The Speed of Sound Through Wood
It's one of the givens, kind of like gravity: sound, we're told from grade school on, moves at 1,092 feet per second.
No, it really doesn't. That's the speed of sound through air. But remember when you were a kid, underwater in the swimming pool, shouting at somebody who was at the other end of the pool? Speed of sound through water, that liquid shout getting to this other person-who, no doubt, you had a crush on, and had no way of expressing it-is much, much faster; in the fresh water of the Seine River, for example, it's been measured at 4,741 feet per second.
Air, it turns out, is a lousy conductor of sound. Shout the long way into an oak tree, and the sound moves at 12,662 feet per second; shout across the rings, it slows to a leisurely 4,229 fps, still four times the speed of sound through air. Don't have an oak tree handy? Try an aspen (and they'll all be the same in the same grove, because aspens are clones), and the speeds are 16,677 and 2,987 fps, respectively.
I've been thinking about sound a lot recently, for an article that's coming up. In Scotland, the dominant sound was the engine of the boxy Vauxhall I'd rented, and BBC Radio 1 and 2. By the end of the trip, I was buying CDs, and now I'll always associate Scotland with James Blunt and Moby.
But when I got out of the car to walk the highlands, the sounds changed completely. This is what we miss all too often. The sound of my cane (long, dull story about detaching tendons in my foot in Venice) against the rocks; the wind blowing through heather; the hollow sound the lochs make when the waves begin to push higher.
Two weeks ago, for the first time in nearly 25 years, I cut my hair. Even that alteration in my personal landscape has changed sound, because sound is the most dependent of all sensory inputs. Everything changes sound, from the material the sound waves pass through-my bass with the rosewood neck is infinitely richer than the one with the cheap neck-to the air temperature. Winter, we all know, in a cold place, is almost frighteningly loud, although one of my favorite memories of living in Japan was the sound of the sweet potato vendors, pushing their carts through the streets of town. It was a winter night sound, the song they sang, and I'll always associate the song with the smell of kerosene heaters and the slap of water in the sink, because we had to keep the taps running so the pipes wouldn't freeze up.
A couple months ago, in Prague, my cousin pointed out that the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones made the whole city fall backwards in time.
Silence is the shyest sound of them all. That's the sound I'm looking for now, but of course, perfect silence is painful-in an email conversation with Bernie Krause, he pointed out that in a seriously quiet environment, “it would literally drive a person to a state of madness if they stayed . . . longer than a few minutes. One hears the blood coursing through one's capillaries and that sound, alone, is a bit overwhelming.”
Jungles are noisy, the silence of the Alaskan tundra is punctuated by the sound of small planes, and even the most remote Pacific islands have generators and DVD players, too many of them offering the slur of Sylvester Stallone's voice.
This is how I'll be spending the next few months: looking for a place that's actually quiet, not only physically, but mentally as well-a place where all sounds are soothing, and the noises in my head shut off the way they do when the woman I love takes me in her arms.
It's a big world. There's got to be a place like that somewhere. Somewhere so quiet that sound itself slows down, even when it's moving through wood.
No, it really doesn't. That's the speed of sound through air. But remember when you were a kid, underwater in the swimming pool, shouting at somebody who was at the other end of the pool? Speed of sound through water, that liquid shout getting to this other person-who, no doubt, you had a crush on, and had no way of expressing it-is much, much faster; in the fresh water of the Seine River, for example, it's been measured at 4,741 feet per second.
Air, it turns out, is a lousy conductor of sound. Shout the long way into an oak tree, and the sound moves at 12,662 feet per second; shout across the rings, it slows to a leisurely 4,229 fps, still four times the speed of sound through air. Don't have an oak tree handy? Try an aspen (and they'll all be the same in the same grove, because aspens are clones), and the speeds are 16,677 and 2,987 fps, respectively.
I've been thinking about sound a lot recently, for an article that's coming up. In Scotland, the dominant sound was the engine of the boxy Vauxhall I'd rented, and BBC Radio 1 and 2. By the end of the trip, I was buying CDs, and now I'll always associate Scotland with James Blunt and Moby.
But when I got out of the car to walk the highlands, the sounds changed completely. This is what we miss all too often. The sound of my cane (long, dull story about detaching tendons in my foot in Venice) against the rocks; the wind blowing through heather; the hollow sound the lochs make when the waves begin to push higher.
Two weeks ago, for the first time in nearly 25 years, I cut my hair. Even that alteration in my personal landscape has changed sound, because sound is the most dependent of all sensory inputs. Everything changes sound, from the material the sound waves pass through-my bass with the rosewood neck is infinitely richer than the one with the cheap neck-to the air temperature. Winter, we all know, in a cold place, is almost frighteningly loud, although one of my favorite memories of living in Japan was the sound of the sweet potato vendors, pushing their carts through the streets of town. It was a winter night sound, the song they sang, and I'll always associate the song with the smell of kerosene heaters and the slap of water in the sink, because we had to keep the taps running so the pipes wouldn't freeze up.
A couple months ago, in Prague, my cousin pointed out that the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones made the whole city fall backwards in time.
Silence is the shyest sound of them all. That's the sound I'm looking for now, but of course, perfect silence is painful-in an email conversation with Bernie Krause, he pointed out that in a seriously quiet environment, “it would literally drive a person to a state of madness if they stayed . . . longer than a few minutes. One hears the blood coursing through one's capillaries and that sound, alone, is a bit overwhelming.”
Jungles are noisy, the silence of the Alaskan tundra is punctuated by the sound of small planes, and even the most remote Pacific islands have generators and DVD players, too many of them offering the slur of Sylvester Stallone's voice.
This is how I'll be spending the next few months: looking for a place that's actually quiet, not only physically, but mentally as well-a place where all sounds are soothing, and the noises in my head shut off the way they do when the woman I love takes me in her arms.
It's a big world. There's got to be a place like that somewhere. Somewhere so quiet that sound itself slows down, even when it's moving through wood.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 3:33 PM
1 Comments:
I'm not sure I'd know quiet if I heard it. A side effect of children living in the house, and living in a metro area of 9 million or so. We are indeed a noisy species--something that obviously didn't hinder our survival.
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