There was a point I was making here. I think it was about alarms. Alarms seem to go off all over this city all the time and you know that it must be important to somebody but the urgency just gets dissolved in frustration. There are auto alarms and shop alarms. In Paris there are occasionally what sound like air raid sirens thrown into the mix. Indeed someone must explain these to me. They also have them in small provincial towns. I believe it just means: get your shit together, something major is going down. They sound like World War 2. Most town halls have what look like giant phonograph speakers installed on their roves. This is where the alarm comes out.
I got to sort out my audio. It’s just that in this day and age no one takes an alarm with gravity. I am sure that in 1890, people took alarms seriously. Perhaps that’s because back then, alarms were both rousing and or genuinely urgent, like the call of the bag pipes or the blast of a lone bugler at dawn. Their noise competition was the soft breeze rustling corn in the fields or perhaps even the bark of a mongrel dog. But now? Man’s alarm bells are just as loud but are so constant in the fabric of the cacophonous landscape of the 21st century that we really can stand to let them buzz all day without doing a thing about it. What should I take more seriously, the blast of that alarm that seems to be going off in that open massage parlor, the 80 decibel rumble of that garbage truck or that chorus of klaxons. Alarms now are like the boy who cried wolf. No one believes the boy anymore because he’s always crying wolf. Indeed when was the last time you bounded down the steps or ran to safety just because an alarm was ringing in your ears? I’ll bet it was not very recently. I tried responding to an alarm the other day, the owner of a BMW just laughed at me. “It always does that”, he explained.
I can tell where I am sometimes, just by the sound of emergency vehicles. For example, a siren in the United States on a squad car is a short deep burst. The same police vehicle in Paris sounds like a nostalgic reminiscing of days past. Alarms are part of the city ambience now. I am faced of them every time I try and record the sound of a city street and end up having the sound of an alarm on the track instead. There’s just no way around it. We are surrounded by alarms and have learned to ignore them like a perpetual mother in law. They are a nagging wife during a soccer game. They are a swarm of bees at a rock concert.
People tolerate all kinds of things, especially in the area of sound. It is hard to punish a perpetrator of noise pollution because the disturbance is often fleeting. But that does not mean that over time , it doesn’t accumulate. Imagine what the birds must think? In their reptilian brains, they must remember the days when they were the loudest ones on the block. They must feel like sub - standard noise bearers. We tolerate the pitch so much, I often hear alarms in dance records. There is a sado masochist touch to all of this. I guess the noise ante is upped so much that now it needs to hurt. A lot of times I wish we weren’t so hard on ourselves. But an alarm now has to feel like something Spock would consider torture to get our attention. This is where we are. This is sound in the 21st century. At least in the city.
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