Module 3 Draft

Here's a draft of an essay I worked on for Module 3, focusing on the readings for the first part. I plan on incorporating the rest of the readings into this piece, which I hope to post by Monday:

Mine was the first headphones generation. Sony introduced the first Walkman personal cassette player in the United States in 1980, and throughout that decade it became the preeminent way to carry your music around with you. People were no longer subject to whatever song came on the radio; wherever you were, armed with a pair of headphones, you could become your own radio station and disappear into your own little world.

In the autumn of 1989, at the start of my sophomore year of college, I went to Greece to study art history and archaeology for a term. We traveled for ten weeks, barely staying in one place long enough to unpack, and so there was a lot of down time spent mainly on buses. I had brought my Walkman with me, and I used it to carve out some personal space and dull the demands of constantly being around the same twenty people day in and day out.

My professor Dale, a septuagenarian who was far more sprightly and energetic than most of us twenty-year-olds, would constantly bemoan the fact that I and my fellow classmates would don our headphones at every available opportunity. “You should be listening to your surroundings,” he would tell us, “to get a sense of what the ancient Greeks heard in these very same places. But not only that: you have to smell, taste and touch everything, too.”  He was completely serious, and now - more than twenty years later - I also know that he was right.

In the introduction to their Auditory Culture Reader, Michael Bull and Les Back argue that the primacy of the visual sense has resulted in the subjugation of the others, thereby limiting our ability to understand the full meanings of an entire range of human behaviors, attitudes and emotions. They encourage thinking with a “democracy of the senses,” where no one sense has primacy over the others and each plays an important role in delineating the experience of a thing or of a place, such as the built environment.

Their focus, as evidenced by the title of their volume, is sound. They encourage cultivating the practice of “deep listening,” where layers of meaning are revealed through repeated listenings and the relationships between ourselves, others and the spaces where we interact are constantly being reevaluated. In this manner, we can begin to understand how sound connects people together in ways that seeing does not or how the same exact sound can spark completely different reactions among peoples of differing cultures, genders or ages.

And then there is the relationship of sound to the modern metropolis. Later in the same volume, Fran Tonkiss suggests that where vision in a city is about “action and spectacle,” sound is often relegated to the background as “atmosphere.” But sound has played a functional and historical role in the development of cities and especially the built environment, where acoustic manipulation serves to either shut noise out or enhance its quality in such a way as to make it more palatable to hear. The cacophony of the city is enough to drive you insane, so we have developed ways to shut out noise and allow social interaction to occur within the confines of regulated space.

The newly-opened September 11 Memorial Plaza in downtown Manhattan, for instance, eliminates urban noise through the creation of natural sound. Two large basins, which occupy the footprints of the original World Trade Towers, are constantly filled with the rushing waters of eight waterfalls, creating a sound which is loud enough to drown out all other ambient city noise such as vehicular traffic, honking horns and loud shouting. If you stand near enough, the rushing water can even mask the conversation of the people standing on either side of you. In this manner, individuals are afforded the opportunity to grieve or reflect in a way that’s personal, effective and immediate.

During the transition from an agrarian to urban way of living, sound also played an increasingly important role in human cultural evolution. In his book The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer argues that it was primarily sounds which augured the development from small towns to increasingly complex urban spaces through things like the ringing of church bells, the hourly chiming of town clocks, the grinding of the local mill and the clanging of the blacksmith’s tools. These sounds began the regulation of time, which had previously been divided into sunup and sundown, and catapulted urban life into the complexities of the industrial revolution.

As artificial sources of light slowly crowded out the night, the hours at which people were able to travel and conduct social business steadily grew.  Those individuals that were bothered by hooves on cobblestones all evening long or the hourly shouts of the nightwatchman in the middle of the night and had status began to exert political influence. Soon enough, regulations began to privatize what had once been public; for instance, in Weimar Germany the making of music was forbidden unless conducted behind closed doors. Something which once serviced the delight of many became captured by a select few.

Sound is not the only sense which relates to the built environment. In a personal history published in The New Yorker, David Owen investigates the relationship between one’s sense of smell and the process of remembering. Back in his hometown of Kansas City with his sister, they decided to take a tour of places from their childhood in order to discover if they still smelled the same. While their research showed that most did not, it motivated him to think further about the conventional wisdom which states that smell is the sense most intricately tied to memory and whether the loss of a place’s scent is meaningful.

Upon visiting his childhood home some years later, Owen descends into the basement and finds that it smells exactly as he remembered it. Although certain things no longer looked the same, he was able to be transported back in time – as if “childhood itself had been hiding out down there, miraculously still alive.” Owen consistently links scent to vision, but he doesn’t necessarily exert the primacy of one over the other. When an art museum gets remodeled and loses its damp and musty aroma, one could easily argue that the indoor air quality has been improved. But when something from the past looks but doesn’t smell the same, has something even deeper been lost? If strong scents invoke vivid memories, what will lack of smells afford us as we go about our lives?

Given the amount of sensory stimuli that we encounter on a daily basis, it’s amazing that we don’t consistently get disoriented or lost. When assessing how individuals successfully navigate the built environment and what sensory information they rely upon to do so, it is helpful to understand the concept of cognitive maps. Jon Lang defines cognitive maps as a process through which people “acquire, code, store, recall and decode” information which allows them to move through complex environments by noting locations and attributes.

REFERENCES

Bull, M., & Back, L. (2003). The auditory culture reader. Oxford; New York: Berg.

Lang, J. (1987). Creating architectural theory: The role of the behavioral sciences in environmental design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.

Owen, D. (2010, January 25). The Dime Store Floor. The New Yorker, pp. 33-37.

Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape : Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.

Stokols, Daniel, & Altman, Irwin. (1987). Handbook of environmental psychology. New York: Wiley.

Tonkiss, Fran. (2003). Aural postcards: Sound, memory and the city. In M. Bull & L. Back (Eds.), The auditory culture reader (pp. 303-309). Oxford;  New York: Berg.