LOURDES GROTTO II

By Elise Duda

Why do we as humans prefer the natural to the mechanical? According to a report completed by the United Nations in 2018, 55% of current day’s world population lives in an urban area, and those numbers are projected to increase to 68% by 2050. We are less than one generation away from almost three quarters of the world’s population living in a metropolitan city due to overpopulation. We as a species are going to have to reexamine the unique sounds that accompanies an urban landscape since they will soon become even more central to the human experience than ever before. My SoundSite considers this issue within our community at Duquesne. What can change about our perception to exist comfortably in spaces that are filled with more human-made sounds than natural.

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Composer, clarinetist, and scholar David Rothenberg asserts that we should be able to revel in and enjoy the sounds of our surroundings. “Patterns evolve, symmetries expand into asymmetries that offer a perfection over millions of years of steady change. There is a rightness in such sounds that no sudden human hubris can ever hope to achieve.” When Rothenberg writes these words, he is talking about the sounds of nature, such as birds chirping, squirrels running up trees, and insects buzzing around you, etc. My question is: why must this thinking only include natural sounds? What would be so wrong about including mechanical, human-made sounds? Is there not an unpredictable, unintentional nature to the sounds of the city? Consider, for instance, the sounds of cars and PAT busses flying down the highway next to Duquesne’s grotto? I listen to the cars and the busses and the trucks in the same way Rothenberg listens to the bird song.

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The beauty in the unpredictability of sounds, human-made and natural, has been studied long before this SoundSite. In the early-21st century, composer, music theorist, and philosopher John Cage was especially interesting in all forms of sound and purposefully blending this with the element of random chance to create music (called aleatoric music) in order to create an experience that is aesthetically beautiful. He put forth musical philosophical ideas that every sound that we hear is music, and there is a unique power in the unpredictability of human-made “noise.” In 1952, Cage composed a piece titled, 4’33” in which the entire piece consisted of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The point of the piece was to force the audience to take in the sounds of the environment around them. In my own personal experience, I have found great comfort in using the sound of the highway and the sounds of the city in my meditation in the grotto.

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While in the grotto, take a moment to really take in your surroundings. Sit on a bench and listen to the traffic of the highway next to you. Focus on the sound of the cars speeding down the road, the occasional honk, the PAT bus opening and closing its doors at the corner of the street. Allow every detail to filter in and then let it fade into the background. Try to allow every opportunity for this exercise to expand your own preconceived ideas on what you previously thought was disruptive, disturbing, or even intolerable noise and how that might change, if it does at all.

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Did the sounds of Pittsburgh relax you and/or help you gain a perspective you didn’t have on city noise before you completed the exercise?

Yes?
No?
Something else?

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This question of what is and isn’t acceptable noise by society has always fascinated me, which is why I picked the space at the grotto to ask this question. In my mind, the difference between human-made noises in urban environments and a white noise machine that many people use to get to sleep are two very similar things, different only in the exact noises they produce. White noise is something akin to a musical drone, a monophonic note or noise played continuously, often accompanying more melodic music on top of it or even played unaccompanied, as with white noise. Basically, it is a note or a sound that is repeated and sustained for some time. I believe that the sounds of traffic (cars honking, crowds talking, bus doors opening and closing, etc.) can be used in the exact same way. These sounds exist at a relatively static level and sustain over a significant period of time, even with lulls in the sound during the night. Drones have been used all throughout history, famously as far back as in ancient Southwest Asian folk music during religious mediation in Hindu temples and is still used in modern day. Similarly, drones are also often used for meditation (adoration) in the Roman Catholic church, and this is what initially sparked my interest in the use of utilizing this effect in the grotto. We can’t build a sound barrier around the grotto without going through and extensive approval process through the city of Pittsburgh as well as significant amounts of funding. Why not at least try to not only make peace with the noise that surrounds us, but use it to make that peace?

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