City Noise Task Force Report

Appendix F

Toronto Globe and Mail
June 6, 1996

By Chris Dafoe
Western Arts Correspondent, Vancouver

Vancouver changes its tune

SOUNDSCAPE/Composer Barry Truax hears music in the city's streets

Ask a long-time Vancouver resident about the changes the city has seen in the past 20 years and you'll hear a familiar refrain of how apartment towers have sprouted on the waterfront, how the European shops on Robson have been replaced by Japanese noodle bars and trendy chain stores, how rush hour is so much worse than it used to be.

Ask Barry Truax and he'll likely suggest that, if you want to fully understand how Vancouver has changed over the past two decades, you should close your eyes and open your ears. Hear the rising whine of the motors on the Skytrain, the fake electronic ring of telephones, the roar of leaf blowers, the rumble of traffic and the annoying honk of car alarms. Search the air, usually without success, for the old sounds of industry and shipping.

Truax, a professor at Simon Fraser University, is particularly attuned to the changing sound of this city. Since the early 1970s, he's been involved in soundscape studies, finding the noise and music that echo through urban and rural settings, documenting the sounds of city and country and turning them into music.

For the past few weeks, he has been working with four composers -- two Canadians and two Germans -- to make music out of the sounds of Vancouver.

Their compositions, and soundscape pieces by Truax and colleague Hildegard Westerkamp, will be unveiled tomorrow at a concert at a CBC studio as part of Vancouver New Music's first New Music Festival.

Owen Underhill, artistic director of Vancouver New Music and programmer of the festival, sees the soundscape project as an important part of Vancouver's musical history. The city has played a central role in the study of soundscapes since the early 1970s, when composer R. Murray Schafer started the World Soundscape Project while teaching at SFU. One of the earliest studies of what has become known as "acoustic ecology" was The Vancouver Soundscape, a sonic portrait of the city released in 1973 as a two-record set. Today, SFU is home to a library of hundreds of hours of sounds from around the world.

"Soundscape studies is something Vancouver is known for around the world," says Underhill. "And I think it's been really interesting to revisit the project 25 years later." Those decades have seen many changes, both in the nature of soundscape studies and in the sounds of the city.

Once essentially documentary in nature, soundscape studies have embraced composition, using the language of music to probe the artistic and symbolic significance of environmental sounds. For example, one of the pieces that will be performed tomorrow is a three-minute collage of the horns and whistles that echo through Vancouver's harbour. The sound of Vancouver has changed in a thousand ways, some subtle, some painfully obvious.

"I was on 4th Avenue last week and it's become an acoustic nightmare," Truax says of the main street in Vancouver's Kitsilano district. "The sheer volume of traffic makes holding a normal conversation impossible. I don't think that was the case when I first arrived here in the early seventies. But you can also hear the difference in smaller things. I suspect most of us don't hear the sounds of milk bottles any more, even the ring of a telephone sounds different than it did 25 years ago."

Few of the changes are positive, admits Truax, who hears plenty about sonic horrors as a member of the Urban Noise Task Force. The new noises produced by leaf blowers, car alarms, Indy races and overpowered car stereos are on almost everybody's hate list. But Truax says soundscape studies have always taken a dual approach, both recognizing the danger of noises and promoting positive aspects of the urban acoustic ecology, teaching people to value their aural experiences.

"It's a complex field," says Truax. "You can't isolate the subjective from the objective. There are sounds whose impact is physically [demonstrable], but there are also sounds that carry social connotations, both positive and negative."

Public reaction can be surprising. The task force has received complaints about the chimes of ice cream trucks, a sound supposedly beloved by children of all ages. Other people are unhappy when they can't hear a particular sound. When the air horn that played the opening notes of O Canada at noon was moved to Canada Place from the top of the Old B.C. Hydro building, some complained that a familiar and comforting refrain had disappeared from their lives.

"That horn is a soundmark that is unique to Vancouver," says Truax. "It is part of our sonic heritage, just as an old building is part of our architectural heritage."

Last modified: April 30, 1997
(c) 1996 City of Vancouver