Quiet, Please

by Joe Wolfe. Joe Wolfe Is An Associate Professor of Physics At The University of Nsw, Where He Researches The Acoustics of Musical instruments, the voice and the ear.

Sydney Morning Herald June 16, 2001

The exhausts of Venice are mixed with water. This is bad news for any fish, but great news for the rest of us. Venice, you see, is an acoustical paradise.

I had noticed it on my first visit to this magical city. Having a quiet meal in the evening, I realised I had spent a day not only without the noise of cars, but a day unmarred by loudspeakers. The Venetian supermarket did not have that offensive mix of distorted music and advertising that pollutes their counterparts in other cities. Venetian cafes and restaurants either have real music with real musicians, or else are pleasantly quiet. Even the least sensitive tourist in Venice seems to have decided to walk the streets without the tish-tica-tish-tica-tish of the elsewhere omnipresent Walkman. And in the evenings, the tenors in the gondolas sing without amplification. They have no need for them, thanks to their good voices and the low-level background noise.

There is more to Venice's magic than this: the absence of cars means an absence of speed, aggression and foolishness, and that puts both residents and tourists in a better mood. But the absence of broadband noise that comes with car exhausts is a balm for the ears.

Almost every little courtyard in Venice is a haven of peace. The tourist returns from a day of this quiet, calm existence and collapses onto a hotel bed and hears ... the gentle lapping of water in the canals, or the breeze in the leaves of the window plants.

But these are memories of an earlier time, and I wondered to what extent they had been filtered by nostalgia? Perhaps I had selectively forgotten some details in the general euphoria induced by la Serenissima (Venice's traditional name, which would translate as the very serene''). I didn't think so, but on my next visit I keep my ears open and my pen ready.

First I noticed birdsong: the occasionally raucous cry of gulls, the low rumble of pigeons, the cheerful sparrows.

Then the sound of my shoes on the paving. In Venice I am often conscious of footsteps: my shoes are soft-soled and I don't always hear them, but I notice the steps of hard soles and the different rhythms of different pedestrians. Are Venetians more sensitive to this, I wonder, and do they recognise the walks of their friends from the next alley?

Sometimes there is a background of voices in the soft musical language that I am later to learn is Venetian, whose speakers proudly note its differences, in prosody and vocabulary, from Italian.

Twice in my walk on this Friday afternoon I hear pianists practising, one doing technical exercises and the other an early prelude from the Well Tempered Keyboard. Both are using the sordino or una corda pedals, as though they are worried about disturbing the calm. A lovely place for musicians, I think, until I see a bass player lugging his instrument over the bridges.

A boat with an outboard passes. It is a 10kW motor, but as it passes at three or four knots, almost at an idle, its sound is inoffensive. And, unlike a motor bike, the exhaust is mixed with water, which softens the percussive shock of the exhaust stroke. Most of the boats are diesels and in virtually all of them the motor turns barely above an idle.

The sound of water lapping against the banks of the canals is omnipresent, as is the sound of water pouring endlessly from the drinking fountains. welcome, cool sounds in this heat. Often these are the dominant sounds.

In one narrow alley, the breeze is a little stronger and the loudest sound I hear is the turbulence of the air in my ears. It is not like this in Sydney at 4pm on a Friday.

A little further along, a man is painting the gate at the entrance to a courtyard. Here the loudest sound is that of his brush as he spreads the thick, dark green enamel itself a cool and quiet colour.

Later I hear, for the first time, an air-conditioner. It is somewhere near a laundry and it must be working hard on this summer's day. I realise that quite a few places (supermarkets, restaurants, printers, hairdressers) have air-conditioners, but that the heat exchangers must be on the roofs and so well baffled that, even in this quiet city, they cannot usually be heard. I also hear a phone ring. And then the laughter of children. (On reflection I realise that I have heard much laughter, and I don't remember any crying. Selective memory? Or are the children all happy here?)

A bell begins to toll, followed a little later by another, pitched a second below, and ringing just a little more quickly, as though set to a different metronome marking.

Then, for the first time, I hear a song which will become more familiar in this summer season of university graduations: a new graduate is being paraded through the city and subjected to various traditional indignities, presumably so as to preclude his assuming that the new title carries distinction. Dottore, Dottore,'' they sing, before finishing the chant with a highly disrespectful phrase.

On a bridge over the next canal a postman is dragging his trolley, and the dominant sound is the bounce of the tyres on the stone stairs. This is not a great town for wheels. Nor for wheelchairs. Still, with no motorcycles and no cars, I expect that there are fewer paraplegics here than in ordinary cities.

The laughter and conversation from a working men's bar drift to me as I walk across the next campo, to be displaced by the steady thump-thump of the slow-going diesel of a construction boat. But its motor has very little noise in the high frequencies (where our ears are most sensitive), and the sound of its gentle bow-wave is clearly heard over the almost pleasant engine.

A violinist practises articulation exercises. (All the musicians I hear practising are good. Where is the Twinkle, Twinkle of a Suzuki student? Or the raucous, out-of-tune saxophonist?)

There is a woodworking shop and I hear the sound of a small lathe producing one of the art forms for which the city is famous. Later I visit the workshop of a man who makes fucole, the elaborate rowlocks'' of the gondola and of other boats here. These intricate pieces of walnut are also works of art. I imagine the neighbours listening to the regular scraping of the different chisels and the occasional use of power tools and judging from the sound how the work is coming along.

After a longer stay in Venice, I revise my original description a little.

There is noise to be found: one day I passed the workboat that replaces rotten mooring posts. A pile driver is noisy, even here. And there is recorded music in some restaurants and bars, particularly along the big tourist route (Ferrovia-Lido-San Marco-Accademia). These routes are themselves relatively noisy during daytime just from the numbers of tourists, which is why I have largely avoided them. And the vaporetto (ferry) that brings me home along the Grand Canal is not quiet, either.