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the endless belt of raw concrete that unites house, street, city and nation together.
Unwanted sound. The Oxford English Dictionary contains references to noise as unwanted sound dating back as far as 1225. Unmusical sound. The nineteenth-century physicist Hermann Helmholtz employed the expression noise to describe sound composed of nonperiodic vibrations (the rustling of leaves), by comparison with musical sounds, which consist of periodic vibrations. Noise is still used in this sense in expressions such as “white noise” or “Gaussian noise." Any loud sound. In general usage today, noise often refers to particularly loud sounds. In this sense a noise abatement by-law prohibits
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“the level of thirty-five decibels can be considered as the threshold for optimum sleeping conditions …”
presbycusis.
Note bleached hair. Smell her boozy breath. She’s drunk and that and hard up.
In one soundwalk a student asked participants to enter a store and to tap the tops of all tinned goods, thus turning the grocery store into a Caribbean steel band. In another, participants were asked to compare the pitches of drainpipes on a city street; in another, to sing tunes around the different harmonics of neon lights.
We have had occasion to note (see page 64) that people who live out of doors in hot climates tend to speak more loudly than those who live indoors.
The caves of the Trois Frères and Tuc d’Audobert in Ariège contain drawings depicting masked men exorcising animals with primitive musical instruments. One imagines sacred rites being performed in these dark reverberant spaces in preparation for the hunt.
Among the classical papers on architecture none is more voluminous or respected than the ten books of De Architectura by the Roman Vitruvius, which date from about 27 B.C. Book V adequately demonstrates the writer’s familiarity with the importance of acoustics, especially in the building of theaters, where, following an extensive exposition of the principles of the Greek science, he discusses the employment of sounding vases in theaters to enhance sound production. Vitruvius writes:
Man also inscribes human rhythms onto the physical world in manual work. Many tasks such as scything, pumping water or pulling ropes cannot be performed unless they follow the breath pattern.
soundmarks,
The technique of attracting attention without frightening the public out of its wits calls for subtle creative action.
Each number on the dial is made up of two frequencies, a low and a high so that tunes are possible, and Beethoven (approximately) returns with the opening of his Fifth as 0005–8883.
Sangīta-makaranda (I, 4–6) we learn that there are two forms of sound, the anāhata, “unstruck,” and the āhata, “struck,” the first being a vibration of ether, which cannot be perceived by men but is the basis of all manifestation. “It forms permanent numerical patterns which are the basis of the world’s existence.”
If one knew the mass and velocity of a spinning object, it would be possible theoretically to calculate its fundamental pitch. Johannes Kepler, who also believed in a perfect system binding music and astronomy, calculated the following pitches for each of the planets.
