sound into noise.

The relativity of noise is reassuring to me. It seems more likely I could find something charming in the soundscape of the city if its noisiness depends as much on my psychology as on the sounds themselves. It is certainly the case, for instance, that one’s experience of urban sounds changes with exposure. To the visitor, the city is just noisy; over time, one does not hear less, but one may attend to the details of it less.
³

There is one sound that city dwellers seem to agree on as noisy, though. Lehrer and I did not have to wait long for it to come to us. As we walked along the quiet side street, the ultimate in interruptedness, a motorcycle with souped-up exhaust pipes came racing down the avenue we had just crossed. It might have been in our sights for two seconds at most, but the disruption was enormous. We had to stop talking. People walking by us stopped talking. I could almost swear that the birds stopped their chirping, the buses their rumbly idling, and our footsteps their echoing.

Some of the motorcycle’s noise is just its
loudness,
clearly: less than a half block from the cycle, we were probably hit with 100 decibels or more. Decibels are the subjective experience of the
intensity of a sound.
⁴
Zero decibels marks the threshold for hearing a sound—and in a modern city, there is never a moment of zero decibel silence. We mostly reside in the 60–80 decibel range, which includes sounds from normal conversation across the dinner table, vacuum cleaners, and traffic noise. Once a sound gets to 85 decibels, it begins to damage the mechanism of our ears irreparably. The reason lies in the mechanism itself.

Cilia, tiny hair cells that stand upright in the cochlea, sway and jiggle when the vibration of air—the rush of air that is sound—wends its way into the inner ear. So stimulated, the cilia trigger nerves to fire, translating that vibration into electrical signals that give us the experience of hearing something. If those vibrations are strong enough, the hair cells bend deeply under their force. Air pressure can mow, crush, or sever the hairs until they are splayed, fused, floppy, or fractured—an earful of well-trodden grass. Bent and damaged enough because of exposure to loud sounds for prolonged periods, the hair cells do not grow back; the ears lose their neural downiness. The world becomes progressively quieter for the person attached to those ears, until there are no sounds, no music, no noise.