Hear and Now

For a short period during the French revolution, bells were torn from churches across the country, melted down and turned into money. Unlike the reconstituted alloy that clunks around in our pockets today, gently tapping these transmuted coins against each other produces a pure, clear tone - strangely at odds with the blood-sodden era of their manufacture. As much as their historical resonance, the coins' tinkling sonority reminds us that the architectural spaces we inhabit are as much tied up with the behaviour of invisible soundwaves as they are with bricks, mortar and an architect's plans.

In her recent book The Soundscape of Modernity (2002), Emily Thompson seeks to document a history of the relationship between landscape and soundscape, and the social implications of architectural acoustics. She listens to America from 1900-33: a period that saw the advent of acoustic technology, radio broadcasts, and the emergence of noise pollution in an increasingly mechanised society. It is a time during which the very nature of listening was transformed for good.

Thompson takes as her starting point the ideas of Alain Corbin and musician R. Murray Schafer, who understood soundscapes to be as much to do with the physical materials and objects that affect sound, as the soundwaves themselves. 'A soundscape, like a landscape,' she writes, 'ultimately has more to do with civilization than with nature, and as such it is constantly under construction and always undergoing change.' The idea of tracing the history of a culture through an invisible, transient and intangible element of our environment is a fascinating one, a little like writing the history of a culture through it's air or water. A history of acoustics recasts buildings as scores from which the sounds of a community are played, and photography or literature as clues from which a society's experience of sound can only be imagined. At one point Thompson quotes Duke Ellington explaining his piece 'Harlem Air Shaft' (1940). 'You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker.'

Thompson bookends her study of the ways in which people came to grips with the new clangs, crackles, pops and whizzes of the Modern era with examinations of the importance of Symphony Hall, Boston, and Radio City Music Hall, New York - both significant loudspeakers in the history of listening. Symphony Hall was the first modern auditorium to be built with the idea of acoustics and good, clear sound in mind. Radio City, with its ranks of concealed speakers and microphones, represented another milestone in its demonstration of the extent to which the control of sound had superseded the built environment in which it was heard. Through developments in acoustics and recording technology, listeners began to discern between 'good' and 'bad' sound - clear 'signal' as opposed to mere 'noise'. But these technological controls to reduce reverberation and maintain high fidelity also divorced sound from the environment in which it was made.

Musicians have long been fascinated by the effect the environment has on their work. When the Royal Albert Hall opened in 1871, the inaugural speech was drowned in a muddy wash of echoes bouncing around the circular auditorium. Later, however, Camille Saint-Saens composed his Third 'Organ' Symphony (1886) especially for the hall's boomy reverberations. Thompson cites the example of Le Corbusier, who collaborated with the composer Edgar Varese to produce an ever mutating acoustic environment for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and also mentions that during the 1960s the Royal Festival Hall in London was fitted out with a range of microphones and speakers designed to give 'assisted resonance' to the live music. In recent years, composers such as Alvin Lucier have concentrated on the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. (Maverick producer Martin Hannett once famously recorded Joy Division's drummer via a microphone in the studio toilet.)

Controlled sound also allows for a controlled absence of sound. We're perpetually engulfed in a constant stream of sonic activity ('Noise Annoys', as The Buzzcocks put it), and as Thompson points out, 'quietness' has changed from being an 'unenforceable public right into a private commodity'. The cover of David Bowie's Station to Station (1976) rather synergistically features a still from the Nicholas Roeg film of the same year, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Arguably the only film in which Bowie's severely dislocated, cocaine-induced demeanour worked to his advantage, the shot depicts the alien character, Newton, entering the control chamber of the spacecraft he has built in order to return to his home planet. The room, lined with strange conical protrusions, is based on the design of an anechoic chamber - a sonically dead room.

Designed in the 1940s by AT&T Bell Laboratories on behalf of the US Navy, the anechoic chamber carries no resonant sound. Sound waves are deflected and absorbed by the bizarre abstract forms lining the room, which function in much the same way as the egg-box-covered walls of band rehearsal rooms. One decibel is equal to the sound of blood in your ear. In a perfect anechoic chamber, nothing can be heard beyond the sound of your own breathing and the steady throb of blood pumping its way around the body. With uses ranging from testing speakers to psychological torture (audio company BM Speakers only allow their employees to spend a limited amount of time in their anechoic facilities) these rooms make visually explicit the relationship between physical, architectural form and sound.

Across the road from my desk there is a busy construction site, which grows louder and more irritating by the day. Composers such as Varese, or the Futurist Luigi Russollo would have revelled in this mechanised music of the city. To me, however, the idea of a perfectly silent room seems oddly appealing. I wonder whether now might be the time to start collecting old egg-boxes.