Noise Control and Articulated Soundscapes By Dan St. Clair Faculty Advisor: Ron Kuivila A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Middletown, Connecticut May 2010 Noise Control and Articulated Soundscapes Table of Contents: Introduction 2 1 - Diagnostic Beginnings 12 2 - Telephonic Architecture 30 3 - Telephonic Landscapes 54 4 - Telephonic Ecologies 78 5 – Re-articulating Soundscape 95 Appendix 115 Thanks to my teachers, colleagues, and family. Thanks especially to my advisor, Ron Kuivila for tirelessly pushing me to diabolical ends, to my Mom, Beverly St. Clair for her grammatical advice, and most of all to Louisa and Gena, for making each day exciting, beautiful, and full of love. 1 Introduction What will humanity’s urban future sound like? Amidst the tremendous efforts in recent years to re-design and re-imagine the modern city in a future world without oil, very little attention has been paid to sound and acoustics. In sampling the proceedings of a number of recent conferences of architects, designers, and urban planners, I find that sound is rarely, if ever, mentioned.1 The LEED Standard for Neighborhood Development has sections concerning the visual qualities of a neighborhood, but nothing on acoustics and sound.2 It is not that sound is an unimportant part of urban experience: noise consistently ranks as one of the top three quality-of-life complaints of residents living in cities around the world 3. Part of the reason for this disconnect is certainly the visual orientation of modern architectural practice – think of Le Corbusier’s statement “I am only eyes.”4 Compared with other sensory issues in the modern city, such as stench, noise has avoided comprehensive control.5 My thesis proceeds from the belief that there is tremendous richness in everyday sonic experiences, that these experiences motivate larger patterns of behavior, and that a silent re-imagining of the future is an incomplete one. To that end, it explores moments in the history of ideas of noise and its control in 19th and 20th century North America. The thesis has two main goals. The first is to inform my artistic practice. To an artist working with sound in public spaces, with sound material that might be described culturally as noise, the history of how noise has been conceived, of what makes a sound noise, is extremely interesting. 2 Also, particular ideas of noise are central to Acoustic Ecology, whose practitioners play a significant role in contemporary Sound Art, the genre in which my work is most often exhibited. The second, related, goal is to provide an historical framework from which the future challenges of sound and urbanity may be addressed. Urban noise is a pressure point on which a variety of yet-unresolved and vital issues related to the way we live now converge. A new set of material and intellectual tools are required to meet these future challenges. This thesis provides a stepping-stone towards working out what those tools might be. Chapter One investigates the public debates about noise and the attempts at noise abatement in response to the 1878 introduction of the first mass transit system in New York City, the Elevated Railroad. Thomas Edison, fresh from his invention of the phonograph the year before, was called in to diagnose sounds of the railway in operation, sounds which incited public uproar and legal action from the track’s neighbors. In what may be the first “environmental” recordings of sound, Edison used the phonautograph, a device that rendered soundwaves visible, to aid in his diagnosis. This episode marks the beginning of modern noise control, of the consultant hired to diagnose a problematic source of sound. Chapter Two covers the evolution of the Articulation Index, a way of measuring how well a communications system transmits speech that was originally developed at Bell Labs in the 1920s to evaluate telephone lines and circuits. This index became the main design criteria used in 20th century noise control. Chapter Three outlines the migration of the articulation index from the discipline of noise 3 control to state and federal guidelines for maximum noise levels in the 1970s. Chapter Four provides a critical look at the work of R. Murray Schafer, the World Soundscape Project, and Acoustic Ecology - work that takes the basic principles of noise control and expands them into comprehensive theories on sound in general. Chapter Five connects the ideas of noise that emerge from this history with my own artistic work. An appendix of documentation of some of my pieces created while at Wesleyan is also included. The early 20th century saw a radical transformation of the acoustic environment of cities. Using New York City as an example, Emily Thompson has charted the dramatic shift in the public discourse surrounding urban noise from the 1890s, where noise came from mostly human sources such as street vendors and hawkers, to the late 1920s, where noise was portrayed as a mechanical beast. While mechanized and electrical sound sources proliferated in North America throughout that time period - cars, trucks, phonographs, radios - so did the means of controlling and evaluating sound in general - acoustical tiles and insulation, precision microphones, decibel meters, and spectral analyzers. Thompson calls this the “engineered soundscape”: as noise was “engineered” into the environment through cars and other products of engineering disciplines, in order to abate noise it had to be engineered out.6 There is a second, more perceptual aspect of the engineered soundscape. Thompson defines the word soundscape as both the sounds present in an environment and the ways of interpreting those sounds, “a world, and a way of 4 making sense of that world.”7 The changing technologies for the transmission and reproduction of sound altered not only the means to control sound, but the general conception of what made for “good” sound. The technology that had the biggest impact on the discipline of acoustics, psychoacoustics, and arguably the American soundscape as a whole was the telephone. According to historian Mara Mills, “The telephone and the ear were measured against one another in the 20th century, the former becoming a psychoacoustic instrument as well as an appliance for communication. A new definition of normal hearing was the result.”8 The models of communication and hearing that emerge from this work on the telephone system are directly incorporated into post-war noise control and remain part of the discipline. Much of this re-defining of hearing happened at Bell Labs, the research wing of the AT&T telephone company. AT&T funded a vast research program into human speech and hearing in the 1920s, whose results and methods have become part of the canon of acoustical knowledge. This research was almost always performed in relationship to the electronic circuits and electromechanics of the telephone system. By understanding how the human voice and ear “worked,” the telephone system could perform as little work as it needed to, becoming more efficient to install and maintain. Increasingly, principles worked out in circuits were applied to the physical and mechanical inputs and outputs of those circuits, the spaces that the telephone connected. Impedance, for example, became a way of describing the movement of sound in general, not just through a circuit. The 5 articulation index, which we will track in Chapters Two and Three, is another one of these principles. By the 1950s the metaphor of the circuit had blossomed into systems analysis, a way of thinking that still permeates many disciplines from corporate management to city and highway planning to ecology and to psychology. In thinking about the importance of circuits to mid-20th century life, it is helpful to explore the concept of “geometry” as applied by geographer and art historian Denis Cosgrove to Renaissance Italy. Cosgrove sees the concept of Euclidian geometry as vital to many of the practical and spiritual aspects of 16th century Italian life. Geometry was used to survey, drain, and divide up the land outside of cities, was displayed in techniques of perspective in painting and mapmaking, and was at the core of a “neo-platonic cosmology” 9. I have not explored the connection of circuits to religious thought, but there are at least the beginnings of a comparison to be made, simply as an idea that organizes a significant part of the “speculative and practical” aspects of life 10. There are certainly Euclidean resonances between the power of surveying in shaping the 16th century Italian landscape, and the laying of miles of long, straight telephone lines across the 20th century American landscape, but circuits themselves are not necessarily “geometrical.” Instead, “topology” might be a better term, as it is used in circuit design to describe the network of connections between circuit components; the possible paths for electricity to flow. In cybernetics, an extremely influential mid-century movement, human action is contained within a general 6 circuit topology as another component in the network, one potentially replaceable with an electronic substitute. Post-war cognitive psychology models the brain itself in this way. George Miller, perhaps the most influential cognitive psychologist to advance this idea, started his academic career researching the articulation index at MIT during the final years of World War II, the place and time when the ideas of modern noise control were taking shape. Thompson’s idea of the engineered soundscape impacts music as well. Thompson relates the response to the New York premiere of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique in 1926, a work whose instrumentation included new urban noises such as sirens and pneumatic drills. While this performance inflamed many, poet William Carlos Williams described gaining a new sensitivity to the sounds of the city on his walk home11. The idea of a piece of music giving a listener “new ears” with which to hear the sounds of everyday life is a recurring theme in contemporary music. Sound technologies have played this role as well. The composer Pauline Oliveros has written that “the tape recorder is the most important instrument of the 20th century,” not only for its use as an instrument in itself, but for the way that it changes how we listen to the world around us12. Oliveros describes her experience as a young composer making recordings of the outdoors through her open window and listening back to these recordings as a kind of ear training: “the microphone was picking up sounds that I had missed”13. Oliveros received her first tape recorder in 1953, several years after they became commercially available14. 7 For many, magnetic tape and its successors turn the world into a studio. The notion of “acousmatic” listening, of hearing sound without visual referent, is popularized around the use of magnetic tape; of the world as a studio full of sonic richness to be recorded and re-listened to. The word “soundscape,” coined in the mid-1960s by R. Murray Schafer, was influenced by the idea of acousmatic sound and no doubt hastened along by the Nagra company’s release of the first truly portable battery operated tape recorder in the late 1950s15. The practice of world- as-studio continues today in the work of many Acoustic Ecologists, a movement deeply influenced by Schafer, including Gordon Hempton, whose 2009 book One Square Inch of Silence chronicles his attempts to record “natural” sounds outdoors without the microphones picking up cars, airplanes, or other man-made sounds. This thesis, in part, explains how we got to this point: where the instruments of sound technology play a vital role in how phenomena like “silence” are measured and defined. John Cage’s 4’33”, the famous “silent” piece, intersects with the engineered soundscape in a way directly related to the history of noise control. Cage cites a visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber in 1951 as a crucial motivation for the work. Inside the extreme quiet of the chamber, Cage heard two sounds, one high, one low, which the engineer attributed to Cage’s nervous and circulatory systems16. Physiologically, the absoluteness of “silence,” in music or otherwise, was obliterated - life itself was sonorous - and it was this never-ending stream of sound which Cage subsequently focused on. The chamber’s original purpose, though, 8 was to test incredibly powerful loudspeakers for use on the battlefields of World War II. The layers of soundproofing around the chamber’s interior kept sound from leaking out and “waking the neighbors,” according to its designer Leo Beranek. Its anti-reflective surfaces simulated the open battlefield. Beranek, and his firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, would be at the center of the blossoming post-war noise control industry. Cage inverted the original purpose of the anechoic chamber as a giant noise-controlling muffler, using a space designed to control the extremes of electro-acoustic loudness to explore the extremes of quiet. These diverse connections between work in acoustics, music, and recording technology are further enriched by placing noise control inside of what Howard Davis has called a “culture of building” 17. Davis uses this phrase to point to the vital importance of connections between architects, economic structures, zoning laws, religious thought, and the entire domain of culture in creating buildings. One well-known example, which Davis cites, is the effect of zoning regulations that required upper sections of skyscrapers to be set-back from the building footprint on The Empire State Building and other skyscrapers. Applied to noise control, the general concept of a culture of building helps to bring even the most heroic acts of controlling sound into a commercial context. Except in their military research, noise control engineers were almost always consultants, brought in to diagnose and control a problematic sound. They were often hired by the corporations responsible for that sound, to design sound environments for the employees or clients of those corporations. For example, the quieting of civilian jet 9