Andrew Moe

Andrea Gullickson & Stephanie Kozick

Musical Cities
10/15/2014

Natural Sound within the Soundscape

Society is now facing the new challenge of finding natural sound in a world where escaping the perpetual sounds of
civilization is nigh impossible. Save for the most distant and reclusive places on the planet, humanity is faced with a
constant barrage of manufactured sound. In order to escape this aural battle between one's body and their surroundings, one
must be able to seek quietude and respite from manufactured sound on a regular basis. Though respect for a soundscape
with few manufactured sounds has been lost over time, the argument should be made for being able to reclaim the natural
soundscape. The natural soundscape can be defined as any noise or sound that is created by nature or man and not
manufactured. Though this is a broad definition, I challenge you to go into a city and attempt to find a noise or sound other
than rain or wind that is not manufactured by man. This manufactured sound only seeks to overwhelm the natural
soundscape, and serves little to no other purpose.
As the world bursts at the seams with population, expanding and growing out from cities, many places that were
once tranquil sanctuaries of sound have now become spoiled by manufactured sound. These outcroppings of civilization are
now becoming the foil to natural sound. There was once a point when you could walk into a forest not too far from a road
and find yourself in complete solitude. Not only physical solitude, but sonic solitude as well. This solitude has been spoiled
by the extreme growth of suburbia and civilization. Being able to commune with nature is now considered a special and rare
opportunity. Even when in nature, one must take the time and effort to displace the sound of the nearest highway in order to
fully appreciate the sounds of the birds, trees, and so many other sounds that are normally drowned out or do not even
exist in modern civilized areas. Think of the trees bending and cracking as a slight wind pushes them. Think of the rustle
of the bushes when a small animal moves in them. These sounds are considered negative in civilization due to fear of wild
animals and fear of trees falling. People fail to realize that these natural sounds are a key into tranquility. Though
manufactured sounds are not inherently bad, they tend to edge towards being less pure, more intrusive, and function without
respect to their surroundings.
Society and civilization are two concepts that are often fused, mainly due to their similarities benefits that they
present to one another. Society, as a majority, has come to assimilate into the modern manufactured soundscape and
forsaken a great deal of natural sounds. Though we may erect gardens for trees and cut out areas of a city's grid for parks,

we rarely make actual room for natural growth, and not the manufactured growth of civilization as a whole, If we were to
shift the body of society towards making room for nature, then we might be able to not worry about erecting a park next to
that new city block. Recently, a landmark park in South Lake Union was in talks to be sold to a company wanting to build
skyscrapers on the park land in order to be next to Amazon's new buildings in South Lake Union. Because land in SLU is
hard to find, this would seem to be a big win for both the economy of the area and the company. However, it also seeks to
remove a great bastion for trees and wildlife sounds in the process. This raises the question of whether or not economical
growth or sound preservation are more important. Of course, it also is worth mentioning the sound pollution that would be
caused by more construction in South Lake Union, of which there is already a great deal.
In addition to the sound of manufactured sound through construction or choking out of natural sound, there is a
great need for re introducing natural sound into the world. People walk around ignoring the day to day sounds of the world
because they know that they cannot escape them. Why not try and imagine that the constant droning of the freeway outside
your window isn't actually there? However, imagine if that weren't necessary. Imagine there not being the sound to ignore in
the first place, but only the sounds of birds, trees, and leaves to distract you from everyday life. Now, one might say that
these sounds would become just as undesirable as the freeway after a few minutes. Nonetheless, people complain when they
have their window open on the freeway, but they don't complain when they have their window open in the countryside. This
may not be the word of God, but I would assert that ignoring natural sounds allows one to be calm, versus ignoring
manufactured sounds, which only tends to make one irritable and upset.
This all begs the question, what is desirable sound? Though there is obviously no correct answer, it could be argued
that natural sounds tend to err on the desirable side and manufactured sounds tend to be more rejected. In response to this
idea, would it not be more beneficial to create ways through which we could reduce manufactured sound and also amp up
the amount of natural sound? I would wager that not many would be opposed to this idea, except maybe those who hate
birds. I would propose that cars be manufactured in such a way that they create less sound through both their engines and
through their air displacement. I would propose that we find ways to build homes and buildings without disrupting the
soundscape of that area. I would propose that we find ways to reincorporate nature into our daily lives and civilization as a
whole. I would propose that we reintroduce these sounds by allowing parks to be built and grow of their own accord. I
would propose that we leave land alone and not sell it to the highest bidder, but allow it to continue to create natural sound. I
understand the need for expansion, but that doesn't mean that we must expand over things, it means that we must expand
around and with things, so that we do not overshadow the natural sound with manufactured sound, and so that we do allow
for natural sound to be present within our civilization and society.
As I stated earlier, natural soundscape can be defined as any noise or sound that is created by nature or man and not

manufactured. Natural sound arrives in the shape of many things; be it birdsong or wind rustling the leaves, it allows for the
body to become a temporary owner of the land it occupies. In a sense, no one can own the sound of a bird chirping, but a
human hand controls whether or not an engine is running. That is the fundamental problem. As a society, we choose to
pollute our atmosphere with manufactured sounds and push out the natural sounds that are already all around us. Natural
sounds have become foreign to us while we've become accepting of unnatural, manufactured sounds. We are only used to
the sounds of rain and wind within civilization, and are trained by media and other outlets to hate the rain, when accepting a
sound that is purely natural should be commonplace in today's society. This acceptance would not need to be necessarily in
the form of becoming a wanderlust hippie, but simply by trying to appreciate the rain rather than bashing it at every
moment. The impartiality towards manufactured sound coupled with the negativity towards natural sound is astounding in
modern society and acts as a root from which this form of sound pollution stems.
Drowning out the natural soundscape seems to be an impossible feat to accomplish, but manufactured sound has
done just that. Listen hard enough in the city and you might hear the coo of a pigeon, but only to have it be drowned out by
a passing car several moments later. This commonplace acceptance of the oppression of natural sound is a new concept. Up
until the communion of cities and mass transportation in the forms of cars and buses, the sounds of animals and voices were
the most commonplace in cities. Cities were only plagued by loud wagons on cobblestones or perhaps the particular loud
town crier. Once we allowed manufactured sounds into cities, we allowed these original sounds to become secondary, and in
doing so weren't able to preserve these sounds in a dignified way. As a society, we have learned to reject these sounds just as
much as we reject the sound of a car, of a bus, or of anything that is around us, allowing ourselves to live within our only
manufactured worlds, failing to commune with the world directly in front of us. It is profound how much we have learned to
block out of our lives, mainly in the aural arena. I would challenge myself and those around me to forsake what has been
taught to us in regards to how we view manufactured sound and natural sound. I would challenge people to look for ways to
appreciate the smallest natural sounds around them, and to do so not by ignoring the manufactured sounds, but by looking
for ways to remove the manufactured sounds from your life. By bringing these natural sounds back into our lives, we can go
back to a simpler, more straightforward way of life, where not everything is a distraction and not everything is a prescribed
way of life. If we accept the natural sounds that were there before they were stifled, we can only become more aware of
every aspect of our lives within society and within the world.