- Prema Jayakumar
‘The noise, my dear!’ This was about the sensory overload of sound of the British retreat at Dunkirk.
Yes, the noise. Recently, I was in an air-conditioned bus with a group of travellers, with the music blasting fast numbers loud. I did request politely that the volume be turned down a little, but if they did it at all, it was only a miniscule change. And since everyone in the group, young and old, except me, seemed to be enjoying the music, quite a few dancing to it and the rest keeping the beat, it seemed unfair to insist. But the rhythm hammered on, hit and enveloped, making me a prisoner of the sound, looking around for escape and finding none. And giving me a migraine that went on over to the next day.
The incident set me thinking about the destructive powers of sound. I had written in a previous column about the fabric of silence that is made up of small sounds and unheard whispers. This is the opposite of that. Sound that is used to destroy. Of course, the first example that occurs to anyone is the destruction of the walls of Jericho by Joshua. The faithful did march round the city seven times as instructed to, but they also played pipes and trumpets. And somehow it is the sound of trumpets that linger in the telling of the story rather than the circumambulation. The walls did not stand a chance against the battery of sound. They crumpled in despair.
Dorothy Sayers, who writes detective stories, is a favourite of mine. One of her books, The Nine Tailors, deals with the esoteric practice of Campanology, that is, the ringing of church bells in a laid down and complicated pattern. In this book, a man who seeks shelter in the belfry of the local church, is battered to death by the ringing of the bells in the tower, in the annual performance of change-ringing. Of course, he turns out to be a man from the same village who had stolen from the church and in some way desecrated it, getting his punishment from the non-human agency of the building. The enclosed space and the inescapable sound used to give me nightmares. The plot of the story was criticised at the time for being unlikely and too speculative. But I found it easy to believe that it was possible. An enclosed space from which escape was not possible and the continuous sound of large bells for hours and hours!
Yes, sound has been used for beneficent purposes too – in medical diagnoses and treatments, notably. Sound enters the body and finds out problems, and treats them too. What would today’s medical diagnosis be without ultra-sound scans and treatment without Lithotripsy and the like? And yet, isn’t there something a little frightening in imagining light and sound entering your body with almost demonic power and doing things to your innards? Rather like imps entering through impossibly small openings and creating havoc in some inner space. Though they call it non-invasive, it is something alien, be it light or sound, invading the body of the patient. The difference seems to be that there is no cut in the outer body and no human hand entering through it. Somehow the technological evolution is so fast, that here is hardly time to assimilate it. And surely hardly enough time to see how it stands the test of time.
Whatever that may be, noise pollution is as dangerous as chemical pollution and volume and length should be controlled at least in public spaces. When one jeep or autoriksha tries to entice you with loud music and louder exhortations to take lottery tickets and another vehicle nearby tells you that some political party is either planning a mammoth procession or meeting and you should definitely roll up in numbers to participate, no one hears anything and everyone is treated to a level of noise, which if it does not kill, will certainly make all the people around deaf.
There are supposed to be controls regarding the decibel at which the loudspeakers can be set and fines if the sound exceeds that limit. But that is probably more on paper than in fact. Just as there is an awareness that destroying land and water could mean the end of life on earth and an attempt to create green spaces, let us hope that an awareness of the destructive property of sound will bring about the creation of quiet spaces without having to go to monasteries to find one.
