PEACE AND SILENCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19750, 17 March 1934, Page 18

PEACE AND SILENCE

DISCORDANT CITY NOISES SYNCHRONISED SOUNDS The world is trying to recapture its old place; it is also trying to recapture its old silence. The latter is a mechanical problem; the former a moral one, and much more difficult. But even in the mechanical region of avoidable noises in cities, the path of anti-noise leagues is by no means clear There are many offenders, and the British Anti-Noise League is accused of treating some more critically than others. This is what an apologist for the harmless necessary motor-car says: “It seems just a little unfair of the honorary secretary of the Anti-Noise League to blame only the motor vehicle without referring to the wonderful advances made in silencing these vehicles of recent years. Everyone who is at all oonversant with the development of this most convenient and essential form of transport knows that it is. broadly speaking, impossible to sell a car to-day that is noisy. The carbuying public demands silence and is getting it to a far greater degree than ever before. The elimination of mechanical noise is strikingly indicated by the fact that designers are nowdevoting their attention to silencing the mild hiss of the induction system which, in the absence of other noises, can now be detected. The league's indictment of the motor horn is equally open to criticism now that nearly all new cars have the pleasing high-fre-quency horn tote.

“The suggestion that heavy-vehicle traffic is unnecessary and can be carried by the railways, coupled w r ith the absence of any complaint against railway noises—shrieking whistles, shunting the night long, and general roar and rattle—points to antipathies other than those concerned merely with sound. Instead of roundly condemning an essential service which has shown such rapid improvement, the AntiNoise League might devote some attention to the old-established and unabated noises on the one hand, and the new r er varieties that disturb our quiet, on the other. In the first class we have railways with their shunting operations, trams, and church bells disturbing wide areas. In the second class there is most notably the full-blast non-stop wireless loudspeaker. The unavoidable unremitting noise from a fixed location is more distressing than the transitory sound of traffic, and the Anti-Noise League might possibly work more usefully in the golden cause of silence if its ears were less exclusively motor-conscious.”

The poet’s dream of “that lovely city. Carcassonne." dates long before the motor car. and has not been brought nearer by modern progress. But an idea was conveyed in a picture recently shown in Wellington, which presented a luxury liner with machinery all sounding to a definite rhythm—the engines supplying the base sounds, the hooters and horns the high notes, and a number of other utility sounds blending in the chorus. But is soundsynchronised machinery effective for production? So far it has only been done “in the pictures.”