The Sounds of Travel
Did you know that sound is processed in a part of our brains that also processes our emotions?
No wonder we have a strong emotional response to sound. Emotions become attached to sound through experiences that trigger thoughts and behaviours. I suspect expectations are also a factor.
I spent last week in Sintra, a city renowned for its palaces and gardens. A city overrun with tourists, as I expect it is most days in these post-pandemic travel days. I could not wait to leave; the sound of so many tourists grated on my nerves.
This morning, I woke up in Porto. My apartment is in a neighbourhood on the edge of Porto’s old town. I fell asleep listening to late-night revellers heading out to the club district. I woke to church bells. A cool breeze drifted in from the balcony, and I snuggled under the covers and listened to the morning. I heard the sounds of a roller suitcase passing through the cobblestone alley outside my window. The voice of a woman drifted up. I thought she might be arguing. Portuguese is a Romance language, guttural and expressive. When I looked, her body language only indicated deep conversation.
Interestingly, all these sounds don’t bother me here. When I close my eyes and listen, I feel the warm embrace of a European city.
For those of you who read my blog regularly, you will know that sound matters a great deal to me. I write about the sounds of nature at my island home. My blog post, Sounds of Silence, explored the pandemic silence many of us experienced. Quiet As a Feather told the story of Gordon Hempton, an acoustic geologist who has devoted his life to recording silent places. Even the Start Here page on my website includes a list of sounds that fill my heart.
So this morning, as I listened to a city waking up, I thought about the sounds of travel. Photos cannot capture the complete travel experience. They don’t capture the details, the smells, the energy, or the sounds.
In her article, Why Every Writer Should Keep a Travel Journal, Jennifer Magnuson shares that writing enables her to see and remember details she might miss with a camera and recollections that she knows will become as sepia-toned and blurred as the pictures themselves.
She writes, “I hold in my hand a picture of a street vendor in India squatting next to a hand-woven basket of peanuts. But without my travel journal, would I remember that the nuts were roasted in red sand? Would I remember the small, wiry man and how he ran, barefoot, to catch up with our moving car to toss us a hot, steaming bag as we slowly navigated the crowded streets of Faridabad?”
She does not mention sounds in this paragraph. I suspect her writing will help remind her of the slap of bare feet on the road and the cacophony of sounds on a crowded Faridabad street.
I think of the sounds from my travels still embedded in my mind. Some of my favourite memories are:
The muezzin’s call to prayer well before daybreak in Marrakesh
Cowbells clang softly in the Quirós Valley in the Asturian mountains of Spain
A choir practising in a church built in the 17th century in a small village along the Portuguese Camino
The piercing call of peacocks strutting on the grounds of an ancestral palace in Oestgeest, the Netherlands
The chanting of monks at the Buddhist temple, Wat Suan Dok, in Chaing Mai, Thailand
The spouting of orcas off the shores of Saturna Island, British Columbia
You must have sounds you remember from your travels. I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
I am not the only one thinking about sound and travel. There is a fair bit of research being done on soundscapes in tourism. While most are focused on noise pollution, studies also examine the role of sound as an element of multisensory experiences. A research study on slow tourism is studying silence in tourism. The acoustic experience of tourists visiting urban destinations, using Lisbon as their case study, is the focus of another study.
If you find this as fascinating as I do, check out Sound Tourism: A Travel Guide to Sonic Wonders. This website identifies, through an interactive map, places with unique sound characters and encourages people to become sonic tourists. I listened to a few and was fascinated - singing sand dunes in Morocco, the whispering gallery at the Gloucester Cathedral, and the whistling sands at Porthor Beach in Wales. I will be exploring more of these sonic wonders!
As I wrap up this post, I hear a man at the end of our alley interspersing song and conversation. A deep, melodic bass singing in Portuguese. I was just got caught taking a peel! He is standing in his underwear, smoking a cigarette, and speaking with a female neighbour across the street. No amount of body language can help me interpret this situation - but his voice is beautiful.