Sound Quality

“He laughed like the most serious child I ever knew, telling me the story about the country where everyone was deaf.” – Ilya Kaminsky

Walking across Iffley Meadows one summer evening, I’m thinking about the quality of sound. In a recent London Review of Books John Burnside argued that peace and quiet had become things that only money can buy. This reminded me of places that I remember as perfectly silent – often places that access to a Westerner’s lifestyle enabled me to visit. There were the nights camping in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. There was the infinitely starred desert night outside Cafayate in Argentina. There was also the garden of the B&B outside Dorchester in Dorset. Also, I remembered places of intense noise – a Bakerloo line platform with the train wheels squealing, where Sixth Avenue meets Central Park in New York, Istiklal in Istanbul, by the roadside in Amman, Jordan. (I’m thinking of ambient noise, not sweaty nightclubs.)

Where I am now is in between. As I’ve written before, Iffley Meadows make up a piece of country close to the centre of a city. It’s getting on for 9pm and there’s a cloudy sunset making its leisurely way into night. I stop on the path, between buttercups and long grass, to listen. What I hear depends on how I tune my ears.

For example, there is an insistent chanting from further up the Thames, maybe rowers in one of the boathouses.

For example, there are emergency vehicles on Donnington Bridge.

I retune my ears, and hear the summer breeze, now chilly, in the high willows.

My ears retune themselves, and I hear the chanting again, and people talking on the towpath.

I retune my ears, and hear a wren in the line of trees across the Meadows.

My ears retune themselves: there’s plenty of traffic on Donnington Bridge and Abingdon Road. When the wind is right, I’m sure I can even hear the bass of bus engines.

I retune my ears to two blackbirds either side of me, and a green woodpecker going down the scale, and an accidental-sounding honk from a Canada goose passing through. The breeze makes a noise in the grass too.

My ears retune themselves –

Most of the time I don’t hear most of these sounds. In the house we had before the present one, which was a hundred metres from the railway, the noise of the trains disappeared after a day or two – except that it was disconcerting when they stopped because of leaves on the line (or whatever reason it happened to be). Even the sound of maintenance trains squeaking long into the night became just another unheard.

It’s a bit like thinking about breathing. Stop and listen, and it all crowds in. But after a few minutes the mind moves on, and it goes back into the unconscious. Where we live now, motorbikes, sirens and car horns intrude. Even birdsong is assigned its place in the background – though I often stop to listen for it, to hear a particular kind of breathing.

There are also the sounds that always grab my attention. A horse’s anxious neigh, blown by the wind over rush-hour traffic, a fox’s yelp – a sound as if snatched at – the heave and moan of a tree under strain. In winter the clatter of twigs against each other alters the presence of trees.

This spring, clearing the pond of fast-growing, strangling weed, I heard – for the first time – the sound of tadpoles. Hundreds of them swim in our pond every year, and the sweeps of the net through the water agitated them. They moved just under the surface, many turning onto their backs and gaping minute mouths into the air. The water crackled with their activity – it was a sound like flames, with an added texture of drops falling from a tap. Very strange, but impossible not to listen to.

Burnside’s comments also set me to thinking about what peace and quiet means. To Mesolithic people (in Britain, from the end of the Ice Age until about 4,000 years ago; living a semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle) moving through the flood plains around the vast unembanked Thames, quiet may have been, as it is for me, a relegation of sound to the level below conscious thought. But that surely would not mean that they were not listening. One thing I almost certainly share with those people is the sound of birds. They would have heard many more species, many more individuals, no doubt – and definitely not a Canada goose – but that’s one line on the map that still exists.

But the quality of that sound must have been different to a Mesolithic person. Let’s say that she and I both take some aesthetic pleasure in the sound of a blackbird. For me that pleasure is one part of a complex web of associations that I might reluctantly summarise as “nature pushing back against the human.” I don’t want to be so simplistic as to say that my putative Mesolithic counterpart might have heard “nature bearing down on the human”, but in the pleasure taken perhaps there was also some element of listening for the moment when the song became the bird’s chucking alarm call, warning of impending threat – to the blackbird at least.

In a world where human mastery – no matter how illusory in the long term – is for all intents established, I tune my ears towards the non-human out of desire. For a Mesolithic person standing in a flood meadow as evening fell, I think it’s likely that there was an element of fear, a survival instinct that investigated sound for the signs of approaching danger.

Presumably money can buy a sense of quiet in which there is no sense of threat. But I’m afraid to drop my guard. What will happen if I fail to listen? Will the sounds that I stop myself to listen to disappear if I don’t make the effort? In some ways I need the traffic noise so that I can find the birdsong rich. In some ways I need the atavistic sense of “wild” in birds’ voices to reassure myself that I am human, part of the noise.

As I reach the corner of the Meadows, the sounds of the river – boat hulls against the current, whizz of cycles on the towpath, the subtextual honks of waterfowl a little way downstream – reassert themselves. I’m heading for a riverside pub full of talk and glasses’ knocking against table tops.