Background and Departures

To begin at the beginning: Inside the womb there was sound –and silence–

interwoven. The fetus exists not in silence, but in a sea of continuous sound, undif-ferentiated sound, where sound cannot be separated from silence, and inside that space there are no concepts even for sound of silence –for obvious reasons– but a human being in a state of just being.

Other far off beginnings –in the span of time– lay in the sound worlds of pre-historic times when man step by step discovered he could consciously make sound – to communicate and signal to each other or shouted to fear off wild animals– but also knew the value of silence and how to keep quiet to keep hidden. The first inten-tional man made sounds were initially done by the voice through speech, whispers, howls and moans. Later, as man evolved, discovery and making of various simple sound tools began to take place. These were early artefacts we still don´t know much about. We are still speculating about their use. What they were like? How did they sound?

In the early soundscapes, which were the primary sounds, what were back-ground ambiences like? What did the individual different sounds mean to the prehis-toric man? To have a sensitive ear was probably more than crucial to survival of both individual and group.

The Swedish Music archeologist Cajsa Lund has devoted a lifetime to study the development of early sound tools of prehistoric man (Lund, Rindel, Hagström, &

Brunskog, 2008). She has investigated the development of the earliest sound tools by carefully studying prehistoric depictions in caves and on rocks as well as

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cheological artefacts. Based on scientific finds she has compiled a record, together with Swedish musicians of how the earliest “music” may have sounded (C. Lund, 1991).

There are other musicological examples of research on historic soundscapes in the work of Anna Ivarsdotter who has been studying early herding calls in the mountains of Dalecarlia in Sweden in Sången i skogen (The song in the woods) (Ivarsdotter, 1986). She has made a unique and thorough mapping of the sound-scapes of the herding worlds of remote areas through making a division between the incoming and outgoing sounds; signals to colleagues, to animals, predators, gods and spirits. Calling for attention and communication, and warding off, frightening.

She has also stressed the importance of listening and evaluating the sounds of the woods for crucial information on weather, predators, enemies and keeping track of the cattle and sheep. It is easy to imagine the serious attention that was given to listening to the environment in those days.

In the time of industrialization and technical development speed, production and noise becomes interwoven. This multitudes of multisensory input of the time is being reflected by artists such as the British painter William Turner (1775–1851) who painted in 1844 Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway where he catches the whole rumbling drama of the steam train rolling at high speed in driving rain over a high bridge. When Monet later painted the station Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1877, he also painted the sounds of engines, the moving steam and the to-tality of life vibrating in the Paris railway station.

The composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) composed the symphonic piece Pacific 231 in 1923, to celebrate physical movement, power and noise of the steam driven American express train Pacific 231. This piece aimed at to musically express the contemporary sound world in the early nineteenth twenties.

Thirty years after this, interpretations of the “clickety clack of the railway tracks” began to be heard in the music of blues, folk and country artists like Josh White, Johnny Cash and others. Listen for example to the musical impersonations the steam train in Josh Whites recording of Jim Crow Train or Johnny Cash´s inter-pretation of the Rock Island Line. R. Murray Schafer has in his important work from 1977 The Tuning of the world (Schafer, 1977) observed how the sounds and rhythms of contemporary urban life, engines and trains has influenced popular music, rock and blues.

So the noise starts growing as cities, transport and industrialization grows into the pulsating, rumbling and explosive twentieth century urban society, and music continues to pick up the sounds of the streets, of the engines, machineries, trucks and trains. The electric amplification makes it possible for the music to be heard over and in the noise, and the beat goes on, until suddenly the composer –and listener– John Cage (1912-1992) said: “STOP, just stop, stop and just listen…”. This utterance was made through a defining of a piece of sound art, when he presented the piece entitled 4:33 in the year of 1952. The work was a manifestation of many things: the collapse of the western concepts of art, tonality and music, with parallels to visual art and artists like Marcel Duchamp's confronting of old concepts of art or Kazimir Malevich (1979-1935) and his visual negation of painting in suprematist compositions like White on White (1918). There were also inflows from eastern thought reaching 1merican artistic circuits at the time and the concept of zen and of ancient Japanese traditional music were dominance of tonal and rhythmical elements in music were not so strict as in western music, and where the element of narrative illustration of events through non-pitched sound is prominent.

Soundscape, Noise and Music in Interdisciplinary. Research and Design 183 By instructing musicians “not to play anything” in tempo and time of free choice, the composer staged a situation were the audience were invited to become aware of the sounds of the ambience, of breathing, of movements and noises leaking in from the streets etc., in fact staging much of the same situation as the one coming to life in an ordinary zazen meditation session. Maybe John Cage through 4:33 did manage to manifest the first and most ultimate acoustic ecological piece ever made?

In different ways artists try both voluntarily and non-voluntarily to capture and reflect their perception of contemporary life. The pendulum swings between fascination and fear, as sounds of the city not only creeps in, but becomes a substan-tial component in both auditory and visual arts.

Obviously the noise of transport and urban life not only provides objects for artistic creation, fascination and reflection, but also means serious and devastating health risks for vast populations. These perspectives has been uncovered by medical and epidemiological research to a growing extent for a long time, especially in later years when more or less solid connections has been found between cardiovascular health and traffic noise exposure (see Babisch, W., 2011).

Soundscape research as well as musicological research on sound art can be conducted from many different perspectives, but when coming to the perception side researchers meets problems as the human subject is unstable, the mind of a changing mode, changing between person and person, and from moment to moment. This fleeting character becomes apparent as the attention of the individual is observed to continuously move between:

1. Different layers of consciousness, moving between the present and memory, as-sociations etc.

2. Different layers in acoustic perception of the sound environment (foregrounds, backgrounds, objects of interest, habituation, expectation etc.)

3. Other sensory inputs (smell, temperature, pain, pleasure, touch etc.)

Amazingly enough, awareness of the complexity of mans hearing and per-ception of sound can be found even earlier in history. The Surangama Sutra in the Buddhist canon {trad:ut} talks about three ways of hearing: Srotra-indriya (auditory faculty), Sabda-visaya (sound environment) and Erh-shih (auditory consciousness) (Yuan, 2010). Yuan clarifies the three ways as: The Ear / The ear in Mind / Hearing the mind itself; 1) The Ear Organ –directed to outside– registering sound from outside world, 2) Ear in Mind –also directed to outside– but sensing (hearing) [including] other beings inner world and finally 3) Hearing Mind –[the most inner

’ear’] consciousness directed into one’s own inner world.

This rather complex detour has meaning in the sense of pointing out that it relates to questions rising even today when trying gain knowledge about our percep-tions of sound environments. The individually, culturally, temporally and spatially determined reaction to sound coming into play along with the moving between the different layers.

Today we study human reaction to sonic stimuli, be it sound arts or noise, through numerous methods from musicological hermeneutics to measuring of wave-forms and brainwaves in laboratories and computers, neurobiologics & psycho-acoustics and what have you. With the help of fMRi (function magnetic resonance imaging) science can trace intricate functions between different parts of the brain when being exposed to sound, and even just thinking or imagining sound or music.

Other tools for measuring cognitive performance is found in eye-tracking technol-ogy, galvanic skin response etc.

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So all this leads us to the notion that the fields of sonic arts and sound envi-ronment are extremely complex and complicated and the academic involvement calls for multidisciplinarity affecting many disciplines.