In My Backyard

The Borrowed Soundscape

“Borrowed Scenery” at Ryoanji’s Kyoyo-chi pond, Autumn 1984. Photo by Richard Newton from his blog LetsJapan.

“Borrowed scenery” or “borrowed landscape” is a traditional garden design principle from China and Japan, where framing, echoing, or otherwise responding to a view beyond a garden’s walls is made part of the garden itself. In truth there is no garden without a borrowed view, at least of the sky. But acknowledging and honoring the connection between the garden within one’s reach and the landscape beyond puts the two into deliberate dialogue. It is the opposite of walling oneself off, even if a wall is what defines the garden.

John Cage in the rock garden at Ryoanji

In audio, we tend not to honor the borrowed soundscape. Recording studios are specially constructed for isolation, and what we think of as ideal listening conditions are similarly isolated from the outside world – not least by a pair of headphones. Field recordists who immerse themselves in soundscapes often seek out “isolated” areas far enough from human activity to wall off a garden of sound.

And yet those isolated areas are increasingly rare. “There are no places on Earth that I’ve been that haven’t been affected by human sound,” says Bernie Krause, the eminent field recordist and soundscape ecologist. Gordon Hempton, writer and recordist, has been advocating for the preservation of quiet places and his organization QPI (Quiet Parks International) maintains a map pinpointing the precious few “certified” locations around the globe - I count only eight currently listed in the continental United States. It’s vehicular traffic that eliminates most places from that list. Les Blomberg of the advocacy group Noise Pollution Clearinghouse cites this striking figure: “In 1900, 20-25% of the continental US was impacted by vehicle noise; in 2000, 97.4% was impacted. Planes finished the task of destroying natural quiet in the second half of the 20th century, flying over the few remaining quiet areas.”

Airplanes don’t exist to generate sound, but their audio waste has thoroughly littered the globe. At the point where we can count the few places on earth without human-generated sound, it is effectively too late to talk about noise pollution. The planet is saturated with human sound. Natural biophony without humans is a rarity to the point of near extinction.

During my lifetime, noise pollution has increased not because of any particular new invention or industrial practice, but simply alongside a dramatic increase in the population, which has more than doubled since the 1960s. There has been a corresponding increase in the number of cars and trucks and planes, and in the density of our cities. The technology for polluting human sound production was all in place by the mid-20^th century; there was just a lot less of it.

In 1962, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she heard nothing where there was no biological life due to DDT poisoning. By 1989, when Bill McKibben wrote his landmark climate change book The End of Nature, he went into the woods by his home and heard… a chainsaw.

“Now that we have changed the most basic forces around us, the noise of that chainsaw will always be in the woods,” he wrote. “Even in the most remote wilderness, where the strictest laws forbid the felling of a single tree, the sound of that saw will be clear, and a walk in the woods will be changed – tainted – by its whine.”

McKibben is speaking metaphorically here, at least in part; what was important to him in 1989 was that “an idea, a relationship, can go extinct” and that idea is “nature” isolated from humans now that the climate has been irreversibly changed. But he really did hear a chainsaw in the woods by his mountain home. And today in the 21^st century, according to globetrotting sound recordists and ecologists like Bernie Krause and Gordon Hempton, any rhetorical exaggeration of McKibben’s has been overtaken by reality. There truly is the sound of a chainsaw – or at least an airplane – in every location, no matter how remote. There is no more aural wilderness. There is no “silent” spring, even where we have killed off other life, because human sounds are everywhere.

And yet it is not only the increase in human-generated sounds that has changed in recent decades, there has been a corresponding decrease in non-human ones.

I sit in my backyard on certain mornings and curse the leaf blower used by the church across the street to clear their parking lot of dust. But in the evening, after the construction pickups have left and rush-hour traffic subsided, it is eerily still. Only a decade or so ago, our back garden was filled at all times of day and night with the motion and sounds of insects – it took just a little quiet beyond the garden, in the borrowed soundscape, to help me tune into their activity. No longer. We have some bees attracted to our flowers. There are some ants moving from here to there. And in August, thank god, we host crickets. But there is no haze of constant activity and buzz throughout the warmer months, as before.

This “insect apocalypse” is being documented by scientists measuring biomass – researchers in New Hampshire have reported an 80% drop in beetles since the 1970s; in Germany, a 76% reduction in all flying insects since 1989; and in England, a 65% reduction since just 2004, roughly the same period we have been cultivating our back garden. The audio impact of this reduction in insect life is harder to measure, surely, but undoubtedly a shared experience to all hearing observers in this period. The soundscape inside any walled garden has become quieter, as the borrowed soundscape has grown louder.

And still we hold on to the ideal of isolation in our audio. Might it be that if we gave that up – were we to acknowledge more fully the borrowed soundscape as an integral part of our audio experiences – we might then take greater responsibility for the communal soundscape? Which would mean, in turn, taking greater responsibility for the natural biophany as well as for the noise generated by machines.

Listening to: The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) by Chris Corsano

Cooking: Gooseberry-Rose jam