The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World by Trevor Cox Read Free Book Online

cavern floor. The sound was loud and overpowering; when I closed my eyes, it was hard to work out where the noise was coming from as the roar of the cascade reverberated around the cavern.
    Basalt columns impressively bedeck Fingal’s sea cave on the island of Staffa, Scotland, about 270 kilometers (170 miles) southwest of Smoo Cave. In 1829, the composer Felix Mendelssohn took inspiration from the sound of the Atlantic swell rising, falling, and echoing around the cave. Enclosing the first twenty-one bars of his overture The Hebrides , he wrote to his sister Fanny: “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily The Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my mind there.” 40 David Sharp, from the Open University in the UK, measured a reverberation time of 4 seconds in the cave—somewhere between a concert hall and cathedral in the pecking order of reverberance. 41
    In general, although caves can be very large, it seems that the biggest do not reverberate more than grand cathedrals. Writing about a performance of postmodern compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon, acoustician Barry Blesser notes that although caves are large, correlating to long reverberation times, they are usually made up of multiple connecting spaces, meaning that the sound decay is “softened, reaching only a modest intensity.” 42 Every time a sound wave bounces or reflects, it loses some energy. In a cave, there are lots of side passageways where walls are rough and uneven. The lumps and bumps disrupt the sound, forcing it to bounce back and forth across these passageways and die away faster. The most reverberant spaces have not only smooth walls, but also very simple shapes; this means they are man-made.
    I n 2006, the Japanese musician, instrument builder, and shaman Akio Suzuki and saxophonist, improviser, and composer John Butcher went on a musical tour of Scotland called Resonant Spaces . According to the publicity material, the tour aimed to “set free the sound” of exciting and incredible locations, including the old reservoir in Wormit: “My God it’s got a preposterous sound, a huge booming decay and . . . echoes, careening around off its concrete walls. Normally I suppose that would be the worst thing you could think of in a performance venue, but for this tour it’s pretty ideal.” 43
    An earlier conversation with Mike Caviezel, head of audio for Microsoft games, had piqued my interest in such spaces. After I gave a keynote address at a conference in London, Mike had approached me to tell me about his visit to a similar water reservoir in the US. He described how the acoustics and darkness make it “one of the most crazy, sort of physically disorienting spaces I’ve ever been in.” Mike also described how the reflections affect speaking: “You immediately lose track of what you’re talking about, and all you can focus on is just the acoustics of the space.” The reverberation is so powerful that “it’s very hard to get out . . . clear thoughts or sentences,” he said, “and everything quickly devolves to people either whistling, or clapping their hands, or testing the space.” 44
    Curious to experience such an odd-sounding space, I decided to visit Wormit a couple of days after I had been in the Hamilton Mausoleum. The arts company that had organized the Resonant Spaces musical tour, Arika, gave me contact details for the owner, James Pask, who was only too delighted to show me around. In a gentle Scottish accent, he explained that he had acquired two underground reservoirs when he bought the land; the smaller one had been turned into a vast garage under his house, but the larger one just lay empty underneath his lawn.
    We wandered out into the garden, chatting about structural loads and the history of Wormit’s municipal infrastructure. The reservoir had been built in 1923 with the