Spaces speak

It is called ‘Auditory spatial awareness’, or experiencing space by attentive listening. “It is more than just the ability to detect that space has changed sounds; it includes as well the emotional and behavioral experience of space”. ‘Spaces Speak Are You Listening?’ Asks Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, in their new book.

They bring out a theory that the first marriage of visual and auditory art occurred when Paleolithic painters discovered that their paintings of hoofed animals appeared more intense if they were located in caves producing echoes. Probably they could hear the hoof beats in the echoes surrounding them in the cave. They quote from Steven J. Waller, a pioneer of acoustic archaeology, that paleolithic art found in the caves of Lascaux (15,000 BCE) and Font-de-Gaume (14,000 BCE) was influenced by the acoustic character of the chambers in which it was created, and that cave art may well have incorporated echoes as a supernatural phenomenon that brought life into visual images.

However according to Prof. Raj Somadeva, (Rock Painting and Engraving Sites in Sri Lanka, 2012), in our country the pre-historic cave paintings had been done in very open cave walls where there is no possibility of echoing. Then it would have been their close association with nature which would have prompted their visual images.

The Dambulla cave temple is probably one example we have about a religious space where the echo effect is found. Blesser and Salter explain that an echo makes us become aware of the object which reflects the original sound, which makes us “see” with our ears. There is an ‘aural architecture’ of the environment which we find in a concert hall or a thick jungle, where there is sound from multiple sources. The aural architecture changes with the location. The examples cited are urban traffic sounds transported to a dessert, an orchestra played in the jungle, where we would perceive them in a totally different manner.

A religious space can produce reverberations that convey a sense of awe and reverence to the faithful, and even those who are not of the same faith, within a confined religious space, would have a more than normal feeling. It is not always inside confined spaces we could feel the sounds around us. The open space at Gal Vihara Polonnaruwa, or the Samadhi statue in Anuradhapura can be mentioned, where we could try to listen to the surroundings. The rustle of the Bo leaves of a Bodhi tree on a quiet evening, is so different from the rustle of palmyra leaves on a quiet desolate beach. All this is because we receive all our sense perceptions into our brain where they form mind-images for us, even though we try to identify them separately into sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

In the Unnabha Brahmana sutta, (Samyutta Nikaya 48.42), “There are, Brahman, these five sense-faculties... which do not share in each other's sphere of action. Mind is their resort, and it is mind that profits from their combined activity.”

In the Ganakamoggallana Sutta we read, “...having seen with the eyes...heard with the ears...smelt with the nose...tasted with the tongue...felt with the body...having cognized a mental state with the mind...they are all doors of the sense-organs”. The primitive man may not have been aware of all these biological details, or the physical science of hearing, and still they heard and their mind cognized the sounds.

The Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius (30 BCE) is considered the father of spatial acoustics for designing theatre spaces, who had discussed the rules for improving theater acoustics. Inside the Echo Hall in ancient Olympia a voice is claimed to echo seven or more times. The Greek amphitheater had “poetry, drama, music, dance and religion fused into a single type of aural experience in a very large public acoustic arena”.

Blesser and Salter quotes acoustic consultant David Lubman who had studied the chirplike sounds from the echoes produced by the staircases of the pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, in the Mexican state of Yucatan. The sound created and echoed “bears an uncanny resemblance to the call of the Mayan's sacred bird, the resplendent Quatzal”. Chirp like echoes appear in many other Mayan staircases, and “the echoes could well have been heard by the Mayans as the call of their sacred bird immortalized in stone”.

Closer home we have the man made caves at Ajantha, from about the 2nd century BCE, where the acoustic effects can be observed. The 12th century Pothgulvehera in Polonnaruwa is considered as an example of acoustic architecture in our country, where the library also could have functioned as an auditorium. At the Golkonda fort in Hyderabad, we can still here a clap made at the main gate, from the top of the citadel, which is about 300 ft. high which is now only a tourist attraction.

Today we are all faced with auditory overload, in the urban jungles, not only from the traffic, and industrial machinery, and sound pollution in the name of music. We are faced with social deafness, when we train ourselves, or when our auditory senses have evolved, to be able to shut off or filter off unwanted noise. We also shut off the rest of the world by covering our ears with headphones and ear plugs, and drown ourselves in our own world, missing the wonderful natural world around us.

Since man began to realize we are rapidly losing all the wonders offered by nature, he is trying to create artificial soundscapes, the same way he is trying to create artificial landscapes, after destroying the natural landscapes. Yet man will never be able to create anything that could come anywhere close to what nature has created, and unfortunately our future generations would never know what they would be missing.

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