Six Things, Volume 5
Soundscapes | scale | pages | bramblings | circle | map
Hello! Before we go on to the Six Things this week, a brief word. Call it ‘Thing 0’ if you like.
You might have noticed that I’ve recently added the option for a paid subscription to Six Things.
The first thing to say is that these Friday Six Things mailings will always be free. They are, I think, what many of you are here for. I enjoy putting them together, have been delighted by people’s enthusiasm for them, and intend to keep on sending them as long as there are things to share. Thank you for signing up in the first place – it would be a lonely activity without you.
But having started it, I’m keen to expand the activities and share even more things with anyone who’s willing to read them. So there is now an extra mailing on Wednesdays. Exactly what it will contain will vary – this week’s was a medium-sized blog-post-type-thing about Time (you can read it by signing up for a free 7-day trial, then cancel if you don’t fancy it after all), and there will usually be a piece of writing by me included in these mailings. But no doubt there will be other stuff as well, as the fancy takes me.
If you choose to upgrade, it costs a bit more than a large vat of coffee-like fluid from any of the major coffee chains, once a month. And it is, dare I say it, stronger, tastier, and less likely to leave you feeling vaguely queasy. And if you feel that the Friday mailings alone are worth a subscription, then I am, as always, powerless to stop you.
Thanks for making it this far, and thanks too for your support, whether free or paid – it is enormously appreciated.
Enough. On to:
Thing 1 – Soundscapes
A winter walk of brisk heartiness is a fine thing. Ideally there will be bright sunshine, but you’ll make do with grey, picking up the pace to offset it. And if it all gets bit blowy, well, that only serves to enhance the heartiness.
There comes a point, though, when the heartiness begins to pall. The legs feel heavy, the tea and cake halfway round are a distant memory, the car still a mile off. The sun has gone, the wind’s getting up a bit, and what’s this? Squally drizzle? No. No no no. You didn’t sign up for this.
That’s when you need the robin.
You might not see the robin. You haven't seen most of the birds on this walk, except the thirty jackdaws straggled across the sky, chacking to each other, the sound spreading through the flock and recalling the sound of snooker balls at the break. There were gulls, too, floating on angled wing overhead, calling harshly then floating away again. And that pheasant, startled, rising from surprisingly close with a ker-chuk and a frantic whirring of short round wings. But you haven’t been short of avian stimulation, mostly in the form of a scattered mix of cheeps, strrrps and tiddly-woops from deep in the bushes.
But the robin’s song is what you want. That silvery ribbon of sound as dusk approaches – fast and rippling. Then a short gap, another phrase, different, shorter. Pause. Another, longer this time, running away from the bird like a loo roll chased by a puppy across a parquet floor.
The robin’s song – the robin itself – is many people’s gateway into the world of birds. We like to think of them as sweet, benevolent animals. The gardener’s friend, keeping you company as you potter around, weeding and dead-heading. ‘Confiding’, to use the birder’s term (this isn’t so much the case outside the UK, where they tend more towards the skulking habits of many other garden birds). A robin at the feeder and everything is fine. Except, that is, if you’re another bird encroaching on their territory. That’s when the robin’s true nature comes out: fiercely territorial, aggressive, ready to fight to the death to protect its patch. Don’t believe that silvery ribbon of sound. It’s a front.
Here’s one I met the other day.
It allowed me to get very close – a sign, as you might have guessed, not of friendliness but of territorial defiance. Quite apart from that feeling of intimacy you get when you have a close encounter with any wild thing, the little swellings of its throat as it gives its subsong are entirely pleasing. I also like the casual poo a few seconds in, but then I am eight years old.
I use the robin as the first bird in the Twitter Birdsong Project, partly because it’s the one garden bird most people will be able to recognise and name, partly because its song is a treat to listen to and a good aural exercise in parsing the strange language of our feathered chums, and partly because (unusually) you’ll hear robins singing most of the year round, and even at night, so there will often be one on hand as part of the general soundscape, wherever you happen to be.
That soundscape might include other things, and it’s only when you stop and listen – properly listen – that you might realise just how complex it is, and how many sounds of different kinds contribute to it.
The idea of soundscapes was popularised by the Canadian composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s, and there is no more enthusiastic and passionate advocate of the subject than Bernie Krause. Since reading his book, The Great Animal Orchestra, I’ve become ever more aware of the sounds of everyday life – not just the ones that jump out at you, but the particular combination of all the sounds that make up a place’s unique aural fingerprint. And even though the soundscapes I experience as an urbanite are often man-made – ‘anthrophonic’, as per Krause’s categorisations of the three kinds of sound contributing to any soundscape1 – there is still plenty to listen out for in even the most unlikely places.
A memory stands out, and will stay with me, of stepping out of the bookshop Hatchard’s onto Piccadilly in central London. A frenetic kind of place, its soundscape entirely anthrophonic and not always pleasant – the rumble of traffic, the footfall of pedestrians, a pneumatic drill or two, the unrelenting din of the city. Cutting through it all, from a rooftop over the road, sweet and pure, I heard the song of a black redstart. A short, sharp rising tsee-tsroo-strch-chrrrr-strcchhkk (transliterating birdsong is a mug's game, I tell you – absolute madness).
(This was not the black redstart in question, just to be clear. But imagine this sound over the sound of Piccadilly.)
There is, wherever you are, always something.
Except, perhaps, in an anechoic chamber. I haven’t yet visited one of those (although I do harbour a secret desire to do so, just to compare it with what the “silence” of my own home). I’m told it’s an eerie, unsettling experience, the background hum of the world removed, leaving the chamberee isolated and nervous, almost painfully conscious of their own breathing, the beating of their heart, the pulsing of blood through their veins.
Maybe I won’t after all.
Here’s Bernie Krause talking about soundscapes. A worthwhile use of fifteen minutes of your time.
Here’s an article he wrote about biophony.
And I include this interview with him partly because he says some interesting things, but also because of the delicious coincidence that the interviewer’s name is Robinsong.
His book, The Great Animal Orchestra, is here. It is a fascinating and sobering read about the quantifiable measure of diversity loss in the last forty years.
Thing 2 – The Scale of the Universe
It comes to us all – or at least it should. An overwhelming sense of the hugeness of everything, neatly juxtaposed with a corresponding understanding of our own tininess.
All very healthy, once in a while – up to a point, at least. Without at least the flimsiest grasp of that concept, we humans tend towards an over-inflated sense of our own importance, and that, I posit, is no good for anyone.
Thankfully, the feeling passes. It fascinates me for a bit, occasionally paralyses me, and then I get on with important things such as making delicious caramelised oranges, how to hybridise the best duck, and which country is the roundest.
When considering the vastness of everything, our brain plays a little trick on us. It makes us think we understand it, but we don’t. Not really. Such things are beyond our ken. We can’t experience 150 million years (the time, approximately, since the “first bird”, Archaeopteryx, was around) or 93 million miles (the distance, approximately, to the sun) – and once you start coming up with ways to aid comprehension, the brain (or this brain, at least) says ‘nope’. We might nod along, feigning understanding, murmuring “Ooh, that’s amazing”, but really it’s ‘nope’.
And that’s probably as it should be. As I say, healthy up to a point.
The website The Scale of the Universe is terrific fun (great to explore with kids), and I revisit it from time to time just to remind myself of, well, the scale of the universe – but, no matter how well conceived and executed it is, it remains confined to your computer screen. And that’s one reason I enjoyed this 7-minute film so much.
It’s an attempt to convey the size of a tiny part of the universe – our solar system – in human terms.
You are – we all are – but a tiny speck on a tiny speck on a tiny speck in the infinite vastness of space-time.
Have an excellent weekend.
Thing 3 – Page-turning
Consider the lot of the page-turner. For non-musicians it might seem mystifying that this role carries with it such stress – what’s so hard about turning pages, after all? But anyone who has ever done it will be familiar with its difficulties. The pianist is occupied with higher matters, and is entirely reliant on your stealth and timing to enable the smooth flow of the performance. Do it right and nobody notices; do it wrong… well, we’ll come to that in a minute.
Perhaps the most challenging task of my intermittent page-turning career came many years ago, when I was asked to perform the role for a pianist who was performing George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, a piece for solo piano of eccentric and brilliant virtuosity (the performer not only plays the keys of the instrument in the conventional manner, but leans into its depths to pluck or brush the strings, and is occasionally asked to shout, whisper, moan or whistle into it – it is not a piece to be undertaken by the diffident or retiring). It’s music that rewards concentrated listening; music for lying in a darkened room and listening to.
While Crumb was meticulous in the creation of his sound world, he also lavished great care and attention on the printed music’s visual aspect, as you can see from this page – the eighth movement of Makrokosmos, entitled 'The Magic Circle of Infinity'.
This movement presents a unique problem for the hapless page-turner, who might have signed up for the enterprise in all innocence, expecting the scope of their duties to be linear rather than circular. In an effort to keep the music rotating as smoothly as possible, I spent quite a few hours developing and honing my technique. In the performance, you’ll be relieved to learn, I managed not to arse it up completely.
Which brings us to Thing 3.
I am full of admiration and sympathy for all involved in this situation, but most of all I’m desperate to know what happened next.
Thing 4 – Bramblings
Bramblings are cracking little finches, winter visitors to the UK, and a welcome variation on their cousins, the familiar year-round finches (green, gold and chaff)
I see them rarely, because they don’t venture to the mean streets of West Norwood. Perhaps I should go to Slovenia.
Thing 5 – Draw a circle
Here’s a way to spend a few seconds. See how well you can draw a circle. 93.4% is my best (I suspect it was a fluke)
Thing 6 – Historic maps
Do you get sucked in by maps? I get sucked in by maps.
Bye bye weekend.
Anthrophony – sounds made by humans; geophony – non-biological sounds such as the wind in the trees or the waves on a shore; biophony – sounds made by non-human living organisms, whatever they might be.
I loved the story telling in the scale film. And they say the ability to draw a perfect circle is a sign of madness. No idea what form of madness, mind you. The nugget of information came from my sixth form Maths teacher who was pretty close.