How Did This Old Place Sound?
Reviving the aural record is a rewarding way to interpret the past.
By Anne Matthews | From Preservation | November/December 2007
Preservation Magazine
Credit: Preservation
Looks aren't everything, even in preservation. Nearly as evocative as architecture or landscape, and far more ephemeral, is how a place sounds—or used to. We lose individual noises all the time. A typewriter's gallop, the rattle of a hotel key, the burr of a rotary phone, the snap of a sock garter, the jaunty chime of a 1988 MacPlus powering up: Some go extinct overnight; others slip slowly away.
Lose the hundreds of sounds that once filled a building, however, and retrieving them with accuracy and feeling becomes a delicate dilemma. Understanding historic environments through the ear is full of promise, but the art of this relistening continues to evolve, for the ethics and aesthetics of reconstructed sound perplex and elude us. Just how did that train station or factory, that house or town square sound?
How do you make a space an aural story? A little physics, a lot of showbiz. In helping buildings live again, text and visual record have always been the keys to re-creation. We can't help it; Western culture privileges sight over hearing. But recently, that legacy has made some historians anxious. A soundproofed past, they argue, can distort our understanding of buildings.
In the emerging field of sensory history, sound studies lead the way. Aural historian Mark Smith of the University of South Carolina, for instance, suggests that the antebellum North sounded to the South like the racket of industrialism and the immigrant mob, while northerners heard the wails of slave labor on southern plantations. One result: that earsplitting conflict, the Civil War. But sonic recovery has pitfalls, Smith warns. Yes, we can reproduce a thump or clink from the past-with an antique hammer on an 1812 anvil, say-yet the way we understand the result may be radically different from the way people in the past experienced precisely the same sound.
Historians of the senses comb the archives for precise references to hearing, smell, and taste. These investigations can lead to big-budget sensory assault. To bring buildings alive through interpretive sound-and-light shows is nothing new (the son-et-lumière tradition has thrived for nearly 60 years at French chateaux and Egyptian pyramids), but in Philadelphia's "Lights of Liberty," a six-block walking tour launched in 1999, images five stories high are projected onto buildings at Independence National Historical Park while period effects fill computer-controlled headphones: rebel whispers, bullets striking walls, the creak of carriage wheels, the wailing bereaved. This venture took five years and $12 million to create. The new Mount Vernon visitors center in Virginia is jazzier still, well up to museum education's worst challenge, the attention span of an eighth-grade boy. Cannon fire shudders your theater seat, fake snow and fog fill the auditorium, double screens appear and vanish, a Valley Forge soldier-robot coughs and groans.
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