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

intention of serving a large town, but the war intervened and Wormit never grew very large. Eventually, the cost of maintaining the oversized reservoir led it to be decommissioned.
    It was very windy that day, with the autumn sun glinting off the Firth of Tay down the hill, and the city of Dundee in the distance across the water. The lawn was extraordinarily flat. Black ventilation pipes poked out of the ground and hinted at what lay below. James opened up a very overgrown manhole cover and asked me if I was worried about health and safety, before disappearing down a ladder into the dark to turn on the light.
    The ladders resembled those on ships. The first led down to a small platform, and then I had to climb precariously over a chain fence to reach a second ladder, which led to the floor below. The vast space, illuminated by the light streaming through the manhole cover and a single lightbulb, had few visual charms. It was just a concrete box, about 60 meters (200 feet) long, 30 meters (100 feet) wide, and 5 meters (15 feet) high. 45 The concrete on the walls had the texture of the wood shuttering used during the construction imprinted on them (like the walls of the National Theatre in London). It reminded me of a municipal garage, with a forest of concrete pillars regularly spaced about 7 meters (23 feet) apart holding up the concrete ceiling (Figure 1.2). The floor was wet here and there, and it was pleasantly cool, like a natural cavern.

    Figure 1.2 Wormit water reservoir (using a very long exposure on the camera).
    As James and I chatted, the acoustic immediately revealed itself: a rumble began building up and hung about us like a pervasive fog. Many very reverberant rooms are acoustically oppressive, making it hard to have a conversation. But not this reservoir. 46 Surprisingly, we could talk to each other even when we were quite far apart—something that was not possible in the similarly reverberant Hamilton Mausoleum. 47 It reminded me of a cathedral, with the great advantage that I could shout and clap. Whooping unleashed the full power of the “preposterous” acoustic; the sound rattled around for ages before dying away.
    I had a few balloons with me, which I burst to get a rough measurement of the reverberation time. As in mausoleums, the most impressive values were at low frequency: 23.7 seconds at 125 hertz. For the midfrequencies that are most important for speech, the reverberation time was a more modest 10.5 seconds.
    Saxophonist John Butcher made recordings in the Wormit reservoir as part of the Resonant Spaces tour. The Wire review of the album describes how he “attacks the spaces.” 48 In Butcher’s piece “Calls from a Rusty Cage,” it is often hard to discern the sound of a saxophone among the strange electronic whistles, breathy squeaks, and blasts, which sound like ship horns. Will Montgomery in Wire described how halfway through, Butcher “suddenly leaps into whirling circular breathing with a flamboyant glissando (which . . . recalls the opening to Rhapsody in Blue ).” 49 This is certainly one musical approach to such a reverberant place: accept the dissonant smog created by lingering notes, and play on.
    Another approach is that taken by American trombonist and didgeridoo player Stuart Dempster in his album Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel . The chapel in question is the Dan Harpole Cistern in Fort Worden State Park, Washington State, the place Mike Caviezel described as crazy and disorienting. It looks very similar to Wormit, although it is circular rather than square. It was built to supply about 7.5 million liters (2 million US gallons) of emergency water for extinguishing fires. A few websites and books quote a 45-second sound decay. This means it takes about 3 seconds for a note to become half as loud, and musicians can achieve note separation only when they play incredibly slowly. 50 Billboard magazine described the recording by Stuart