In Pursuit of Silence Page 8
The U.K. researchers suggest that the explanation for our response may have to do with points of sensitivity in our auditory system. We might hear certain sounds as unpleasant because “they contain strong concentrations of energy in a range … to which the auditory system is maximally sensitive.” In other words, the sounds that drive us crazy may be ones that we hear as loud at almost any level. Our auditory cortex seems set up to favor sounds consistent with the pursuit of silence.
The pitch of an infant’s cry may have been biologically selected because it’s so hard to ignore. We may just be faced with two diametrically opposed interests on the part of the screamer and the screamed at. The helpless baby has to hit the most vulnerable point in our auditory cortex to make sure we take away the pain; the screamed-at party, on the other hand, has to smother the noise since it puts them at risk of being localized, then lunged upon by a savage beast or by someone like Jason Everman. Loud sounds—especially in certain frequencies—mean something bad is coming at us or placing us at risk. They have to be silenced as quickly as possible.
Except, that is, when aggression is the aim of the noise.
Once again, as Niemiec reminded me, it’s not the frequency per se that’s at issue. Aggression arises in response to certain changes in harmonics. A sense that some fundamental frequency is being stressed the wrong way elicits rage. And this returns us to the “228 vibrations” of Hitler’s voice. Niemiec pointed out that to the extent Dr. Steer was correct in his measurements, it might mean Hitler sounded like Mickey Mouse. (Not usually a bloodlust-inducing frequency, though parents exposed to repeated viewings of Disney DVDs might think so.) Or, Niemiec added, it might sound like a woman’s scream. But then I read another account of Hitler’s voice that suggested the secret of his vocal powers might lie squarely in the domain of Niemiec’s harmonic studies. This description reported how “at all of his public meetings Hitler begins in a rasping tone; decidedly he is off key. Then he modulates his voice and it becomes a pleasant baritone.” Later on, the higher pitch returns. Then the lower. And so on. Perhaps, then, the power to incite aggression in his audiences arose not from the 228 vibrations on their own but from the repeated shift in harmonics, where Hitler stressed his “pleasant baritone” up to the level of a female scream. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker, wrote in her memoir that the instant she first heard Hitler’s voice she had an “almost apocalyptic vision.” All at once, she recounted, the surface of the earth spread out before her “like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt paralyzed.” Perhaps Hitler’s voice really did create a kind of noise that suggested disruption in the cosmos.
Among the most intriguing explorations of the cosmic roots of noise is a study done in 2005 by Mark Whittle, an astronomy professor at the University of Virginia. Whittle undertook to analyze the sound of the big bang itself. His analysis revealed that the sound would not, in fact, have been an explosion at all.
Creation itself, it seems, was completely silent. Because the initial expansion consisted of a perfectly balanced, radial release of energy with, in Whittle’s words, “no part catching up with any other part—there were no compression waves, no sound, just quiet brilliant live expansion.” However, variations in density in the pre-creation universe had carved what Whittle describes as gravitational valleys and hills. As the gases of the big bang fell into these “cavities” and ricocheted around, sound waves were created. With the passage of time, more gas fell into deeper caves, making for more long, deep sound waves. Over the first tens of thousands of years, as gravity released the longer pressure waves into the spectrum, the pitch dropped. Gravity, in Whittle’s universe, plays the part of a pianist at the keyboard of the primordial landscape. He characterizes the overall noise of the big bang as “a moment of silence, followed by a rapidly descending scream which builds to a deep roar and ends in a deafening hiss.”
Perhaps our revulsion for certain harmonic changes has its origin in the birth pangs of the universe.
There are two main ways that sound can have a negative impact upon us. One relates to specific associations we bring to a noise. The second, which is only just beginning to be explored, has to do with the inherent acoustical properties of certain sounds. In many but not all cases, the two species of disagreeable sound overlap. But whether the issue with a particular sound is associative or intrinsic to the noise, or both, the problem is that—at least if it’s loud enough—time does not diminish its sting. A thundering growl is as much a signal to us that we better hide as it was to our ancestors. Lidia Glodzik-Sobanska of the New York University Center for Brain Health told me that the problem with alarming sounds is that while we are quite good at psychologically adjusting, if we hear them often enough, our physiologies never habituate. No matter how thoroughly our conscious minds might know that a loud siren rushing by is not coming for us, our blood pressure still spikes, our pupils still dilate, and our hair cells still flatten and twist.
There are two phenomena that trigger a baby’s startle reflex: a sense of falling and a loud noise. In both cases, a baby responds by arching its back, flailing out with arms and legs, and grabbing out with its thumb and first finger. In other words, noise, exactly like being dropped, makes a baby feel it has lost its anchor in space and is plunging down. No wonder the word “noise” derives from nausea—specifically seasickness and the sense of dizzy disorientation it implies.
There is plenty of evidence for the negative consequences of noise. But the more I understood about these, the more I wondered why we would make so much of it intentionally. To get a handle on this conundrum, I went to visit a few contemporary environments in which people were relentlessly jacking up the volume.
CHAPTER FOUR
Retail: The Soundtrack
Dateline August 11, 2008, Barton Creek Square
From the dark opening in a black wall stamped with gray shutters came a pounding bass throb. I thought of the words of Michael Morrison, a professor of marketing I’d recently spoken with. “It’s so difficult getting a ‘wow’ from customers entering a retail space today,” Morrison had lamented. “The challenge of producing the ‘wow factor’ is placing a whole new amazing focus on the acoustical element in store design!” I stepped closer to the entrance and felt the waves of noise taking control of my body; it was as though a muscular DJ had just slammed down inside my chest and grabbed hold of my entire cardiovascular system.
“Wow,” I said out loud.
“Right?” Leanne Flask, a blond sound designer with many clients at the Barton Creek Square mall in Austin, Texas, nodded. “Let’s go.” She waved me forward. We passed a pair of pubescent girls twitching in place in the spotlit darkness, and entered the sonic abyss of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Their flagship store is planted on Fifth Avenue a few blocks from my office, and from time to time in the months prior to my visit to Texas, I would wander by the entrance and take in the thump, thump, thump that emanates all day long from inside. The store often has a velvet rope set up outside, guarded by towering, chiseled men who eye the line of shoppers with cool menace. Many days the line wraps all the way around Fifty-sixth Street, filled with tourists from all over the world, mostly young but sometimes old, patiently awaiting their turn to get inside and buy some mass-produced clothes. Okay, I get it: it’s hot, it’s exciting, it’s sexy. But I didn’t really grasp why so many people of all different backgrounds would be drawn to shop in an environment where the sound was kept at a truly punishing level. I couldn’t fathom why it was that, as Professor Morrison gushed, “People love that space everywhere they go!”
Shopping and noise have been associated since the first shill hawked his wares. In ancient bazaars (and a number of modern-day souks) salesmen shouted out the nature, quality, and prices of their goods; the loudest voice promising the best bargains often drew the biggest crowd. It’s basic, big-lung competition. But except for a few
connoisseurs of street noises (such as Irving Howe, who wrote approvingly in World of Our Fathers of markets where you could “relax in the noise of familiars”), the loudness of the scene was not itself a draw. Newspapers describing the peddler trade in early-twentieth-century New York almost invariably attach the adjective “noisy” to this form of commercial activity—in close conjunction with “aromatic,” “unsightly,” and “dirty.” When Mrs. Isaac Rice, who founded America’s first society to fight noise pollution, took a trip down to the Lower East Side in 1908 to hear the “unnecessary rackets in that section,” she pronounced it the “saddest place” she had ever visited. To end the “noises made by the hucksters” she proposed that residents of the tenement houses “display different colored cards to indicate the peddlers they wanted to buy from. A red card could attract the vegetable vendor, a yellow card, the fruit man, and other colors other tradesmen.” Through this means she hoped to minimize noise in neighborhoods where people were already condemned to insufficient sleep “owing to their long toil.” A few decades later, most people applauded Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to eliminate pushcarts—in part because it meant confining the noise of commerce to the new indoor markets the mayor had built. And when a New York Times article in January 1940 reported on the belated closing of the East Side pushcart market, it noted that “only a few sentimental New Yorkers” regretted the fact that Orchard Street, Hester Street, and Rivington Street would no longer “resound to the raucous cries” of “bull-voiced peddlers.” Still, the clamor of the pushcarts was not the thunder of Abercrombie & Fitch. I decided to contact A&F to ask them about their sound strategy.
Unfortunately, my questions made “corporate” fall suddenly as silent as Trappist monks after compline. But eventually I discovered DMX, the sound-design company responsible for implementing A&F’s auditory will. Leanne Flask, an executive with DMX, invited me to Austin, where the company is headquartered, to discuss the thinking behind Abercrombie & Fitch’s acoustics, and to give me a tour of the mall.
Flask is a stylish blonde with a big, apprehensive smile. The day I met her, her right arm was encased in a lavender-colored cast, the result of a volleyball disaster. As we drove to Barton Creek Square, Flask told me that DMX had started out in the mid-1970s marketing an uninterrupted music service that was beamed into stores by satellite. Music design for retail was then in its infancy: most providers, Flask explained, took the approach that just throwing on a CD did the trick. “You would have a store selling teen ballet slippers playing classic rock.” There was a complete disconnect between product aura and store sound.
Today, the DMX Web site describes the company as “an international leader in multi-sensory branding” that enables clients to express their brand’s “unique personality and create an unmistakable identity.” These days, Flask explained, acoustical branding is much more than a matter of loading up an iPod for a client. “We hand-design how every single sound flows from song to song seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.” DMX provides clients with “mood, energy, texture.” In her experience it was incredibly difficult for people to grasp that these elements had no connection to the most popular artist or the most popular song. What was it about then? I asked. “It’s all about connection.” She swung into a parking place in the mostly deserted mall lot and dug in her cowhide-pattern purse for a pair of sunglasses. “I’ve lived my whole life in music. I love what I do.” She looked up at me. “This power to heal and connect and bring people together who otherwise wouldn’t be … That’s amazing.”
ACOUSTICAL RAPTURE
As Flask and I began to loop the store, she hollered the odd factoid above the din. Pointing to a set of cellblock-like dressing rooms, she explained that though it sounded here as though the music had been cranked louder, it was just due to the fact that the dressing rooms lacked the stacks of clothing that provided a measure of sound absorption. I stopped to write a note, whereupon a young girl twitched up out of nowhere to ask if she could help us, then jiggled swiftly away when we shook our heads. Flask aimed a finger after her. “She thinks we’re managers reviewing the store and she’s freaking out. If you ever want to torment the people working in an Abercrombie & Fitch store, just come in with a little notebook writing things down.” We started moving again. Flask yelled a few more insights in my direction. I gestured helplessly toward my ears; her remarks had been entirely drowned out. She started to shout louder, then gave up.
At last we staggered back out of the gates of the store to a position far enough away that we could hear each other without screaming. She glanced back at the storefront. A sympathetic human weariness passed across her features. “Everything’s very dark inside. So they use the music to make it lighter.” I nodded encouragingly and she gathered steam. “So all the music—everything’s like very, very uplift-y. It’s like—I’m going to start my day in a club!” She adopted the expression of someone being ecstatically strangled. “That’s a branding tactic.”
When DMX got the Abercrombie & Fitch contract, corporate management told her that the store “needs to feel like a place where everyone’s having fun all the time. A happy place with a positive, happy feeling. Like a party. So for us, we have to be careful. Because there’s a feeling they want you to express and it’s not what they’ve done with the visual design. I have to look at what they already have and figure out how I can make it feel like an upbeat, uplift-y, happy, positive place when everything’s really dark. So I’m going to have to go to extremes of happy and energetic.” She looked back once more at the vibrating blackness.
While Abercrombie & Fitch technically targets fifteen-to twenty-eight-year-olds, Flask believes it’s really going after the college freshman and those who idealize the freshman lifestyle. “It’s the mentality of first time away from home,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Woohoo! I’m going out at night and I’m not going home afterward!’”
I inquired to what degree sheer loudness was part of the equation she had to work with. She cast me a look like I was making fun of her. “We have to be very aware of exactly how every sound will be heard at the levels they’re going to be played at,” she said. “So if a song is going to start splattering at a certain level, we can’t use it.” She went into a lengthy technical digression about how they gauged the risk of splatter in different acoustical conditions.
“But how is all this about creating a connection?” I asked, gesturing toward the booming storefront. Flask paused. “This isn’t about using music to create a connection,” she conceded. “It’s about using music to create an event.”
All of this seems designed to push a simple, primeval trigger: Abercrombie & Fitch uses loud music and spotlit darkness to induce a state of celebratory arousal. Indeed, if you walk around your local branch of Abercrombie & Fitch, you may feel that there would be something downright frigid in considering your purchase too closely. Far better to release your inner “Oh my God I’m away from my home!”
This is not, of course, a use of noise that Abercrombie & Fitch invented. Despite what Flask said, this too can be understood as a means of creating connection, only it’s less between people than between the individual and a state of group ecstasy.
Iegor Reznikoff is a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris who has a fondness for medieval chanting and spelunking. In 1983, he went on a visit to Le Portel, a Paleolithic cave in France. When he walked into Le Portel, he began humming to himself, as he generally does when he goes into a new room, to “feel its sounds.” Reznikoff was intrigued to discover that when the walls were adorned with painted animals, his humming became louder and more intense. Working with Michel Dauvois, a colleague, Reznikoff went on to demonstrate that ancient paintings on cave walls around the French Pyrenees are positioned in synchrony with points of heightened acoustical resonance. In the course of subsequent explorations across France, Reznikoff found that there was almost no resonant point in caves once inhabited by Paleolithic peoples that did not contain at least some pain
ted markings—and, conversely, that the positioning of some of the markings could only be understood in relationship to sound. Moving through the caves in total darkness while using his voice as the only sound source, Reznikoff would come to “a particularly resonant place,” turn on the light, and invariably find a sign, “even in a place unsuited for painting.”
Reznikoff believes that this intersection of painting with acoustically hyperresponsive stone walls reveals how the shaman heightened the emotional power of ritual through amplification and echoes. (The resonance at these sites is, indeed, powerful enough that when he himself made sounds in the caves Reznikoff felt his whole body vibrating in tandem with the gallery.) Sound effects enhanced a sense of communion with both the space and the images painted there. Such synchrony would also have boosted the shaman’s effort to identify with specific animals. By making a sound near a picture of an animal, Reznikoff discovered he was able to make it seem that the animal itself was calling out.
Reverberation, echoes, amplification, and resonance were all part of the prehistoric wise man’s bag of tricks for inducing a state of high emotion and minimal reason. This, it seemed to me, was getting closer to the territory of the mall.