We need to start listening to the world anew. Our survival may depend on it, writes Natasha Mostert Among the many grotesque edicts of Afghanistan’s Taliban mullahs, the ban on music ranked as one of the most incomprehensible. The idea that someone could be flogged for whistling a tune or clapping to a beat boggles the mind.
But the belief that sound and music need to be treated with great caution is an old one.”If you wish to know if a people are well governed, if its laws are good or bad, examine the music it practises,” warned Confucius and added that music should never be at the disposal of the stupid or the wicked. The Shu King, written in 2300BC, describes how the emperor regularly travelled within his kingdom, randomly testing musical instruments to ensure that they corresponded with five perfect tones. If they did not, conflict and political instability was sure to follow. Sound was crucial to man’s survival: the very cornerstone of civilisation. Sound is not for the faint of heart. Music is staring at the sun. But as we start our journey into the 21st century, we rarely consider what it means to live on Planet Sound, even though man has never, in his entire history, been exposed to as many different sounds as he is today. Imagine how quiet it must have been on Earth 1 000 years ago; how incredibly rare and precious music was. Now picture that right this minute, sound waves are becoming tangible like long trails of fibre. All of us choking, smothering, enmeshed. We live in a world overwhelmed by sound. Unless you dunk into a sensory deprivation tank or go down a very deep worked-out mine the kind we have here in South Africa you will be unable to find any spot on Earth where there is absolute quiet. Man’s activities his resonance patterns are effecting the whole of the planet. Giant under-water speakers, testing for global warming, send out soundwaves that travel right around the globe. Satellites in space form an army of whispering spies. Every day we are insects caught in a sticky web of noise. Around us the sounds of the dying and the living: ambulances wailing, police cars screaming, planes droning, frenzied chatter, jackhammers throbbing, cellphones beeping, the incessant beat of music, pounding, pounding.
Even the Earth itself is now humming. Japanese geophysicists have identified 50 notes over two octaves that make up the Earth’s background hum: a constant low frequency noise. Sound affects us constantly but we appear sublimely oblivious to its power. At the movies we sit happily munching our popcorn, largely unaware of the background music even though for two hours it will cause our heartbeats to fluctuate. We turn up the speakers on our CD players and rarely consider that music can drive up our blood pressure, lead to a drop in body temperature, a decrease in the skin’s conductivity, place us at higher risk of having a heart attack. Our environment is equally affected. Sound can adversely influence the growth of plants. Certain frequencies kill off bacteria. Whales beach themselves because of noise from sonar systems. The casual way we treat sound stands in contrast to the belief systems of ancient civilisations. In the mystery schools of Egypt, Rome, Tibet and India the knowledge of sound was a highly developed science based on the understanding that vibration lies at the heart of all matter and energy in the universe. Pythagoras reduced music to numbers and mathematical ratios and believed the very same ratios to be applicable to the universe and everything within it. This view of a musical cosmos was adopted by Plato and became the standard throughout the Mediterranean world. These thoughts have found new life in the theories of some modern-day particle physicists who propose that atoms react as though they have resonance: a planet assembled of building blocks made up of sound. A world that rocks. Blaise Pascal wrote in his Penses:”The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” And modern man does indeed seem to find terror in silence. Churches are empty. Rock stadiums are full. In the last week in March, 592-million songs were downloaded from Napster this after the site attempted to block copyrighted music. Under the influence of Mozart, rats run through mazes faster and more accurately, Alzheimer sufferers function more normally and women giving birth find relief from pain. Not all the music we listen to is Mozart.”Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat like that. Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back” Dr Dre’s exhortation to young rappers. Na’im Akbar, former president of the Association of Black Psychologists in America, acknow-ledges the link between gangsta rap and violence:”You can’t prove it’s causative, but it certainly is correlational.” Parents fret about the headbanging sound of a Slipknot song, but all music has insidious power, even music as bland as country and western. Some research suggests that country ballads, those”tears-in-beers” songs, may actually increase the risk of suicide. Is there something in our genes that predisposes us to become addicted to sound? Why is it that music speaks to us so? Scientists are proposing that the human brain is pre-wired for sound. With PET scans and MRIs they seek to establish that music has biological foundations and that musical preferences are wired into the music centre of our temporal lobes from birth. Maybe the answer is simply that music brings us close to what is sacred. There must be a reason sound plays an important role in llcreation myths;why it is seenll as thetool with which the cosmos was created out of chaos. The ancient Chinese believed the origin of the world to lie in an inaudible sacred sound. In the Upanishads it says the sound that is OM is the universe itself. And for Christians the beginning started with a Word. We even talk of the Big Bang although, as David Hykes, musician extraordinaire, points out, this term is modelled on the”noisy violence of our own culture”. Hykes prefers the concept”Big Ring” for that moment when unknown forces brought the universe into being. llMichael Hayes, in his remarkable book The Infinite Harmony, sees in the composition of the DNA molecule the four nitrogenous bases, the triplet RNA codons, the 64 possible combinationsof bases and the 22 signals at the amino-acid stage of development a biochemical manifestation of the heptatonic musical scale. He concludes:”As I looked deeper and deeper into the workings of the genetic code, I became convinced that God Himself was a musician.”
Maybe it is that in the presence of music we find grace. As strange little girl Tory Amos says:”My fear is stronger than my faith but I walk.” Music will give you that strength. And yes, some of the music we become addicted to speaks of unrelenting alienation. Demon poetry. But poetry all the same. Still, excess is rarely a good thing. In ancient times man was a fly walking across the piano keys of the universe. He left no noise in his wake. This has changed forever. Modern man with his myriad activities is creating sound overload and his addiction to music is all-pervasive. What the long-term effect will be on our environment and our mental health remains to be seen. Noise above 55 decibels can lead to aggression and hypertension. According to the European Environment Agency, 65% of Europe’s population is exposed to levels much higher. Recently, recognising that the very survival of some species is at risk from noise pollution, the National Park System in the United States designated natural soundscapes as a resource, granting them the protection afforded to clean air and water. Scientists are paying attention. Joseph Pompeii, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is developing an”audio spotlight”, which would allow you to steer sound away from your ears and create a zone of acoustical privacy. This kind of innovative thinking will be necessary in a world where the output of sound will increase to levels never experienced before. We need to start listening to the world anew. Our survival may depend on it. Think of our fragile blue planet as spinning through space like a tumescent, pulsating drop of sound. Earth: pumped up and wired. Feverishly vibrating. Natasha Mostert is the author of The Other Side of Silence (Coronet)