Sound Culture

The sound culture is the auditory environment (or soundscape) located within its
wider social and cultural context.

The concept of a sound culture (also called an auditory or aural culture) is directly
connected to the soundscape. Indeed, the distinction between the two is not that
clear cut. In a sense the sound culture is the bigger picture, it requires us to step
back and ask questions about the origins and nature of the soundscape; why
does it sound as it does? What are the broader social and cultural influences on
what we hear in our everyday lives?

Social and cultural organisation are largely responsible for the sound landscape that
we inhabit and these inevitably change over time. In the pre-industrial European
world one of the defining features of the soundscape was the tolling of the church
bell. It told the workers in the field of the progress of their day’s toil but was also an
auditory marker of the community briefly enveloped in the sound of the bell. It also
reminded those who heard it of the centrality of the church in their lives. The bell’s
ring was part of the soundscape but the social and religious dimensions, which add
meaning to the sound, are also part of the wider sound culture. Industrialisation
created a very different soundscape, the soundscape of modernity. The cities
became unprecedentedly loud; ‘the din of modern technology: the roar of elevated
trains, the rumble of internal combustion engines, the crackle and hiss of radio
transmissions’. Faced with this often alienating din the science of acoustics was
born as 20th-century city dwellers strove to create a quieter world and even to
eliminate unwanted sound. Part of the aural mix in the USA was the sound of jazz,
which came to represent the American city itself (as it does to this day in the
soundtracks of Hollywood). Jazz was closely related to urban noise and the noise of
the ghetto described here as it came up a Harlem ventilation shaft by the jazz
musician Duke Ellington: ‘You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You
hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip
floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker.’

These sounds, including jazz, were part of the particularly rich and complex sound
culture of America’s African population living in the ghettos. A soundscape that was
socially, historically and culturally determined as was the often racist reaction to it.
Jazz was seen as the music of the jungle capable of driving people to ‘the vilest
deeds’. This was ‘nigger music’ and ‘whorehouse music’ and no wonder so much
effort was expended in keeping it off the airwaves. The contemporary urban
soundscape has a uniquely electronic quality: The chkty-chkty-chkty-chkty spilling
out of someone else’s headphones, the yeow-yeow clearing the way for ambulances
and police cars, the bllliiiiii heralding the banalaties of a stranger’s one-sided
conversation on a mobile phone – these serve as a keen reminders that most of us
live immersed in a world of sound.
So much of contemporary sound culture is the sound of electronic
media; the personalised media of the phone and the iPod. Music, the radio and
television at home, recorded sound in the shops, pub and nightclub. In cultural terms
this soundscape has to be seen as a highly commercialised and global environment
in which what we hear is determined by the boardrooms of the media
conglomerates. This is a soundscape largely detached from and ignorant of the local
environment. In this global, commercialised soundscape, radio is highly complicit,
except perhaps where it dares to challenge sterile, homogenised and formatted
programming.