On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (29 page)

Lehrer and I took that approach for a moment, too. We paused at the next corner and stopped talking, better to listen.

Our ears were alert to every sound. Cars came and went; pedestrians arrived and retreated. I collected these sounds like beach pebbles, warmed in my hands and pocketed. The jangle of a dog’s tags; the scrape of his toenails on concrete; the leaked trickle of music from between a passerby’s earbuds and her ears; the rumble of a subway underfoot. Trucks roared by; buses whined. In the lull between the pulses of vehicles, birds tweeted over one another in short sharp descending tones. Then a small sound drama: a man in a jumpsuit dragged a heavy vinyl bag up onto the curb in front of us; the weight of the bag could be seen in the man’s cant and heard in its low rasp on the sidewalk. A moment later, an empty mover’s dolly was rolled by, attempting to catch up with the jumpsuit. It nearly swiped a third man sweeping trash into a plastic dustpan, which folded up with a
thwack.

Lehrer looked pleased. “A lot of stuff just happened sonically! Think of all the elements going on in those little events,” he said, motioning at the space where the dragger, dolly, and sweeper had passed. “It was a symphony!”

Out of nothing, a symphony. As someone subjected to the noise
of the city day and night, I was getting the sense that Lehrer’s ability to turn bag-dragging into symphony was a shrewd adaptation. I was witnessing his psychological ability to turn the same noise I heard into music. Surely it is not only Cage who has a monopoly on this kind of transmogrification. Should we be able to do so on command, we would certainly be the better for it. We have not just emotional reactions to music, but physical reactions to sound. In Homer’s telling, choral singing kept the plague at bay. Roman writers claimed that a short flute piece could relieve gout discomfort. And David’s harp was famously used to loosen the grip of King Saul’s mental illness. For myself, just a few chords played by Art Tatum will calm me right down. Of natural sounds, those that are “self-similar” are more likable: the sound of water running; the susurration of a breeze in the canopy of a tree. These sounds share something with fractals: we hear them as the same when played at different speeds or different loudnesses. Something about them resonates deeply in us.

Our intersection was providing the typical voices of the city environment, with its trucks and buses, street preachers and loud talkers, high heels and ring tones. At times, people have tried to make inventories of all the noises of the city—a taxonomy of the bright or dull, simple or complex, brief or enduring sounds that fall around them on waiting ears. It seems an impossible task. We do not have enough attention to notice every sound, or words with which to mark them. Even the buzz of our own bodies working—the thrumming of our hearts, the click of our joints—eludes our attention. To hear this, we need to go into an anechoic chamber. In these strange spaces, all external sound is muted. One can hear only the swoosh of blood circulating, the lapping click of the heartbeat, and the muscles of the lungs stretching with each inhalation.

In the city, residents become inadvertent experts on urban sounds. I know the difference, I realized, between the sound
made by a shuttle bus and a city bus; I can recognize the acoustic signature of alternate-side-of-the-street parking days; I can tell from the language spoken around me whether I am on Broadway or a block away, on Amsterdam Avenue. Those who regularly walk in the forest may come to know each tree by its characteristic sound, be it a sob and moan (fir), whistle (holly), hiss (ash), or rustle (beech). In the forest, my ears are blunt instruments. In the city, they are well tuned. Sure, in the country one might be able to count the number of cricket chirps in order to determine the temperature outside.
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But in the city, I know within seconds of waking up whether it is a weekday or a weekend by the sounds of the street alone. If a garbage truck is groaning, weekday; if the distant sounds of the highway are turned down a notch, weekend.

At our corner, a car backed slowly into a parking spot parallel to the curb. Its tire, turning, caught the edge of the sidewalk. A splendid rubbing-squealing-yawning-pull of rubber fibers and concrete filled my ears. This was a sound not just of a city but also of a particular moment in this city’s life. The sound of parallel parking, of cars fitting into a crowded space, of two synthetic objects struggling to keep their integrity—this noise may disappear from the city in time. Either the design of urban environments, the rules of parking, the mode of transport, or the material of tires or sidewalks will change enough so that at some point the sound becomes rare. Then, if it is lucky, it will live on as a sound effect in period movies about the early twenty-first century, added to the pages of the Catalog of Lost Sounds among the rings of telephones and cash registers, the muffled flash-powder burst of an old camera, and the catch of the latch of an ancient refrigerator door as it closes.

Lehrer was speaking. “You feel it?” he asked. Under our feet, a train rumbled again. I could hear the subway, if I listened for it, but the sound was low enough that we felt it more than heard it. “Sound is a physical thing, you know—you reach a certain low frequency where you actually start feeling sound as well as hearing it. We can feel that bus.” He nodded over to a bus cruising down the street. “That bus is shaking us.”

It was true! A large tour bus ripped the air with the sound of its engine and the press of its tires, but I was surprised to find that it also jostled us with bursts of air. Lehrer pointed out another sound:
Ka-PLUMP!
A car struck a manhole cover ill-placed over its hole in the street; again, we heard it, but I also
felt
it. There is a tactile side to sound. More so than with vision, we can experience the physical agent (sound waves) in two ways at once. Once light becomes “ultraviolet” and invisible to us, we can feel it, but it is the feeling of our tissues slowly burning.
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With sound, the overlap is less painful and more common: in low frequencies, the sense of hearing morphs into the sense of touch. The subway’s rumble was almost tangible in the soles of our feet and our stomachs.

This fact has been used to great effect in insidious ways. In some cities, police sirens have been changed from their familiar—and ignorable—lullaby to a low-frequency bass boom that can be felt in your body almost before your ears. Audible sounds have been used in warfare: the U.S. government currently uses a so-called non-lethal acoustical device, which sends out low-frequency sounds in a very specific range to control crowds or as a warning.

There are other cross-modal components to listening. It is
visual, for one thing. Close your eyes, and your hearing is more focused. This is not because we need to shut off one sense in order to use the other. On the contrary, vision changes hearing. Though we hear with our ears, we often turn our heads to confirm with our eyes what the sound is. This practice seems ridiculous—who listens with her eyes?—except that it is so sensible. Straining to hear the person you are talking to on a subway platform, you would do just as well to stare intently at his mouth as you would to turn your ear toward him. Seeing what he is saying—through reading lips and monitoring expression—is sometimes as good as actually hearing it. Should you feel unpracticed at this skill, think again. You have been watching people speak all your life, and unconsciously training yourself to hear visually. Similarly, we may only be satisfied with our guess at the source of a sound after finding it with our eyes. The strident car alarm heard out your apartment window changes character when you discover which car is spouting it (and it thereby becomes more hectoring, usually).

Movie makers take advantage of our hearing with our eyes, Lehrer told me. In capturing a street scene like one we were gazing at, the foleys, in charge of sound, do not try to record it all. Instead, “they look for someone that people might want to visually focus on”—and capture the sounds, say, of just that one person’s footsteps.

“And we can’t hear the other people?”

“No.”

“You don’t have to get the other people?” I was impressed.

“Not really. You should watch that sometime on a film and see how often you see three or four people walking and you only hear one person’s footsteps.”

The sound has created a visual focus, and it is untroubling that we cannot hear the rest. I remembered the mute pigeons from my walk with John Hadidian; in their quietness, the birds now
seemed suited to film. It changed my perception to imagine the noise we were hearing as in some way cinematic. The introduction of sound to films swung the expressive emphasis from what was seen to what was heard. Sure, film is a visual experience, but sound is used dramatically and effectively to heighten that experience. And at times, sounds can allow us to see something that is not even there. A dog barking off-screen is enough to invoke the image of a fenced-in, menacing guard dog, a stranger passing by, or an unseen intruder or disturbance. Viewers of science-fiction films know that automatic doors make a satisfying
pssht
sound, so directors can take advantage of its familiarity: to show a door opening, one need only film static shots of a door closed and opened, and overlay them later with the added sound effect.

Of course, one of the things that is not sound track–like about the sounds of the city is that the heard sounds are all functional, not emotional. Rather than inflecting what is happening with swooning violins, or punctuating a scene with comic, melodramatic, or rhythmic sounds, we just hear the sounds things make and the noises people utter. Our steps are rarely synchronized with a beat, or our emotions with a tune.

What would it be like to walk through a city with your own expressive sound track, in which a mugger arrives with menacing music, or the sight of a loved one is decorated with a swell of violins? I suspect this is one of the pleasures of walking while listening to music through headphones, or with earbuds burrowed into the inner ear. Certainly the activity distracts the walker enough from the actual experience of being on the street that he can become an annoyance to others, as his social sense is reduced to almost nothing, much like Fred Kent’s cell-phone talkers. Others become merely characters in the great movie unfolding in three dimensions to the sound track coming through his earbuds. He moves through the film weightlessly, undisturbed, with nobody breathing
down his neck and interrupting his flow. He stops experiencing what is actually happening outside; he is merely an observer, watching it happen, even while moving through it. It is almost as if, if he reached out to touch the person walking astride him, his hand would fall through their arm, it being but an illusion projected on the mesmerizing screen of his creation.

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From our corner we were treated to a spitter’s throat-clearing, mouth-contorting expurgation, so phlegmy we reflexively recoiled even at our safe distance—as though we were at risk of tasting it ourselves. Hearing can invoke memories that are emotional—as the nostalgia of the swings—or visual or tactile. To hear a regular, tonal beeping in the city is to imagine a truck’s rear lights on and to nearly picture it creeping backward. Much of what I was finding to be distinctive about the sounds on this urban walk was the non-sound sight or feeling associated with them: the back strain felt in the man struggling with his dragged load; the feeling of popped gum in my mouth and on my lips on hearing a girl casually snap her gum as she passed.

The ears feel connected to the entire body. Music taps our fingers and feet and, if we are so inclined, our hips. The pleasure of a lover’s voice is felt in our viscera and stands the hairs of our neck’s nape on end. Or, as on this walk, we can feel nostalgic, empathetic, disgusted, or exhausted by what we hear. Hamlet’s father was killed by the herb henbane poured into his ear—and no wonder, because the ear was thought to connect to all internal points, to course “swift as quicksilver . . . through / The natural gates and alleys of the body.” Even the sound of the click of heels from a woman walking by felt empathically translated into myself, and I could feel what it is like to teeter on those high-heeled perches.

Daily, we are exposed to sounds that affect our bodies in ways
we might not know. Low-frequency sounds are the source: waves coming too infrequently for our ears to make much of them but slipping into us quicksilver-like. Low enough, and we call it
infrasound,
as though if humans cannot hear it, it is not a true sound. Of course there are plenty of familiar animals who make a living using infrasounds—elephants, for instance. A bull might stomp a message that travels ten kilometers along the ground, as infrasounds are resilient to weakening as they travel over space and time. Lots of man-made objects inadvertently produce infrasound. These noises are omnipresent and damaging.

Ventilation fans moving stale air out of large office buildings, thrumming along at a few hertz, are doing a service, but they have also been implicated in thrombosis. Their low-note hums not only get into our bodies’ gates and alleys but also might vibrate in rhythm with the heart, amplifying and thus disturbing normal circulation of blood. Sounds traveling at 7 hertz, including wind sounds, have been implicated in headaches and nausea, as they vibrate in time with the alpha waves of the brain. Loud sounds can cause the heart to seize or skip a beat. For whales, Navy sonar signals interrupt their communication and damage the tissue of their ears.

Sounds are also contagious, whether they are emitted by a living thing or a simulacrum. The sound of someone breathing heavily in a movie can affect your own breathing rate. A commercial jingle is successful if it lands in your head and stays there, replaying itself unceasingly. You may not want a Coke or a mattress or a pizza right this second, but the suggestion has wormed its way into your subconscious in case you grow thirsty or sleepy or hungry. And the contagion of sounds has a biological component: if a predator growled at our ancestor’s ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, his insides likely vibrated to this growl, and he hightailed it away from the scene. Today, if my son, recently an infant, cries, I feel it viscerally. I can locate no anatomical mother-button he is pushing,
but I react as though there were one. It is as if he cries at a frequency that makes my interiors rumble—and I hightail it toward him.
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