Online Extra: Hear Here
Q & A with Anne Matthews, author of "If Walls Could Talk"
By Eric Wills | From Online Only | November/December 2007
While working on her essay on how buildings sound, author Anne Matthews became intimately more aware of her own surroundings, of the differences in ambient noise, for example, associated with buildings in various settings. Matthews, the author of several books, teaches at Princeton University. Here she discusses the writing of "If Walls Could Talk" with Preservation's associate editor Eric Wills.
EW: Why do you think the movement to preserve sound has recently gained momentum?
AM: Because the world is getting infinitely noisier very fast. Alex van Oss is very eloquent on the subject in my story. We are literally not wired to handle the noise, and yet when we seek silence, tranquility, and natural sound, the social, cultural, and geographical barriers are higher than ever. When you want peace and quiet you really have to work for it these days. It's something that you value much more when you do find it. The preservation impulse takes over at that point. Something that's marvelous and vanishing inspires the desire to save it for the future.
EW: Have we to some degree become desensitized to sound because of the increasing acoustic clutter around us?
AM: Very much so. There's a wonderful British writer, Lucy M. Boston, who in her memoir ("Memory in a House," published in 1973) writes, "More and more now as the hum and roar and scream of engines grows and closes in, I remember the silence of my childhood and youth. As I lie in bed wakened by the flight of aeroplanes or kept from sleeping by the drone of dynamos from the poultry houses, I recall my night nursery bed in a town house. I re-hear the lamp-lighter's steps pausing, moving on and pausing, the clip-clop of a late horse and the following purr of wheels; then no sound until long before it was light, the chorus of cocks from the back-gardens … " We use sound as a barrier, as a way to carve out private space, with our iPods, computers and sound systems, white noise machines, radio at night to wipe out traffic. In my college courses I now urge people to remove their earbuds, turn off their cellphones and not surf the Web, e-mail, or i-message during seminar. Individual concentrated attention to natural sound is becoming a lost skill and a declining taste.
EW: Did writing the story in any way make you more conscious of your aural environment?
AM: I go into New York fairly often, and it made me much more conscious of the contrast between the suburban birdsong of Princeton and the waterfall of sound that hits you outside Penn Station. It's a commute between soundscapes, and that began to interest me more and more. The principle of sheds I find inherently interesting: watersheds, viewsheds—which the National Trust is interested in preserving—and especially invisible but powerful cultural markers like the news-shed—that point between Princeton and Trenton where people stop reading the New York Daily News and start craving the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sound sheds are also very real, and I began to notice the point between New Brunswick and Princeton where city sound really does fall off. I'd put that point almost 50 miles out from Times Square. A generation ago, it was, maybe, 30.
EW: How difficult is it to reproduce lost sounds?
AM: Not at all. Thousands of sounds have been preserved lovingly on the Internet. I especially like The Library of Vanished Sounds, and specialized sites like Historic Naval Sound. The problem is akin to the great question of environmental restoration: What past are you restoring? If you say you want to bring nature back to New York City, is it the New York City the Dutch colonists saw, is it the New York City of the Native Americans, or the New York when Harlem is a rural village and Central Park a wasteland? Or the smoggy, polluted New York of 1960?
EW: Was there anything you uncovered during your reporting that was especially surprising?
AM: That the lively, passionate subculture of sound-saving is global. In Europe and Canada, public radio give more time to sound art, to experimentation, to aural documentary.
EW: Will the preservation of sound become more of an integral part of historic preservation here?
AM: Yes, especially as we move away form the urge to re-create and then freeze-dry pretty buildings and think more about human narrative, the material-culture matrix, and the art of hearing time. History is text-based; it favors the eye. But sound is nearly as powerful. Emerson says we should see, not merely look. I hope historians and preservationists take the time to listen, and imagine, as well as hear. If you're over 40, especially, browse that wonderful book, "Going, Going, Gone" (by Susan Jonas), and marvel at how much has slipped away: the burr of the rotary phone, the rat-tat of a manual typewriter. Daily sounds go extinct all the time. Novels are great sound refuges, though. Dickens is wonderful on how his time sounded.
Or take August Strindberg on the morning noises of Stockholm. What an acoustic mapper! "Far below him rose the clamor of the newly awakened town; down in the harbour the steam cranes whirred, the bars rattled in the iron weighing-machine, the lock-keepers' whistles shrilled, the omnibuses rattled over the cobblestones; hue and cry in the fish market, sails and flags fluttering on the water, screams of seagulls, bugle-calls from Skeppsholm, military commands from Sodermalmstorg. Workmen in wooden shoes clattered." - "The Red Room" (1879)
For more about Adolf Cluss, go to adolf-cluss.org and goethe.de/cluss
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