Pictures at an Exhibition
I am sitting in the cafe of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It is a Tuesday morning, and the marble and tile surfaces are reverberating with the chatter of visitors across a wide public space full of tables: chairs scrape on the stone floor, and in the corner, a coffee machine clears its throat noisily. Standing on William Brown Street, in the heart of the city, next door is the great Liverpool Central Library, and a few steps down the road is the World Museum, the delight of local schoolchildren, while just across the road is the giant St George’s Hall and nearby the Empire Theatre. The whole area is a hub, and a thriving, pulsing one at that.
For now though, I sit, drink coffee and listen. At first, the place is full of amorphous noise, and the sounds merge in my head. Gradually, I focus and begin to hear some perspective and direction—voices murmuring on the far side of the room, to my left, a sudden burst of chatter and laughter as a school party comes in out of the rain. They pass through into a teaching room, and the sound subdues somewhat. Someone laughs nearby, to my right, and then I become aware of something I had not noticed before, a low humming sound that I cannot quite identify. Air conditioning? Perhaps. Now it has gone. In fact, I realise as it stops that it is its absence that has drawn my attention to its previous presence. The voices around me have quietened a little. Is it because, without realising it, everyone has adjusted to the fact that now there is less noise to talk over, for which to compensate? How much quieter we would be if our voices did not have to compete with so much of the random cacophony that surrounds us, not least the ubiquitous soundtrack to eating so many restaurants are determined to inflict upon us. Mercifully, there is no musical accompaniment to coffee here, but there is—now I listen again—something else—a low rumble, less a sound in fact than a vibration. It comes, lasts about ten seconds and fades. Minutes pass, and there it is again. Then, I remember that in this part of the city, the railway goes underground, and these are local trains travelling the subterranean loop beneath me. Anyone familiar with the pulsing beats of night clubs will know the feeling of music that is as physical as it is auditory: rhythm will play a major part in our story, and the vibrations of low-frequency bass notes fostered by high output sound systems are palpable, and the experience is a whole-body one. If I were to record, amplify and analyse what I’m feeling beneath my feet, and slow it down, I would begin to dissect the elements of the sensation into separate vibrations, and the high volume, low throb of club dance music makes for an even better example: ‘Bass notes in the ground, underfoot, in our bones. Slow the sound down further and each vibration might be separated out, counted, added up; there is no more sound, just individual shocks, one at a time’ (Trower, 1).
Emerging from this imaginative troglodyte world, I listen to the voices around me again. Fragments of conversation step forward for a moment and then retreat. More, it is about the sound of the voices: mostly women as it happens, mostly of an older generation. A mix of tones and character as one would expect, and a mix too of implied origins. Some distinctive accents, clearly local voices, but there is a Spanish couple sitting not far away, looking at a map, and I can here American voices, east coast I would guess, animatedly discuss a Rembrandt self-portrait they have seen upstairs. I cast my personal audio antenna elsewhere, scan the area for its stories in the realisation that noise, once it comes into focus, and once we drill down through its layers, becomes particularised sound.
I place my cup down rather noisily. If the room were empty and silent, that sound would have bounced around and reverberated, but as it is, the sound of it is lost in seconds and no one else notices. I go back to absorbing the incoming waves of sound from around me: near sound, far sound, sound in the middle distance, a miniature indoor landscape but in sound—a soundscape. Here, in the middle, at the point of processing—the control centre within my head—this hubbub is quickly sorted, unravelled, separated, analysed and interrogated. Some of it is thrown away—at least consciously—some is recycled, while some becomes the subject of mystery and conjecture in the mind. That is probably the material I will retain, the information my imagination and memory can use as part of today’s life experience. Often, it is the effort of locating the sound under the surface—under the layers of other sounds—that can prove to be revelatory. The composer and musician Pauline Oliveros expressed it well:
Listening for what has not yet sounded – like a fisherman waiting for a nibble or a bite.
Pull the sound out of the air like a fisherman catching a fish, sensing its size and energy…
There are sounds in the air like sounds in the water.
When the water is clear you might see the fish.
When the air is clear, you might hear the sounds. (Oliveros, 50)
This book is about the tiny sounds of the world and acquiring the ability to listen to them. Often they lie buried under the utility of modern life and so we miss them, but of course they are themselves a part of that raucous orchestra, a contributing factor in the composite sound-picture of the world, clues to where we are and why we respond to life as we do. I have worked with sound all my life: I have made radio, I have taught and researched it, and I have written poems about it. This then will be a poetic and philosophical journey rather than a scientific one. Here, I will be concerned with the emotional effect of these moments of sound and our capacity and potential to develop deeper responses to them as micro-events. Thus, in some ways, this writing is a sequel to my book Sound Poetics, in which I explored the nature of sound as part of personal identity and interaction. Sound is essentially poetic; it shares the capacity of the poem of which it is so key a component, to stimulate images in the mind that make every individual sound experience unique. Even when little else is left, a barely heard sound is sufficient to unlock a raft of associative thoughts and ideas. A very small sound, given knowledge and the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, just as the sound of a coffee cup placed in a saucer within a large, reverberant empty room can dominate the space in which it sounds. Yet even when the room is full and noisy, the sound is still there; listening by hearing—like seeing by looking—can be a learnt skill, the sweet art of noticing things as the circumstances around us dance. It can be found intuitively or consciously, but we should nurture it carefully in the everyday. There is never a moment in our lives when it cannot enhance our experience. A tiny sound can be as eloquent as a voice whispering to us. Indeed a phoneme is the start of all stories—a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry; these utterances need no language to communicate their meaning. By speaking a name, we give a person to the world. Were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparently innocuous fragments of sound around us that trigger realisation of a coming storm, earthquake or tsunami.
Here with me in the cafe, I turn to the book I have been reading. Although I am in the heart of a great city, this book, a novel by Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, surrounds me with arboreal whispering and running sap. Calvino wrote about a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, Cosimo, who rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees, where he remains for the rest of his life. (It occurs to me that this gallery will probably have portraits of young contemporaries of the fictional Cosimo from the Age of Enlightenment within its rooms.) During the course of his life among the branches, Cosimo discovers sonic wonders unknown to his earthbound friends and family. After all, those who spent their lives in the flat world could never understand the murmurings that came to one ‘who spent the nights listening to how the wood packs with its cells the circuits inside the trunks that mark the years, and how the patches of moulds spread in the north wind, and how with a shudder, the birds sleeping in their nests tuck their heads in where the wing feathers are softer, and the caterpillar wakes, and the shrike’s egg hatches’ (Calvino, 96). I must seek these same powers of awareness, learn with Cosimo and—wherever I am, in the town, by the sea or walking in the countryside—tune my mind’s radio to a new set of frequencies.
I will explore also the everyday sounds that may or may not be small, but that familiarity has bred, if not a contempt, then perhaps exclusion from our conscious awareness of their presence. We cannot listen to everything, but we can at least make our listening more conscious and deliberate. It is interesting to note how the use of a recording device and a pair of headphones can focus the attention on the sound world. The very act of initiating this mode of listening is an acknowledgement and commitment to entering into a relationship with a world that is essentially sonic. As a first step towards this sonic relationship with what is all around us, it is a technique that is useful insofar as by focusing in this way, we no longer take for granted the signals coming to us from all around. They begin to become strange and wonderful, as they first were as we encountered them when we burst into the world from the womb and the shock of air and all it brought with it made us cry out. Thus, this book is about not only training ourselves to hear, listen and interpret the minutiae of sound, but also making the familiar new again.
Many sound broadcasters have found that the seashore is an eloquent metaphor. It is an edgeland, a geographical pause between two states of being: a border between two worlds and a place of setting forth and arriving. In the opening pages of his great work for radio, Embers , Samuel Beckett evokes the beach as a haunted place where Henry shows us the ghost of his father against a strange background of dark waves. A shoreline is where the visual and the auditory are most mutually conjoined as a complementary sensory experience. Later in this book, we shall explore the rich and complex sounds of the natural world and seek to delve down—and up, into Cosimo’s trees—seeking out the subtle messages it sends us, and as part of that aspect of our exploration, we shall visit the work of the lyrical geographical scientist, Vaughan Cornish. In the meantime, here is Cornish on his own seashore, invoking the capacity that we shall enhance within ourselves on this journey: the ability to be in a place fully, with all the senses working as equal partners. A beach, as he shows us, is a good place to start, because its sound is as near to its visual presence as anything in nature:
At low water there is a soft murmur upon the flat sands then exposed, which changes to a rhythmic boom when the waves reach the steep, shingle slope. The breaker increases in height, culminates for a moment in a cusp, and then, curling over in a scroll, descends in thunder, the clear dark water transformed into a white, foaming surge which sweeps over the rattling shingle…No other aspect of the natural scene presents so perfect a harmony of sight and sound as the waves which advance upon the shore. (Cornish, 37)
Here in the art gallery cafe, there is ebb and flow too. I notice that the weave and weft of the voice tapestry around me have changed, and I see that the Spanish couple have gone, and the Americans are walking up the stairs, back to the galleries, perhaps to take another look at Rembrandt.
Our own overall sonic experience of a gallery provides the soundscape into which are placed the focused specifics of the individual art objects, each with the potential to evoke its own sound world in the imagination: internalised sound placed within the context of physical sound. Leaving the room, we carry the memory of it, of the objects we have seen, the impression they made upon us, but also of the place itself. Physically, it may have been a shared experience with other visitors, yet in audio terms, every personal response remains unique and of our own making. As Franz Kafka said: “Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing” (Kafka, 1). We may choose to purchase a catalogue as a souvenir of our experience; when we open it in a new environment, say our home, office or classroom, the sound of this new place provides a changed audio backdrop, while the ‘music’ of the images as we turn the pages may—or may not—remain the same as on first seeing. A broad analogy would be the experience of live music in the concert hall, contrasted with a recording of the same artist and/or work listened to within the environment of the home; one provides a direct witness to the event, while carrying with it all the unpredictability such a happening brings, while the alternative of a reasonably controlled situation, listening to the same work as a purely auditory experience may aid contemplation, but through the medium of a copy. One could argue that neither is totally definitive, and indeed such a reading of the performer’s original intention could only really occur were the live performance itself to take place in the presence of the listener alone. Nevertheless, we find ourselves returning to experience the original in situ in order to replenish our mnemonic and thereby nourish our experience of the work itself. In other words, a painting performing live is a happening of its own. Later, we shall explore the affect of an auditory work when augmented by the visual and acoustic properties of great spaces, such as a church, in which the sonic properties of the space itself as a part of experience are important in the event and its memory. A dry external acoustic compared to the liquid reverberations of a cathedral is a part of the performance of the world.
I make my way towards a room containing a mixture of nineteenth-century paintings, including some Impressionist work. On a landing, I pause beside a large portrait of the jazz singer, art critic, writer, lecturer and bon viveur, George Melly, who died in 2007. Melly came from Liverpool, and this picture is one of a series painted by his friend, Maggi Hambling. George was a larger-than-life personality, a life force if ever there was one, and Hambling’s pulsing canvas captures that exactly, positively fizzing and vibrating with the energy that was George Melly. If ever a picture was audible, this one is, and its soundtrack is ‘Dr Jazz.’ As a boy, Melly’s world was south Liverpool, where I live and I know the roads he knew well. In the autobiography of his childhood, Scouse Mouse , he writes vividly of those days between the wars and of some of his seminal experiences from the time. I remember that he bought his first sheet music, of Bing Crosby singing ‘Pennies from Heaven’ one day from a music shop near his home, and that he retained the memory of the ‘pale blue art-deco cover and a round inset of the young Bing Crosby in the bottom right-hand corner’ (Melly, 176). As he grew, the moment, the place and the song grew together, so that fifty years later he was able to write that ‘for some reason I can “see” the cover of “Pennies from Heaven” superimposed, like a pop collage, on the sky above a road that led up from Aigburth Road to the bottom of Mossley Hill’ (ibid.). That is on my way home; from now on, I am sure I will hear Crosby’s voice and ‘Pennies from Heaven’ every time I travel the Aigburth Road, and I shall think of George.
I walk into a relatively small room of about twenty pictures. Although it is not a large collection, cumulatively it has the same effect on my senses as did the cafe when I first arrived—twenty-three voices calling from four walls, their community for a time obscuring their individuality. I...