December 2011

..election
campaign characterised by profound shallowness and intellectual mediocrity by
both political parties and the media, I wrote …..“Many years ago
I recollect seeing in scratchy black and white an interview between Walter Cronkite
and an aging Dean Acheson who had been the Secretary of State in the Truman
Administration. He had played a central role in defining American foreign policy
for the Cold War and had a central role in the creation of many important institutions
including Lend Lease, NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank, together with the organisations
that later became the European Union and the World Trade Organization. My recollection
of his final remark at the end of the interview is unsubstantiated but I believe
that it went something like this, “We have entered the age of the common
man and I, for one, am glad that I shall not see too much more of it.”

Which leads me elliptically, and probably yet again, to noise both natural and
man-made. This was brought to my stunned attention by the energy/sound pressure
levels needed to demonstrably flex the steel panels of the Honda Accord I was
briefly stopped beside at the Chandler Highway and Heidelberg Road intersection.
I could not imagine the concomitant ear and brain damage that must have been
afflicting the callow youths reclining gracelessly in the driver and passenger
seats. Naturally they were wearing baseball hats – the first indicator of diminished
intelligence, part of a dress code where wearing a hat back to front signifies
complete and utter gormlessness. As I drove past I am sure their brains were
trickling from their ears.
It may have been music performing this unnatural phenomena, but not music as
we know it. The closest correlation was to an endless loop succession of twenty-one
gun salutes with severe noise gating. If there were vocals they were well disguised
as the glottal wailings of a Tibetan throat singer whose genitals were being
attacked by a rabid ferret sown into impermeable sweat stained trousers whilst
in the psychotic grip of an N-methylamphetamine overdose. All the rest was white
noise establishing an ever-growing force field that was actually pushing the
surrounding cars away as if through some invisible expanding force field.
I drove off, leaving them for dead, their car slowly lapsing into silence as
two thousand watts of amplification drained the power of the idling engine.
The use of sound as an adjunct to psychosocial manipulation reached its nadir
with the advent of Musak in all its eighty or so channels of variegated splendour.
After a corporate existence of more than eighty years some of us were momentarily
cheered to note that in 2009, Muzak Holdings LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection. We were then dismayed to read a year later that the U.S. Bankruptcy
Court approved the plan to reduce Muzak’s debt by more than half, allowing Muzak
to officially emerge from bankruptcy. So supermarkets and lifts will continue
to be rhythmically tailored to our psychically researched pleasure points, encouraging
the purchase of various unnecessary consumer perishables; consumer durables
being a distant memory – in the way that a good memory is a distant memory.
Before Musak, crowds were stirred to belief, war and communal solidarity, by
martial music, church organs and choirs, communal singing and very little else.
The world outside of towns and cities was quieter, broken only by the passing
wind of horses, cows and obese men of the cloth. We are now so surrounded by
musically derived noise that it is only when it is at its most blatantly opposed
to our carefully cultivated prejudices that we notice it. For me there are shops
that I won’t go into because the sound environment has been carefully
manipulated to ensure that I am so totally offended; not just because I fear
permanent nerve deafness but rather guaranteed and immediate psychic disintegration
with a system of music so far distant from ABC Classic FM that my very personality
would disintegrate. Not even wearing a baseball hat back to front could afford
sufficient protection, though this seems to be necessary to gain entry.
Not that Musak was loud, it was merely persistent. Loud music is loud because
it can be – an outcome of an acoustic arms race between heavy metal groups and
sound system manufacturers. Whilst the Russian and Americans never unleashed
their forces of Mutually Assured Destruction, every garage band that escapes
the garage can unleash the forces of Armageddon on a client base of supportive
relatives who were hoping for Puff the Magic Dragon on the kazoo.
Whatever happened to silence?
Even in the bush I am awakened by a pre- dawn chorus of Sulphur Crested Cockatoos
that brings me into sufficient consciousness so that I can hear the semi-trailers
greeting the dawn with full exhaust-engine braking as they exceed the speed
limit down the hill. Cockatoos seem to have replaced Bell Birds but, unlike
the incessantly piping brethren, these hob-nail booted avian vandals walk across
our tin roof performing an Edinburgh Tattoo of imprecision, marching before
flying a few metres to denude our fruit trees of almost ripe fruit. They start
silently the morning we go out with the fruit basket, but as the last almond
shell drops to the ground they let out a series of banshee victory cries to
demonstrate their contempt of bird netting, silver balloons and our harvesting
intentions. They are the Jeff Kennetts of the avian fraternity, vandalistic,
bombastic and noisy in the extreme.
So this year, at some considerable expense, my wife and I will have some brief
haven in the Melbourne Recital Centre listening to the Australian Chamber Orchestra-
where no amplification is needed, where every note is heard perfectly, and the
silence is truly silent. Acoustic perfection.