Are We Building a Society Out of Tune?
Photo via flickr by mararie
There is an unstoppable hum that is emitted by the Industrial Age soundscape in which we live. Sometimes the sound is subtle, like the hum of our refrigerators and computers, and sometimes it’s deafening like a screeching car alarm.
The National Institutes of Health reports, “Nonauditory effects of noise exposure are those effects that don’t cause hearing loss but still can be measured, such as elevated blood pressure, loss of sleep, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing, and changes in brain chemistry.” Moreover, the site states: “According to the WHO Guidelines for Community Noise, these health effects, in turn, can lead to social handicap, reduced productivity, decreased performance in learning, absenteeism in the workplace and school, increased drug use, and accidents.”
In conversations with Sputnik Observatory, Bill Buchen, sonic architect and artist Robert Adrian X discuss our changing urban soundscape:
The soundscape has changed a lot in my lifetime alone, and the main thing has been cell phones and fluorescent lights. Usually, in North America it comes down to 60 cycles, or some fraction of that. Like 60 x 4 equals 240, or 480, because this is the 60 cycle hum of our lives. If we’re sitting in a room, we don’t hear it all the time, but the fans are going at 60 cycles, the electric grid is, and so this has become our mantra as a society. So, wherever we go, we’ll always have this 60 cycle hum as a tamboura, a tonic note in our lives, and we run our lives according to it.
—Bill Buchen, Sonic Architect, sptnk 0:01:98:21
In an urban environment, you have all kinds of sounds which are constantly collaging – other people’s lives and experiences going on all around you. You have the radio, the neighbors radio. You never hear anything alone. In a way, collaging is a useful way of understanding what has happened in our culture with technical media producing all kinds of extra-natural events. Then the question comes up, “Is this nature too?”
—Robert Adrian X, Artist, sptnk 0:32:20:00
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