Check it out: Ralph Gardner’s “Sounding Their Way Around the City”
Last month Ralph Gardner, from The Wall Street Journal, reviewed Elastic City’s listening tour of DUMBO. (If you’re interested in Elastic City’s listening tour or other sensory tours of NYC, click here. Next time I swing by NYC I’d love to check this out.) In his piece he details how the tour guide, an acoustic engineer, takes them around the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and invites them to take in the sounds the area has to offer. Here’s the trick, though: the listening walk must be in silence. Gardner did not seem too impressed by the tour, by the tone of his article. However, I think Gardner’s frustration stems from the fact that he kept on looking for a particular kind of sound, instead of simply listening to his urban surroundings.
What was Gardner looking for? I’m not sure. But he was looking for something other than “noise”: “The evening began with Daniel Neumann, our guide (he’s an acoustical engineer), taking the handful of us who signed up into an alley and inviting us to close our eyes and listen. Unfortunately, an industrial air-conditioner chose that moment to kick in, drowning out all other sounds….But it was so noisy I couldn’t make out what he was saying.” Farther down the article he complains about one of the most iconic New York sounds, the sound of the subway:
From the alleyway we proceeded to walk underneath the Manhattan Bridge. I’d never taken a good look at the bridge before, and I was struck by how elegant it is, how much it reminded me of the ironwork on the Eiffel Tower, built in the same era. But I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be looking. I was supposed to be listening. The problem was that there wasn’t much to listen to except the deafening clatter of the subway running overhead, back and forth across the bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn. We passed a guy practicing the saxophone; I assume the reason he chose that location was because it was already so noisy he knew nobody would complain.
From the looks of it, what bothered Gardner was that he couldn’t focus on the acoustic landscape of DUMBO because of the noise. I don’t believe that cities only produce and harbor noise (as in harsh sounds or artificial sounds) because listeners can find the sounds of nature and the sound of silence down alleyways, backyards, or parks, day or night. However, the sounds Gardner complains about are artificial sounds, industrial sounds (air conditioner, subway) that you would find in a city. Later in the article he mentions “the sweet trill of birdsong.” Even though he is making a joke here about how it’s hard to focus on such sounds when you’re walking around NYC with your eyes closed, his choice of words–and of sound–is interesting to say the least.
Gardner tried to tune in, and I appreciate it. But he consciously tuned out the very sounds he was supposed to tune in to. There’s a very fine line here: sounds/noise, urban sounds/natural sounds (I am assuming that’s what he was looking for, from his comment about the birds’ songs). And can we ever “just” listen? There’s always some sort of discernment going on when we listen; we are always in the process of tuning out when we tune in. These are issues people within sound studies contend with. They are not solely issues that Gardner’s piece poses. We are not sure of how the tour guide influenced Gardner’s listening, and if he coaxed the folks on the tour to listen to certain sounds (Gardner mentions one moment where the tour guide asked them to listen to the sound farthest away). In the end, Gardner’s article is a snapshot of listening vs hearing, and how selective we can be when it comes to listening even when we are not trying.
Share this:
City Noises, City Sounds
Last week, I spent a few days in New York City to celebrate Thanksgiving. I stayed in the Bronx, at an apartment a few feet away from the Bedford Park Boulevard stop and a subway train yard. Now, even though I have lived for over five years in a sleepy Upstate town, I have developed an uncanny ability to sleep wherever, whenever. The screeches and huffs of the trains were but a distant murmur to me. In fact, they were almost soothing, a reminder of the sounds of my childhood. My hostess was a bit concerned that the sounds hadn’t let me sleep. I reassured her, telling her, “I lived surrounded by noise in San Juan. The sounds of the trains weren’t really a problem.” She told me other guests hadn’t had such a good night sleep.
That made me think of soundscapes, my soundscape in particular. As someone who has lived in cities, towns, and countryside, I am very aware of the different sounds that characterize each place. I lived in the Bronx as a child, and traveled to Puerto Rico often. My mom likes to remind me that I had trouble sleeping when we would go out to visit the family on the West Coast because I didn’t like the sound of roosters in the morning. Eventually, after we moved to Puerto Rico, I grew accustomed to the sounds of roosters and chickens in the morning, as well as the murmurs of the stillness of the night, and could sleep through either. As an adult, I lived in San Juan. My apartment building stood at one of the busiest corners in Rio Piedras; there was always something to hear. Some nights it was the cackle of drunk college kids headed back to campus. Other nights it was the conversation of cops who had come to the cafe downstairs for breakfast (it opened M-F at 2 am). And sometimes it was the faint tweet of the crossing sign, an alert for the blind. When I moved to Binghamton, I had trouble sleeping: the silence was disconcerting for someone who had spent the last five years falling asleep to the sweet lull of “noise.”
All of this came back to me last week, as I stood in the guest bedroom, making the bed. Many distinct sounds make my soundscape. They follow me wherever I go, and will inevitably color the way I interpret other sounds. They color the way I “listen” in other words. For example, some people will find the sounds of the city abrasive, harsh on the ear. I, on the other hand, always find city sound comforting and exciting. They sound like life to me. Of course, they also remind me of the city of my childhood, the city I always look for when I visit other cities. Can I add other sounds to that soundscape? Certainly. The whirr of the refrigerator in my kitchen that starts and stops at random moments of the night is an example of a sound I have added to my soundscape. I’ve also added the open and shut of the doors in the hallway outside my apartment, a sound I can hear as clear as a bell in my apartment. But I think that the same way that we add sounds to our soundscape we also categorize them according to the sounds we have already stored in our memory bank. The sound of the fridge is the sound of “home” for me, and it sits alongside the sound of roosters and the sound of the city streets. Same could be said for my idea of “noise”: there are sounds that mean “noise” to me, and that definition is inevitably rooted in what I define as “sound.”
LMS
Share this:
Current Top Posts
April 2021
January 2020
November 2019
October 2019
August 2019
April 2014
November 2017
March 2015
December 2017
October 2015
Sounding Out! 
Recent Comments