Sound heritage
The concept of Sound Heritage takes understanding and taking care of heritage to a level unfa- miliar to most experts, let alone laymen. Its crux is that not the sound carrier but the sound itself is the monument. Indeed, the sound-carrier, for example a record, is essential for sound to come into existence. The carrier can be monumental as and for itself as well, for example because of its design aspects. Yet, as soon as it can’t perform sound anymore, it is downgraded to merely an inactive object.Googling ‘Sound Heritage’ results in an impressive list of references. Interestingly, the majority
of the projects focuses on recordings. This implies that a sound’s qualities, i.e. the qualities of
what is actually heard, are for a significant part determined and controlled by the audio gear the
user applies. This activates the risk of tacitly assuming that a sound’s qualities would be of
minor significance. However, the fact that it is the qualities of artefacts that produce their
heritage values, is a strong argument supporting the opposite. The above given articulation of
what Sound Heritage is about iterates that insight, and is an update of how it is commonly
understood.
Presence Sounds exist in time, and hence in a specific space: they are situational, having specific time and space coordinates. To complicate matters, it is one’s individual experience that determines how a sound sounds to one in a given situation, and how one remembers it. Hence, sharing sound experiences is complex: I don’t know what you heard, and we are convicted to share me- mories if we want to find out, as we can’t point at certain aspects the ways we can watching a sculpture or a painting. In addition, this poses the question whether sounds can be reproduced: is the sound one experiences when playing a record two times twice the same? The answer may be positive if one does so without changing the circumstances. Yet listening to a record on a high-end audio system in a studio and on ear pods in the train constitutes two separate situati- ons. As a result, significant qualities of the sound (timbres, rhythms, dynamics, acoustical beha- vior, to name a few) will manifest themselves differently. Taking this to the field of music may help articulating the problems more clearly. When one claims that one is listening to violinist X while not being in the concert venue when and where she plays, but instead playing a recording in one’s room, one has to reduce the importance of the difference in sound in order to be able to maintain that position. To what extent can art sur- vive such reduction? The answer also depends on the extent we are willing to understand how miraculously our ear works. The visual does not suffice as a means to understand the world: the auditory deserves attention and training as well. It deserves not being taken for granted; it deserves:
The best field to explore and develop
the concept of Sound Heritage:
organs!
The musical instrument that offers the best oppor-
tunities to transport our ears back to yesterday
and beyond is the pipe organ. Organs tend to live
very long (the oldest still sounding organs date
from the 15th century) and if nothing would be
changed in them nor around them, they would
sound the same today as they did when they
were built.
The reason that they are not easily replaced is
that they are in most cases large and expensive;
and also that they are custom-made, i.e. specifi-
cally conceived to sound optimally in the acousti-
cal situation they are located in. In addition,
organs include not only a separate sound genera-
tor per key (like the piano does), but also per
sound color, so it’s quite a task to change the
sound of an organ. Yet, we can be sure that no
historic organ pipe still sounds the way it origi-
nally sounded: organs were adapted to fashion
time and again. On the whole, however, they do
store historic sounds better than any other object.
Check for example the 15th century organ at San
Petronio, Bologna, Italy. Given that organ pipes
are able to survive the centuries relatively unhar-
med, and given that their design is, in comparison
to flutes and other man-blown instrument, fairly
straightforward, it is easier to replicate an organ
pipe than, say, a baroque oboe. Check for exam-
ple the sound of the replica of the 15th century
organ that once sounded in St Nicolai, Utrecht.
The replica was inaugurated in 2012 in the
Orgelpark, Amsterdam.
Photo: organ by Peter Gerritzs. (Utrecht
~1479, case now in Middelburg)
Resisting reduction
Obviously, accepting reduction can be an effective
strategy when the sounds in question are not meant
to constitute an uncompromised artistic or a high-
quality heritage experience. The Sound Heritage
programme ‘Save our Sounds’, launched in 2015, is
a good example. Led by the British Library, it aims
to digitize and make available over half a million
sound recordings. That is in itself a great goal. In
addition, one could argue that the sounds made ac-
cessible this way offer not much more than a win-
dow enabling reconstructing the recorded sounds in
one’s mind. In most cases that is an option: one
does not need many clues to imagine how a street
sounds if one is familiar with its soundscape.
Matters are different as soon as the distance between users’ systems of references and the sounds
stored in recordings increases. Next to recorded sounds, however, there is another body of sounds
from yesterday that suffer less from this problem: sounds produced by sound carriers other than recor-
dings, such as high-end audio gear and musical instruments, i.e. carriers that are specifically designed
to enable creating sounds of the highest quality.
Sound Heritage Politics
The fact that the sounds of historic organs have been adapted to new sound ideals time and
again, increasing the distance between our ears and their original sounds, and the fact that we
are not able to listen with period ears, means that sound heritage politics should aim at not ad-
apting sounds to current fashion and ‘just’ focus on restoring the sound carrier, i.e. the organ.
In fact, this plea has been published in the majority of organ history books – yet the ideal has
never effectively been reached.
To be sure, it is not out of reach as of yet. The main problem is that sound and sound concepts
never have been considered to be researchable or even documentable: the main organ data-
bases only contain data of the sound carriers. Furthermore, there is no educational system that
collects, researches and disseminates knowledge on voicing, i.e. the art of making organ pipes
sound the way they do. In danger are currently especially postwar organs. The majority of
organ sound experts, i.e. organ builders, organists, heritage experts, considers the sound of
these organs to be too bright and aggressive; also, they would lack bass too much. As as re-
sult, there is almost no organ left from that era, only a few decades ago, that sounds the way it
originally did. An example is the organ at Zwolle, Grote Kerk: interpreted as the best organ in
the world by the famous Dutch organist Charles de Wolff after its restoration in 1954, and do-
cumented beautiful on LP’s by great masters including Anton Heiller and Michel Chapuis, the
owner decided to change essential aspects of the sound piece by piece. Meanwhile, the dream
in Zwolle is to improve the 1954 restoration, based on a remark of the restorer at the time, Dirk
Andries Flentrop, that he hoped his work could be redone by later generation, whom he expec-
ted to understand the organ better. The question is: if the sound concept he nonetheless crea-
ted was valued so highly, who are we to change it? It might be us that don’t understand what
De Wolff, Heiller, and Chapuis loved so dearly in the sound of the Zwolle organ.
Problem: the period ear
Thinking along lines like these adds
yet another factor to the equation
that can’t be ignored: we are not
able to experience an
instruments´tsound the exact same
way the builders of the original and
the listeners llistening to it did. On
the contrary, the culturally as well as
individually determined traces in our
reference systems are beyond any
doubt very different from theirs.
There is no ground to claim having
a ‘period ear’.
Loudspeaker organs as a solution?
The upcoming of loudspeaker organs that work with samples of pipe organ sounds could be imagi-
ned to be a solution: why not consider these instruments as ever so many archives? Yet it would
only be so in the fashion of the ‘Save of Our Sounds’ project, as it would presuppose accepting re-
duction, tacitly claiming that it does not matter whether the sounds of the thousands of pipes one
single organ includes, let alone the sounds of their countless combinations, are displayed by a few
loudspeakers or not.
Sound Heritage and loudspeakers
Interestingly, this issue relates to what keeps the world of high-end audio running: just like musical
instruments, every loudspeaker design sounds different, every amplifier, every streamer, every
DAC. This very fact renders the field of high-end audio an additional field relevant in terms of
Sound Heritage, as audio systems reflect the aesthetics of specific regions in specific eras, just like
organs do. Take, for example, a set of JBL speakers, a set of Tannoy speakers, and a set of T+A
speakers, all from the 1980s: they reveal first and foremost the impressive differences between
American, English, and German audio aesthetics of the time. In fact, the correlations with the way
orchestras sounded and played in these countries are amazing; let alone the way pop musicians
were influenced by the affordances of the audio gear they used.
Sound crafts
All this means that the craft of gear and musical instrument restorers is of the highest im-portance:
based on careful research of original specimen in museums and other collecti-ons, they build repli-
cas. The sound that these replicas produce is as close as it can get to the sound the original ob-
jects once made, i.e. the sounds music was made with in earlier times. A deeper understanding of
the Sound Heritage concept is essential if we wish to under-stand yesterday’s cultures and to de-
termine how take care of the artefacts they have left us. As a bonus, the concept of Sound
Heritage actualizes heritage almost automatically, as sound can manifest itself only in the now. In
combination with comparably intangible yet tangible heritage concepts, such as Olfactory Heritage,
it opens new perspectives on how yesterday can live on today.
w
