How did this old place sound?
Reviving the aural record is a rewarding way to interpret the past.
BY ANNE MATTHEWS • Q & A with the author >>
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.
For more of this article, look for the
November/December 2007 issue on newsstands or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
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