Are the places we live and work so uninhabitable, so disconnected from the natural world, that our only option is to reproduce sounds that keep us sane and healthy?
As I’ve been working on my upcoming creative rural research residency, SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes, I keep wondering about how the sounds we choose to tolerate or accept, and those we don’t notice or can’t hear, will shape our future. Sound is, of course, central to my practice as an artist.
I don’t have a crystal ball, nor am I a futurist, so I thought I’d dig around to find any papers about how sound might shape our future. Much of what I found was about us personalising our listening experience with algorithms and technology or creating immersive sound with the use of augmented and virtual reality technologies. I even came across a video about the use of sound in future cancer treatments and firefighting. Medical science and firefighting applications aside, why do we need to surround ourselves in personalisedsound?
A selection of birds, frogs and bats that call my place home for some or all of the year, including finches, honeyeaters, doves and pigeons, songbirds like the grey shrike-thrush, kingfishers (including kookaburras), parrots of all colours, family-oriented birds like choughs, apostle birds and magpies, and owls. We have several frog species, bats—flying foxes and 10 species of insect-eating bats have been found here.
The soundscapes we live in
I live in a peri-urban[i] area about five kilometres outside a growing regional city of about 42,000 people, on Wiradjuri Country. Around me are small parcels of land of between 8 – 80 hectares—mostly ‘lifestyle’ blocks. There’s an abundance of vegetation on our land, unlike neighbouring areas that have been heavily cleared for hobby-farming or supposedly for fire mitigation. We have dozens of bird species that whistle, chirrup, carol, peep, screech and squeak from pre-dawn to dusk. The crickets and frogs here produce a constant level of noise on warm, damp days and nights. When the eucalypt trees bloom in autumn and winter, the Little Red Flying Foxes fill the cold night air with their chatter. Yet there are times of day when I can’t hear any of these species for the roar of dirt bikes, barking dogs, chainsaws, lawn mowers, and plane engines six kilometres away at our regional airport. Even on my early morning walks, the drone of traffic four kilometres away carries across the range. A retired neighbour, 300 metres away, often plays music in his shed with the volume maxed out for his personal listening pleasure. I can hear every word.
It’s estimated one million healthy life years were lost from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe alone.
I grew up surrounded by farm noises. My day started with the pre-dawn crow of a rooster, the clanging of the milking bails in the cattle yards near the house, and ended with the drone of a TV in the loungeroom through horse-hair plaster walls. The days I wasn’t at school were filled with the sounds of riding horses, working dogs, large mobs of sheep and cattle, and the manic sounds of chickens laying eggs. At certain times of the year, there was the banging and clanging of steel on steel in workshops or cattle and sheepyards. During cropping season, it was the diesel engines of heavy machinery or the choofing of an auger moving grain. When I was sent to high school in the city, city noise kept me awake long into the night—sirens, endless traffic, international planes coming or leaving, and nearby trains ka-thumping along the tracks behind the school. I remember the flocks of Currawongs though. They were one of the few species I recognised. They strutted around the school on weekends when the day students were elsewhere, their loud kurrok-kurrowk calls reverberating inside hard outdoor chambers of concrete, tarmac and brick.
The impact of sound on human health
There’s been extensive work done on the impact of noise on human health. A 2011 World Health Organization (WHO) report titled Burden of disease from environmental noise[ii] collated data from various large-scale epidemiological studies of environmental noise in Western Europe, over a 10-year period. The study analysed environmental noise from planes, trains and vehicles, building sites and other city sources, and then looked at links to health conditions. It’s estimated one million healthy life years were lost from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe alone.
Species diversity is still in decline and with it the diversity of our soundscapes.
So, what do we expect our environments to sound like now and in the future? The sounds in cities are largely dominated by what’s regarded as noise pollution from manmade sources. Changing city soundscapes seems to deal more with abatement rather than the design of more habitable soundscapes. Perhaps better public transport and electric cars might make a difference, but it won’t be a matter of just taking one noise source away, if the natural sound makers are gone forever. I wonder if those Currawongs still call my old school home.
In a 2016 paper by Reeman Mohammed Rehan titled The phonic identity of city urban soundscape for sustainable soundscapes[iii], Rehan writes: Sounds are important for the intrinsic quality of a place. The quality of a soundscape is important for creating and preserving the identity of the city. Jian King[iv], makes the point that the conventional approach to sound design, i.e. reduction of ‘sound level’, does not always deliver the required improvements in quality of life. What if we could design a habitable soundscape from scratch, what would it include?
Biophonic loss means diversity loss
Cleared farming and grazing land and roadside on Wayilwan Country, North West NSW (2019). There’s been no strategic revegetation of this country undertaken since it was cleared. Wind turbines on Wiradjuri Country, near Wellington NSW (2022).
Over my fifty plus years, the soundscapes of rural and regional Australia have been vastly altered by changes to land use and biodiversity losses. These changes began many decades before I was born. Colonisation and settlement, the carving up of land, and the mechanisation of agriculture that saw broadscale land clearing have had an enormous impact on Australia’s biodiversity. Today, some renewable energy developments are having a similar impact. Species diversity is still in decline and the loss of these species means less biophonic[v] diversity, which leaves all of us worse off.
I have childhood recollections of many of the larger bird species, but I don’t recall seeing or hearing many small birds other than wrens. There was no place for them in the paddocks cleared for big machinery or the growing of monoculture grazing pastures such as Buffel grass or lucerne. Remnant vegetation on ‘green’ roads, roadsides, and stock routes rarely had dense understorey because they were also used for grazing livestock. Much of that remnant vegetation is also gone now. Gardens were also of the ‘English kind’, with introduced flowers and groundcovers, under-pruned trees and large expanses of mown lawn.
As I try to raise money in preparation for the SOIL+AiR research residency to start in July, I’m trying to find the right questions about what it is we want for the future—a future where all species might thrive. What does that sound like? What sounds will make us feel at peace or at home, or simply reassure us that all will be okay?
SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes project
SOIL+AiR fundraising campaign
[i] Peripheral urban environments are the large areas between built-up suburbs and rural landscapes. (NSW Government)
[ii] https://www.who.int/tools/compendium-on-health-and-environment/environmental-noise/
[iii] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687404815000048
[iv] https://www.acoustics.asn.au/conference_proceedings/AAS2019/papers/p11.pdf
[v] Biophony refers to the collective acoustic signatures generated by all sound-producing organisms in a given habitat at a given moment. (Krause)
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