Welcome to the Jungle

With the trams currently kept out of the city centre and many of the roads blocked off for road works, there was a whole new soundscape in Manchester centre today. Instead of the usual fuzz, roar and heave of engines it was the confused mumble of a thousand voices that circled around my head.

A Bass heavy wave of cross rhythmic and incomprehensible voices swept through town, bubbling, jolting and circling in panorama, occasionally penetrated by clearer, higher pitched voices cutting through the mass, but still largely incomprehensible amongst the clutter.

It is a joy to hear the human voice in such a way, stripped of recognisable language but full of nuance, tone and interaction, telling the story of space and time through sound rather than words. It is the same when we communicate with people who we do not share a common language, through echoic mimicry we listen to and replicate tones, intonations and sounds rather than words.

By closing your eyes and listening to such scenes you can really sense the space around you, mood, size and materials are all audible if you listen carefully enough and you can draw a solid mental image of your surroundings.

Doing this today though I realised that things can easily get confusing when sound synonymous with another environment is suddenly inserted where it is not expected. People were selling whistles which replicated the various calls and screech's of the howler monkey, and they sounded fairly realistic amongst the noise of the crowds. So when I closed my eyes I had the bizarre sensation of hearing what sounded like a thousand people trekking through the jungle.

This demonstrates to me that although it is important to understand sound in relation to place, it is also good to think about sounds simply as sounds. Try not to always associate them with particular objects or settings, think as well about their pitches, rhythms, movements, moods, reverberations and timbres.

Think about how you can get a feel for your environment through sound without automatically converting your hearing into stored images and signified knowledge. Allow yourself to learn something new from sound as well as using it to better understand what you already know.