What was the very first sound you heard this morning? Have you noticed how many planes have rumbled overhead since the beeping of the alarm penetrated your consciousness? Can you hear birdsong above the din of traffic? The new Save our Sounds campaign launched by the BBC’s World Service is trying to make us more aware of the sonic soundscapes in which we live.
We’re all very clued up on visual interference, blots on the landscape, the way buildings look and affect our aesthetic sensibility, but we tend to overlook the sonic soundscape which surrounds us. On Wednesday’s Discovery programme, an acoustician, Professor Trevor Cox, took us on a sound walk from King’s Cross to Regent’s Park in London to celebrate 25 years of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. This was set up by R. Murray Schafer, the ‘father of acoustic ecology’, who began by being concerned about the impact of noise pollution on the human psyche. Since then the project has taken on a bigger perspective — looking at the way that urban soundscapes are changing as quickly as the physical appearance of cities. What we hear around us from hour to hour has changed radically since the traffic-free days of our grandparents (or perhaps I should say great-grandparents). Surely this must affect us? Does it matter?
The chirruping of a couple of sparrows in my garden in the last few days has made me realise how much they’ve been missing from my aural horizon in recent years. It’s a sound I grew up with but they’re a rare sounding now in many urban spaces and especially to the denizens of south-west London where the screeching of bright-green parakeets drowns out the rumbling jets of Heathrow.
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