The Bristol lockdown sound

Two weeks ago I sat in a pool of morning sunshine with the living room window open, listening to a train approaching. It began as a low murmur, not yet drowning the happy twittering of blackbirds and wrens in the cherry trees. Then the wave gathered volume.

The obnoxious two-tone blare of the horn was the loudest sound I’d heard all morning.

Metal wheels chuntered along the tracks, and then the heavy rush died away as the driver hit the straight run towards Bristol Parkway and the empty stations beyond. In the quiet that returned the sounds poured in: an accelerating engine on Ashley Down Road, the creak of a gate, the sporadic running footsteps of a young child and their happy babble, a sudden siren wail, the roll-slam-thunk of a van door, improbable honking from a goose in a sky empty of aeroplanes.

Later, I heard the plaintive bleat of lambs from St Werburgh’s City Farm. Below it all was the soft pale murmur of the M32, and the sweet chatter of birds. It struck me that what I could really hear was the absence of Bristol’s normal soundscape; sounds lost and sounds gained.

With the government’s announcement of lockdown on March 23 came an immediate change in behaviour, and a change to how life across our city sounded. Gone were the staccato shouts of jumpers-for-goalposts football games, the early summer twinkle of an ice-cream van, the roaring early-morning burn of a hot air balloon kissing the rooftops.

The clinical beeps of contactless payments replaced the comforting jangle of change. Conversations became muffled by masks. Bathrooms filled with the suck and squelch of soapy hands lathered for two rounds of Happy Birthday, sung under the breath. Traffic dwindled, and the roads were so quiet you could hear the whirr of a bicycle chain as a cyclist drew near.

In the language developed by composer R Murray Schafer in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, a city is a place of low-fidelity (lo-fi) soundscapes. Sounds are drowned by others: purring engines and the banging blows of building sites.

The sounds we hear are those in the immediate vicinity because the detail is swallowed, and anything coming from far away gets obscured. Under lockdown, we’ve been experiencing high-fidelity (hi-fi) soundscapes, where individual sounds come through clean and sweet, and faraway noises carry because they aren’t crushed under the tyres of passing traffic.

Dr Tom Rice studies the anthropology of sound and its importance in cultural contexts

“I’ve been really struck by how dramatically the sound environment has changed,” says Dr Tom Rice, a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter.

His voice comes through the phone from his home in Bishopston a little crackly. “Living in Bristol, we’ve developed a tolerance to noise. The absence of permanent masking sound has made other sounds become audible and more noticeable. It’s not that these sounds aren’t usually there, it’s just that we don’t perceive them as clearly.”

He has been getting used to being woken by the bells chiming in the tower of B&A Church, on the corner of St Andrew’s Park.

Tom’s specialism in the field of anthropology is sound, and how the production and interpretation of sound differs in different cultural contexts.

“In our culture we, tend to think of seeing being believing,” he says. “Sound is doubtful, a bit insubstantial, and we have a tendency to value what we see – giving it importance. But this isn’t universal.”

In societies who live in rainforest environments, for example, thick trees make it harder to see into the distance. There, sounds provide vital information, and are perceived as revealing more about a presence than seeing it would.

During lockdown in Bristol we may have been taking in more sound information than usual, echoing life in pre-industrial times.

Before the mechanisation of the 19th century, the city’s soundscape would have been hi-fi. People would have been able to glean a lot of information from sounds, and hear things in their locality very clearly, according to Tom.

‘Soundmarks’ – community sounds that act like visual landmarks – would have placed you on a certain corner as surely as the smell of hot chips and vinegar billowing from the Bristol Fryer on Gloucester Road at lunchtime.

Zoe Banks Gross hopes that noise pollution levels in Bristol can be kept low post-lockdown. Photo by Bernhard Gross

As the weary weeks of lockdown have continued, it’s undeniable that sound levels have crept back up. Government figures put the level of traffic last week at 35 to 45 per cent of the usual volume, which the AA have compared to levels in the early 1970s.

Noise pollution is the tangible kin of air pollution, which is illegally high in parts of Bristol and is responsible for 300 premature deaths per year.

Zoe Banks Gross is a trustee for Playing Out, which supports residents to close their streets and allow children to play safely in the road, reclaiming the space from traffic. She lives in Lawrence Hill, the area of the city with the highest level of air pollution.

“A lot of the time we don’t realise how stressful noise can be – unwanted noise,” Zoe says over the phone. “It can impact our wellbeing and ability to think.”

A study published in 2010 gave memory tests to almost 3,000 children and examined whether exposure to road and aircraft noise affected their results. Chronic exposure to aircraft noise impaired their memories.

“All children were affected by noise pollution – in their ability to make decisions, their working memory, and their regulation of emotion,” Zoe adds.

“You think about being a younger person and having that underlying level of something affecting you – not having that background noise is going to be quite useful to process the Covid-19 situation.”

While formal Playing Out sessions are on hold, Zoe says her son has enjoyed being able to scoot up and down their road with far less traffic about than usual.

“It has been great to see more kids and people using space that we don’t usually have the opportunity to use because it’s devoted to cars.”

She hopes Bristol City Council will be able to use lessons learned during this period about how enjoyable the city is with fewer cars to make changes in the future.

“It would make such a difference. If you make it easy for everyone to access green space and to be able to walk or cycle into the centre, you level out some of the health inequalities – especially for people from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds.”

A ringing glass bowl provides the first note in Dan Pollard’s Isolation Melody

Along with the sounds coming in from outside – neighbours playing musical instruments (consensus split between nice to hear vs desperately needs more practice), whistling parrots, wine bottles shattering into recycling bins, seagulls, loud sex, loud arguments, the industrial hum of air conditioning units, the 50-year-old Bristol Hum, DIY attempts (whining sanders and swearing), owls in St Werburgh’s, lions in Clifton, yappy dogs, a drum ‘n’ bass remix of the old Bristol Carpets advert – the sounds of our own homes are also in focus.

For the past few weeks, Dan Pollard, a composer and sound artist who lives in Greenbank, has been collecting sounds from household objects around the globe and compiling an Isolation Melody.

It begins in Dan’s home with the almost pained ringing whine of a glass kitchen bowl. In comes a happier dink from a coffee pourer, sent in from Japan. A German enamel bowl booms deep and rich, a grandfather clock jars a memory of brown swirly carpets by the front door of my grampy’s bungalow.

An egg slicer trills. Water slops. The melody creeps along, refusing to be rushed: ten sounds and 20 seconds of audio have taken weeks to compile.

“I was trying to find a creative way to document what’s going on right now,” Dan says over the phone, the signal patchy in his home studio. His voice occasionally cuts out and glitches back in.

“We’re very separated but also very connected by the lockdown situation. I’m interested in setting limitations and using that to make music – so the situation itself composes the music.”

Dan chose to use only non-musical instruments found at home for the project, reflecting the new relationship we’re developing with our homes, now that we are spending so much more time there.

These non-musical sounds were themselves a limitation for the composition: “The palette would get so much broader, but I wouldn’t be choosing the notes.”

The composition has been an experiment in playfulness, as well, with Dan’s (almost) two-year-old son influencing his work. “He’ll hit things in the house and sometimes I notice it’s a cool sound. If you hang out with adults, they don’t tend to do that.

“There’s dormant music hiding in our houses, and in general there seems to be a heightened awareness of sound right now. None of us have experienced such a quick and dramatic change in the sounds we can hear.”

Musician Joe Hill has been missing the human sounds that provide a backdrop to city life

As lockdown rules slowly lift, we’ll be able to see friends and family outside our homes and enjoy all the tiny things that have been missing from digital communication.

“I’m getting to hear the voices of my friends and family on the phone but it’s lost all the details you get when you’re having a conversation with someone – the squeaks and belly rumbles and burps,” says composer, musician and interdisciplinary artist Joe Hill.

“The sound cuts out and you miss things. It feels conversations are a lot more purposeful than usual now. I’m missing some of the human sounds but it’s been good to hear some of the nature sounds, the birdsong, and the other living things we share the space with.”

Joe is speaking down the line from Bedminster, where he can hear baby starlings making noises like synthesisers in a nest on a neighbour’s roof.

“I wonder if the change in sound can be a reminder of what we want more of or less of. Sound is something we can’t ignore – we can block out a lot of sensory information but even when you go inside your house you can still hear the traffic. Your ears are always open which makes the impact of sound huge.”

On a recent Thursday night, the city fills with sound again for the weekly Clap for our Carers.

On Nine Tree Hill in Kingsdown, a man comes out of his front door with a cajón drum, and, on the dot of 8pm, begins tapping out a steady rhythm.

Onto their balconies come residents of nearby Armada House. A whole family is out on the first floor, clapping and cheering, hand-drawn rainbows stuck to the windows beside them.

On the very top floor, where the corner of the building pinches to a point in the company of the crescent moon, someone smacks a saucepan with a wooden spoon and it rings across Bristol below.

Pots and pans play at different tempos and pitches, people whistle and whoop, a man in a car passes with his hand on the horn, and for two solid minutes the sound of a whole community echoes between the buildings.

Then the drummer stops, the clapping fades and the birds return for the coming of night. The silence reassembles itself like feathers ruffled and smoothed. When life gets back to normal and the city sounds return, I’ll miss this.

Main image by Jess Connett

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