The spaces we design and inhabit all have distinctive sounds. The reading rooms at the New York Public Library have an overlay of rich sound. Your office may be a big room in a glass building with rows of cubicles where people stare into computer screens. It may be sealed off from the outside, and you may think it is quiet....That reminded me of the scene in "Living in Oblivion" — a movie about making a movie — where at one point everyone needs to stop making any noise so the sound technician can record the "room tone":
AND: Here's some mockery of room tone:
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Reminds me of a scene in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the over-rated Warner Herzog documentary about the Lascaux cave paintings. Some tour guide is leading the film crew into a cavern, and he cheesily tells them to pause to listen to the silence. Us suckers in the theater got to listen to chamber music while watching the film crew listen to the silence. Because the sound editor was as inept as the director.
I would love to listen to the sound of different caves. It's not silence. The sound that is close to silence is very interesting! If you are there to hear it, at the very least, your body is making sounds. These sounds will echo. I'm a huge fan of silence. There always is some texture to it, and it creates an opportunity for the tiniest sounds to shine. I prefer to work at home because I can get closer to silence, but I get a lot of pleasure from small sounds -- the tapping keyboard, the coffee cup on the wooden desk. I almost never play music.
I wish I could hear silence again. Tinnitus really sucks.
Sorry to thread hijack, this will be my last, but talking about sound and music brings up another interesting but overlooked scene in that movie--one of the interviewed experts had a reproduction of a flute that was 30,000 years old and he played something on it, Yankee Doodle Dandy, I think. What I found astonishing (but the movie ignored) is that this 30,000 year old flute could play a modern tune that sounded like the modern tune. The holes were drilled to the exact same 8-tone scale that we use today.
For podcast recording, room echo is okay in stereo but not in monaural. Use curtains, drapes, blankets, winter clothes.
I once watched a show about the making of Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Trouble Water album; it was interesting enough to keep me watching. At one point it went into how the producer or the head sound guy would walk around the different parts of the studio building, walking loudly, clapping his hands, talking while listening...all to determine the right place to record any particular element of the songs. It seemed pretty pretentious to me, but maybe back then it was important. Seems to me in the digital age you can get whatever tone you want wherever you are.
Car makers discovered that "sound matters" some time ago; that's why they design even the thinnest car doors to make that satisfying "clunk!" sound as they close, and pipe simulated engine sounds through the car stereo as the car is driven.
Which, perhaps, should be a warning to architects: resist the temptation to use electronics to alter a space's soundscape (but if you just can't resist, at least provide user controls that include an "off" setting).
I once saw classical guitarist Christopher Parkening play in Pittsburgh, at Heinz Hall.
Yes, the hall is designed for acoustics, but one man and one guitar alone filled it.
I was a bit in awe of the volume, textures and sounds he made.
@tim maguire:The holes were drilled to the exact same 8-tone scale that we use today.
Once the length of the flute is chosen, you're pretty much stuck with your holes. You can't put holes just anywhere, they have to be spaced according to wavelengths that can be supported by the flute, and there are only so many of those.
tim maguire said...
The holes were drilled to the exact same 8-tone scale that we use today.
Well, that depends. Looking at some pics of 30 to 40K year-old flutes, the holes seem to be evenly spaced:
"Using a hole-placement method that spaces the finger holes on the flute an equal distance apart is preferred by many flute makers and players. The finger holes are relatively easy to position, and some players find that the equal spacing makes it easier to re-locate the finger holes with your fingers after you lift them off to play a note."
A more complicated method.
Ann Althouse said... The sound that is close to silence is very interesting! If you are there to hear it, at the very least, your body is making sounds.
Oh you'll hear your blood circulating in your ears; it's weird but for me the weirder thing about being in a quiet pitch-black cave was my mind tying to fill in things I was "seeing." If I left my eyes open I kept thinking I saw things even though there was literally no light, but if I closed my eyes I didn't see anything, just darkness, as though my mind only agreed that I truly couldn't see if my eyes were closed.
Related: Can Silence Drive You Crazy>
A paste from Radio Derb, on expertise and getting the ambience right.
So here's the story. A chap in south China died at age 75, which is a good age — no tragedy there. South Chinese people are generally conservative, and this guy's family did what traditionalist conservative Chinese people do in the circumstances: they went to the local cemetery to pick out a plot.
If you're a traditionalist Chinese that's no small matter. In fact you need an expert to tell you which plot is the most auspicious, based on the surrounding scenery, gradient, rocks, plants, and so on. You need a fengshui man. Fengshui means "wind and water." It's a body of traditional ideas — I refuse to say "knowledge" — about which places, heights, orientations and so on are lucky.
So this family, who must have a bit of money, hired the best fengshui man in south China, a chap named Zheng Guoqiang, surname first of course. They brought him up from Hong Kong, over a hundred miles away, and took him to the cemetery. Mr. Zheng did a diligent survey and at last announced he'd found just the right spot for the grave, a spot where all the forces of wind, water, earth, and sky were in harmony.
He gathered key family members in that spot and began explaining to them all its harmonious perfections. Before he could get very far, there was a sudden mudslide on the slope above him. Seven people were buried alive. Six of them, including the fengshui master, died before they could be dug out.
The death toll was given in the press as two of the relatives, three cemetery workers, Mr. Zheng, and, quote, "a Taoist named Wu."
"A Taoist named Wu" … Isn't that a Johnny Cash song?
Further quote from the news story:
A friend of Mr. Zheng's, metaphysician Lee Chengze, told TomoNews [that's a Taiwanese newswire] he was "puzzled" as to why Mr. Zheng had decided to visit the cemetery as that particular Sunday "was a bad day" to go there.
I remember really liking Living In Oblivion, btw; I'm pretty sure Peter Dinklage is one of the "dream sequence" dwarves and both Catherine Keener and Steve Buscemi (sp?) are great in it.
Gabriel said...
@tim maguire:The holes were drilled to the exact same 8-tone scale that we use today.
Once the length of the flute is chosen, you're pretty much stuck with your holes. You can't put holes just anywhere, they have to be spaced according to wavelengths that can be supported by the flute, and there are only so many of those.
That's silly. Of course the chromatic scale wasn't determined 30,000 years ago based on the length of the flute.
At my enormous state university in the 1980s, the library was divided into two wings on each floor. One wing was identical to the other. However, one wing was used for group study, where six students around a table could talk and interact. The other wing was used for silent study, where six students around a table might not even know each other, but could read and work in silence.
Freshmen were informed politely in the library about this student-originated, student-enforced behavioral rule during the first weeks of Fall semester. After that, being noisy on the quiet side of the library would result in several students explaining to you, quietly, that you were being an asshole, and needed to leave immediately or be removed by fellow students.
The acoustics of the library worked fine for both group and silent study, although I am sure there was no design intention for this result.
"I remember really liking Living In Oblivion, btw; I'm pretty sure Peter Dinklage is one of the "dream sequence" dwarves and both Catherine Keener and Steve Buscemi (sp?) are great in it."
He's very memorable in that sequence, criticizing the filmmakers for using him for a dream sequence.
Here's it is, the dream sequence.
"Why does it have to be a dwarf?... Is that the only way you can make this a dream -- put a dwarf in it?"
@tim macguire:That's silly. Of course the chromatic scale wasn't determined 30,000 years ago based on the length of the flute.
No one said it was. I said you can't put holes just anywhere or you don't get notes for those holes. A length of flute can only support a finite number of notes. Not necessarily all those notes will fit the chromatic scale, but enough options will be closed off that you are probably going to get notes that sound pretty close to the chromatic scale.
Ferdinande's links explain the issues pretty well. You can evenly space the holes by making some bigger, which can result in unplayable holes. But your options are not unlimited, and unless you checked the frequency of the ancient flute's notes with a meter of some kind, or an instrument known to be in tune to the correct notes, you don't know how closely it matches, only that your ear can't tell.
"The sound that is close to silence is very interesting!"
Most people love mountains and waterfalls and other dynamic landscapes. I love the plains.
Where the wind blows freely. And whispers. Sometimes almost silently.
Sometimes silence sounds almost just like moderation.
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