Thursday, September 18, 2014

Preserving Sounds and Smells




Eight floors up and I can hear the rain.  It isn’t the water hitting the ground.  There is no 潇潇细雨[1] like I might hear at home.  Rather eighty feet up in the air its that city sound of cars let loose with the turning of the light speeding through puddles, splash.  This, mixed with horns near and horns sounding far away.  Cars gaining speed and oncoming cars approaching from the other direction, two different crescendos of watery escalation building, meeting, receding till the traffic lights calm them and it’s only the horns in the distance. 

A friend mentioned something to me about the recording of sound-scapes, a project undertaken by someone who saw them as fleeting.  A quote was bandied about that if a picture is worth a 1000  words that a sound could be worth a 1000 pictures.  Perhaps.  Certainly it would be interesting to just listen to what Shanghai, which is the city I’m sitting above, might have sounded like one hundred years ago, and then one hundred years before that.  I recall a Wittgenstein quote where in he (approximately) suggested: “even with Brahms I can hear the sound of steam engines beginning.”  



I suppose it is the granularity of sound, where the recording is made that would determine its approximate value.  Perhaps if I were blind my aural sense would be significantly more refined.  But from where I’m sitting it would be very hard to listen to this splashing of cars and beeping of horns and know that it was here in Shanghai, and not, say Manhattan, or for that matter, Philadelphia. 

And sense taste and smell apparently stimulate the memory even more profoundly than site and sound, is a smell or a taste worth 1000 sounds?  How do we go about archiving the tastes of this time?  I can think of certain smells, not all of them pleasant from my youth that would conjure a particular memory.  Should these also be stored for posterity?  Could they be?  Thoughts turn to Bugs Bunny, when, during the episode entitled “The Old Grey Hare” with Elmer Fudd where they head off to the future in the year 2000 an unimaginably distant time, and the new headlines read the “Smell-o-vision Replaces Television.” 

As usual, music beckons this morning.  Splashing and aggravated car horns only make it for so long.  I’ve followed this soul jazz progression to come upon some jazz from Oakland California recorded in 1967 I have the album “Up and Away,” by the pianist Gene Russell playing drowning out the rainy day for a while.  The tune, is the standard, “Too Close for Comfort” and this mix is simply a pared down up-tempo rhythm section with him on keys, reminding me a bit of Junior Mance. 

There isn’t much about the man out there.  Mr. Russell was responsible for launching a label known as “Black Jazz Records” which he founded three years after this set and ran until his death in 1981, though the bulk of the labels output appears to have occurred in its first five years of existence.  More happy hunting there with their catalog of some twenty two releases, none of which I have ever heard.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Russell

I eagerly checked the paper this morning to find out what had transpired with the vote in Scotland.  All I found was pictures of polls closing and hands wringing.  In the US, we’re accustomed to immediate gratification.  We usually know the results of national elections by the end of the day.  It must be just before dawn there on the day after and all I've learned is that the Orkney Islands, which are beautiful but rather sparsely contributing to this decision I should think, have voted to remain in the U.K.  By the time I post again, all will be revealed. 



The place I’m staying has a modest breakfast provided.  The buffet isn’t great.  There’s some salad and fruit but is wan and watery.  The juice isn’t fresh and I don’t want any of the warmed over stewed stir-fries or buns.  I already know the espressos are watery.  But free always has a certain magnetism and hunger a certain ignition.  Some tastes though are not worth cataloging and don’t really belong in the museum of human sensory memory that will inevitably arrive.
  




[1] xiāoxiāoxìyǔ:  the sound of light rain or drizzle (idiom)

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