The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World (31 page)

The teacher asked how we knew we were “inhabiting a body.” Apart from discomfort and breathing, the awareness came from the sounds around me. This was hardly a silent retreat! Above the meditation hall was a large rookery, and the loud squawks and squeals as the rooks fed their chicks rang out across the hall, interspersed with the soft, warbling tones of blackbirds and the cooing of wood pigeons. Less poetic was the gurgling pipework—from stomachs and radiators—and coughs as people cleared their throats. As I was to learn over the next few days, part of meditation is accepting these sounds and incorporating them into the practice.

On the way to the retreat, I had read some scientific papers about how brain networks are altered by mindfulness techniques, and these accounts helpfully described the stages of focused-attention meditation, which I then copied.
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You start with a focus—say, your breath passing through the nostrils. Inevitably, your mind wanders. When you become aware of being distracted, you need to shift attention back to the focus. Different brain regions are involved in each of these stages. In an experiment carried out by Wendy Hasenkamp, subjects meditated for twenty minutes in an fMRI scanner to measure brain activity. The subjects were asked to press a button whenever they realized their mind had wandered, before returning to their breath focus. Experienced meditators had more connectivity across networks of brain regions that might be used for maintaining attention and avoiding distraction.
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This increased connectivity might have been in place before the people started their years of practice, in which case it might be evidence that they were well suited for meditation. Alternatively, it could be evidence that meditation changes neural structures. Attention is not just important to meditation; it plays an important role in cognitive processing. Many aspects of it—alerting, disengaging, reorienting, maintaining attention—are also useful elsewhere in life.

Having survived the first few meditations, I grabbed a quick barley-and-chicory coffee substitute (I bet your mouth is watering!) and retired to the lounge. It was like a dreadful retirement home when the television is broken. Chairs were pushed against the walls and we all sat there staring at our cups, at the walls, or through the windows into the darkening green hills outside. I decided to go to bed early. I was sharing a room with two strangers, and I could not even say good night. It was like a scene from a 1970s sitcom where a marriage had gone wrong—or in this case, a same-sex three-way civil partnership. We padded around the bedroom not looking at each other or talking, passing like ships in the night.

For some there is joy in this communal silence—the freedom from having to put on an act. The silence creates anonymity, since you do not know people's names, where they come from, what jobs they do, and so on. Taking a break from being mindful at breakfast, I glanced around and tried to guess who everyone was, but the loose, formless meditation clothes offered few hints. A young man sat in a fleece sarong and woolly hat, a thirty-something woman had a tie-dyed top and leggings, and an older man sported a goatee and looked as though he played in a traditional jazz group. It was like living in a whole-food shop.

Half of the sessions were walking meditations, which were better outside, even when it was drizzling and cold. The idea was, while walking, to notice how the feet struck the ground and how the lower legs moved and were braced for each step. A cyclist passed on the lane just outside the grounds and stared as the retreatants walked purposefully and incredibly slowly in random directions. Adding to the chorus of birdsong, a malevolent hum came from a tree in full blossom as insects buzzed about pollinating, and wing-beat noise was just above my head.

Maintaining silence between meditation sessions encourages continuous mindfulness. At the time, I was so busy being mindful that it was hard to judge what effect all this silence might be having on me. Only after leaving the retreat did I notice the effects. The sandwich I bought at the railway station while traveling home tasted exceptionally strong.

The idea that meditation can change basic perception is gaining traction in the scientific literature, although not many results are available yet, and there is nothing on taste or sound. Katherine MacLean and collaborators have looked at one aspect of vision, testing people on a three-month Buddhist samatha meditation retreat in a remote mountain setting in Colorado. They had retreatants look at different-sized white lines on a black screen and categorize each line as long or short. By the end of the retreat, compared to a control group, retreatants had improved their ability to discriminate different line lengths, and five months later they still demonstrated improved acuity.
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My family laughed at me when I arrived home from the retreat because I spoke in an uncharacteristically soft voice and walked about at a snail's pace. Immediately after the retreat, I felt it had been an interesting experience but not one to repeat. In the weeks and months that followed, however, I had a lingering desire to spend another weekend in that noisy silence, to take the time to rediscover the peaceful state in which I had arrived home.

I
f I were to ask you about iconic images of London, Paris, or New York, you might name famous landmarks like the Houses of Parliament, the Eiffel Tower, or the Statue of Liberty. But what about iconic sounds? How readily can you name
soundmarks
, those keynote sounds that define a place and make it special? Soundmarks can be as varied as landmarks: in Vancouver, Canada, the Gastown steam clock marks time not with bells but with whistles; on the Orontes River in Hama, Syria, ancient waterwheels called norias let out loud groans as they slowly rotate, and my travels in the southwestern US were punctuated by the dissonant hoots of Amtrak trains.

For Great Britain, the bongs of Big Ben, the giant bell housed within the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament in London, are a signature sound. In the UK, Big Ben rings in the New Year, has been broadcast at the start of news bulletins for decades, and starts the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day (Britain's Veterans Day). What makes chimes of bells so special? The answer to this question is partially social (bells have played an important cultural role for millennia), but there is also something special about the sound itself. Listen to a bell chime, and what at first seems a simple ring is actually a very complex sound. Why does it start with a clang? Why does the ringing have a dissonant warble? What role does the anticipation of the strike play in our perception of a great bell?

These were the questions going through my head as I approached the Houses of Parliament. Winter sunlight was glinting off the gilded ornamentation around the clock faces on the day of my audience with Big Ben. The outside of this Gothic revival tower is a grand Victorian edifice, a popular establishing shot for film directors to portray “now in London,” but the inside is utilitarian. More than 300 stone steps spiral up a narrow staircase to the belfry. The tour took a breather halfway up the tower in a small room that wraps around the staircase. There, our guide, Kate Moss (not the supermodel), told us about the amazing engineering behind the clock's construction in the mid-nineteenth century.

The astronomer royal at the time, Sir George Airy, had set exacting standards. The first stroke of each hour had to be accurate to within one second, and he insisted on being telegraphed twice a day so that he could check the timing. Such precision was greater than that of similar clocks of the day, and difficult to achieve because wind pushing on the 3- and 4-meter-long (10- and 13-foot) copper clock hands can change the speed of rotation. Barrister and gifted amateur clock maker Edmund Denison came up with the solution: the Grimthorpe escapement, which isolates the giant swinging pendulum in the middle of the tower from the vagaries of the weather.

Rested, we climbed more steps before stopping in a tight corridor behind the clock faces. A clunk from the clock mechanism was a signal that the next strike of the bell was two minutes away, so we quickly climbed the final flight of steps up into the belfry. This simple, functional space, with scaffolding and wooden walkways, is completely open to the elements, and a bitingly cold wind whistled through.

The great bell is 2.2 meters (7 feet) high and 2.7 meters (9 feet) in diameter, and it weighs 13.7 tonnes (about 15 tons). Since we were standing only a couple of yards away from the metal, Kate handed out earplugs to protect our hearing. Four bells in the corners of the belfry produce the famous Westminster Chimes before the great bell is struck. Kate instructed us to listen for the third chime bell, which would signal a good time to put in our earplugs. My anticipation and excitement built during the long pause between the Westminster Chimes on the corner bells and the bongs from Big Ben. A large, 200-kilogram (440-pound) hammer drew back slowly before crashing forward and striking the outside of the bell. Even with earplugs in, the sense of power was visceral. The sound resonated the air in my chest like a pumping bass line in a nightclub.

With ten strikes to enjoy, I could examine the quality of the bongs in detail. At first there was a clank of metal on metal, which gradually faded into a sonorous ringing that lasted about twenty seconds. While the initial hammer blow created sound with lots of high frequencies, these rapidly died away, leaving a gentler low-frequency ring, which slowly warbled.

The start of a musical note, the “attack,” can be a fleeting moment, but it is incredibly important. As a saxophonist, I spend a lot of time practicing the correct way to start a note cleanly by coordinating the right air pressure from my lungs with precise use of my tongue on the reed. For a violinist, the attack is about the start of the bowing action; just listen to someone learning the violin to hear what getting it wrong sounds like! The attack is one of the main things that makes a sound individual. Big Ben's clang is as much a part of its soundprint as the long warble and the Westminster melody.

Eight months after hearing Big Ben's crisp attack, I heard the complete opposite at a sound artwork. There are only a few examples of permanent sonic art in the world, and three of them are wave organs—in San Francisco in the US, Zadar in Croatia, and Blackpool in England. Blackpool is the archetypal British seaside resort, with its fish-and-chip shops, amusement arcades, and miles of sandy beach. It divides opinions: some see it as a mecca of lowbrow fun; others, as the epitome of tackiness.

It was a typical English summer's day when I visited: I had to wear a waterproof jacket to protect me from the cold wind rushing off the Irish Sea, and there were only intermittent glimpses of the sun. The organ stands behind a parking lot next to the promenade, with the UK's tallest and fastest roller coaster generating distant screams from across the road. A narrow, rusting sculpture, 15 meters (50 feet) tall, shaped like a fern in spring beginning to unfurl, forms the most visible section of the wave organ (Figure 8.1). The sculpture is a popular spot to stop and light up a cigarette because it offers shelter from the wind. When I first arrived, the organ was only letting out the occasional groan. “Sounds like a moaning cow,” remarked a young woman as she walked past.

Figure 8.1 The high-tide organ in Blackpool.

High up in the rusty fern, I could see a few organ pipes, just like the ones you might see in a church. To get a better sense of what was going on, I climbed onto the tall seawall. Trailing down the concrete sea defenses was a set of black, plastic pipes that disappeared into the water. As the sea swells up, it compresses air in the plastic pipes, pushing the air up to the organ in the fern. Just as happens in a church organ, the air forced into the bottom of an organ pipe by the sea waves meets a constriction just below a rectangular slit in the side of the tube. The fast jet created there causes the air in the main part of the pipe to resonate, creating the tone.

For any organ, the air needs to get up to speed quickly so that the pipe can start speaking cleanly. In this case, however, with the artwork being driven by water waves that flood and ebb irregularly, the notes often start tentatively and die away erratically—hence the groaning and moaning.