15 Jan 2014 02:56:41
Pity the wife and children of Trevor Cox. Here's a man who in the middle of a French holiday wanders off to start whistling at a staircase and recording its response, who comes back from a day trip to London needing to shower off a patina of human waste picked up during a subterranean walk among the fatty stalactites of a storm drain; someone whose idea of a good night out is driving around Manchester in his pyjamas, sunroof wide open so he can capture the howl of the winter wind, or whose perfect camping trip involves pitching on the icy-grey wasteland next to a sulphurous geyser. Whether he's with his family in a hushed museum, a quiet art gallery or a silent church, it's only a matter of seconds before he's clapping loudly or bursting balloons.
I hope they forgive him. For Cox's mission in life is rather wonderful: to size up the world with his ears, to hear all the beguiling echoes, hisses and rumbles in far-flung locations we might never visit or at landmarks which, though familiar, remain hidden behind the smog of modern transportation noise and our own habitual inattention. In search of the planet's most reverberant place, for instance, he takes us deep inside a vast abandoned Scottish oil storage tank. To catch the rare and unsettling cry of the bittern, we crouch with him amid the fog of a Somerset dawn. He climbs to the top of a rusting cold war spying tower in a German forest to experience the disorientating ricochets of his own footsteps, and scrambles over red-hot sand dunes in a Californian desert, hoping they'll sing for us (they do).
Each trip leads to fascinating discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that there are scientists who spend their days carrying ducks from one laboratory to the next simply to measure the echo from a quack? Or that the most common animal noise on Earth is probably the crackling of a shrimp as its claws close rapidly enough for nearby water to start boiling, for tiny bubbles to collapse, and a stream of shock waves to be released? No, me neither.
There's something of the Victorian gentleman explorer in Cox – a man of ripping yarns, circumnavigating the globe to collect the sonic equivalent of endangered flora and fauna. But in place of bombast, we find a disarmingly modest storyteller who shares his discoveries generously: a David Attenborough of the acoustic realm, whose scientific knowledge is unimpeachable yet worn lightly, whose language is vivid yet without indulgence. For Cox, human voices in an underground tunnel spin around the curved walls "embellished with a metal twang". Volcanic lagoons "belch like a thick, gloopy, lentil soup". Sand dunes rustle in tune with the leaves of a deciduous tree.
There's been a flurry of interest recently in all things sound-related among artists, historians, anthropologists and the like. Sonic Wonderland helps us to understand why. Whatever the beguiling acoustic properties of a church or a forest, Cox concludes, the sounds to which we're emotionally attached turn out to be not the most obviously beautiful ones, but those which conjure in our minds the greatest emotional connection to time and place and fellow beings. Too often, commerce and industry work to destroy this vital organic pleasure. Dim the racket of the material world a little, retune our ears a fraction, and all the other, human-scale sounds of a place will soon work their magic, reconnecting us to our locality at a powerfully visceral level. Cox claims his sonic explorations teach us about architectural acoustics or how our brain processes sound. And indeed they do. But after reading him, we might also start demanding of our politicians, town planners and businesses that they rescue the sensory qualities of our car-ravaged city centres – and grasp the possibility of building a better-sounding world.
