The urban symphony
Asleep like the dead in a womblike curl of blankets, the silence is perfect. Snoring is the only sound, like a tree falling in the woods over and over, except no one is awake to hear it.
Then at 6am my alarm clock honks, honks, honks, prying my eyes open. I go into this dark morning, as I do every day, gently as the Incredible Hulk. Bad noise! Stop noise! Smash!!! Let some other early bird have my share of the worms. I want peace and quiet.
So I wrestle the enemy, the snooze button, lose, and try to enjoy the gentler sounds of waking up—the hissing, sprinkling shower, the gurgling coffee machine. I turn on CNN, hear the stern authority of voices more alarming than any clock, and turn it off.
It’s an hour when reasonable people ought to be sleeping, but even now the sounds of bustling, striving life fill the city. People jog, sneakers pounding the sidewalk. Delivery trucks huff down deserted streets, beneath tree canopies alive with the conversations of birds. Keys jingle, engines turn over, a dog barks. On Douglas Avenue, a forklift rumbles and steel beams clank as workers building the Belmont Lofts begin their day. In an adjacent yard, a rooster crows.
As the city wakes up, the sounds of us working, living and playing rise up like instruments in a symphony. This can be music, like the murmur of voices outside a coffeeshop. Or it can be noise, like the jackhammer outside your window. Regardless, the sounds we make tell a story. Light reflects off buildings and people, telling us what Charlottesville looks like, but the sound waves flowing in our streets and through our walls tell us what we’re doing.
Most of the conversations about Charlottesville’s future focus on what the city will look like. Sound, although often neglected, is a powerful force that influences how we perceive our environment. As Tony Hiss writes in his book The Experience of Place, the sensorial qualities of a city—the shapes, sounds and textures of our homes, offices, neighborhoods and streets—communicate feeling and experience, whether we consciously notice them or not.
"Whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue and a deeply personal one," Hiss writes.
In a growing, changing environment like Charlottesville and Albemarle, Hiss would argue that paying attention to sound helps us to better understand the place where we live. And as our places change, through population growth, demographic shifts and real estate development, sound can tell us what we’re gaining, and what we’re losing.
As the City and County grow, the sounds grow richer, more diverse, louder. Quiet becomes a luxury item. "The sound of Charlottesville is the sound of a community evolving into its next phase," says Bill Morrish, an architecture professor at UVA. "The question is, is it music or is it noise?"
Charlottesville and Albemarle each enforce noise laws that try to regulate how different places sound. Nevertheless, noise continues to provoke conflict in neighborhoods as varied as Keswick, Belmont and the Fashion Square Mall [see sidebars]. Our pursuit of silence is a big reason suburban sprawl has gobbled up Albemarle’s farmland. As City Council plans to increase the allowable density in Charlottesville, matters of noise are included in the debate.
"The issues about noise are symbols for the larger issues about us living together," says Morrish. "This city is going from one set of rhythms to a diverse set of rhythms. It’s happening in many places, and it’s happening fast. How are we going to mix these things?"
Groove equations
It doesn’t matter whether you’re working, dancing, making love or making a city—finding your rhythm is always a good thing.
"Why is it that you can be engrossed in a book, completely oblivious, but if a Brazilian rhythm comes on the radio you can’t help but start tapping your feet," wonders Dave Van Valkenburg. "Rhythm has the power to move the body without your even desiring it."
To earn his doctorate in psychology at UVA, Van Valkenburg is studying the galloping sensation people perceive when they hear a series of tones played at a certain speed and frequency—in hipper parlance, "the groove." He’s trying to figure out why music has the power to move us in such irresistible ways, and how people hear a roomful of instruments and perceive the sounds as a symphony.
Before the 1950s, science mostly focused on visual perception. But as inventions like the telephone and phonograph made sound an increasingly important component of modern life, science began to grapple with the mystery of how we hear.
In his experiments, Van Valkenburg sends his subjects to a dark closet in his lab space in Gilmer Hall. He sits them in front of a computer and fits bowl-shaped headphones over their ears. He plays a repeating pattern of five tones that alternate from high to low.
First he plays the tones slowly, and you can easily hear each individual note. But as Van Valkenburg increases the speed of the sequence, the three high tones group together into a cascading triplet layered atop the alternating bass notes. Now it sounds like two patterns instead of one, and they form one unified galloping sensation. You’re in the groove, baby; and according to Van Valkenburg’s research, everyone generally finds the groove in similar combinations of tempo and frequency.
"That galloping sensation doesn’t have to happen," Van Valkenburg says. "Under some circumstances it does, and under some circumstances it doesn’t. I’m looking for a model to figure out when that would happen, which is ultimately a question of how and why sounds go together."
In essence, he wants to capture a groove equation, a mathematical expression of the phenomenon that makes music so infectious and that makes some songwriters very rich.
Well, it’s not that simple. Van Valkenburg’s experiments use pure sine-wave tones. Changing timbre—the complex overtones that make an oboe’s C completely different than a Stratocaster C—skews the data. Timbre is generally defined as the characteristic of a sound (besides frequency and amplitude) that makes it sound the way it does.
"That’s not a good definition. It says what timbre is not, but not what it is," Van Valkenburg says. "The truth is, we don’t really know what makes an instrument sound the way it does." In other words, nobody’s going to come up with a formula for Jimi Hendrix anytime soon.
Van Valkenburg’s experiments prove, if nothing else, the power of sound. "Some people can do the tests for one or two hours, then they have to stop," he says. "They can’t take the beeping. But one kid came in and did like six or seven hours in one day. He said he dreamed about beeps all night."
Van Valkenburg hopes his research will help him formulate a theory that when we hear complex layers of sound, such as a symphony, our hearing transfers some aural information to our motor system. Tapping our toes and drumming our fingers, he says, may be helping us hear. "It’s almost like you need to move your body to hear the music," he says.
As a by-product of human activity, sound is an important part of how we experience and remember our environment. We can come to associate sounds not only with tapping toes and snapping fingers but with our most intimate loves and fears, too. The sounds of flowing water and crashing waves, for example, rank high among people’s favorite sounds, while crying babies and car alarms are universally loathed.
"You know how a cat’s body vibrates when it purrs, when it’s sitting on your belly? That’s my favorite sound," says Allison Benner, a hostess at South Street Brewery.
A nearby customer, Charlie, says his favorite sound reminds him of the house in the country where he used to live. "It’s the sound of a wood thrush in a dark forest," he says. "It’s a really small, shy bird. You hardly ever see them. But they’ve got this great voice. You can hear them in isolated areas around dawn and twilight."
For 21-year-old Mimi Robinson, the worst sound in the world is someone mispronouncing her name. "It sounds like Jimmy," she says, giving the correct pronunciation. But, she concedes, when the right person says her name the right way on the first try, it could be her favorite sound of all.
Can you hear me now?
A flowing river, a singing bird, a whispered name. Any can sound like music to people’s ears. But unwanted sound—that is, noise—can cause real problems.
The human ear can perceive sounds as low as a single decibel. Sounds greater than 75 decibels (about the volume of normal freeway traffic or a flushing toilet) can set off alarms in the nervous system. When confronted with loud, prolonged noise, the body reacts as if it were in danger. Muscles tense, breathing and heartbeats accelerate and small blood vessels constrict. Such tension raises blood pressure and cholesterol levels, two conditions which are associated with heart problems. Noise above 85 decibels (think of a noisy bar) can cause hearing damage over time. Noises above 140 decibels (like a firecracker or a rock singer screaming into a microphone) are above the human threshold of pain and can cause damage with a single exposure.
As Van Valkenburg points out, we never hear just one sound at a time. Whether we are asleep or awake, our ears detect any noise within hearing distance, a collage of sound scientists call the "auditory stream". We can shut out the sights of the city, if we want, but we have no choice but to live with each other’s sound. There is no eyelid for the ear.
Charlottesville and Albemarle each have noise ordinances that state that people have a right to be protected from excessive sound that "may jeopardize the public health, welfare, peace and safety or degrade the quality of life" (Charlottesville City Code, Section 16-2). Both City and County noise laws both prohibit specific noise, like loud music or machinery, but the primary clauses in both ordinances make it a crime "for any person to create or allow to be created any unreasonably loud, disturbing, raucous or unnecessary noise. Noise of such character, when its intensity and duration is detrimental to the life or health of any person, or which unreasonably disturbs or annoys the quiet, comfort or repose of any person, is hereby prohibited" (Albemarle County Code Section 7-104). Simply put, don’t pollute your neighbor’s auditory stream.
The City and County noise laws apply only to sound generated in residential areas. In Charlottesville, nighttime limits are 55 decibels (the volume of a normal conversation), measured at the property boundary, between 10pm and 6am; 65 decibels (the volume of a busy office) is the daytime limit. Noises audible at a distance of 100 feet are also prohibited.
The same decibel levels apply to multi-family housing. Owners or tenants can ask police to measure sound four feet from the wall, ceiling or floor nearest the source, "with doors to the receiving area closed and windows in the normal position for the season." Theoretically, if you sing in the shower, your neighbor can ask the police to make sure your caterwauling doesn’t break the law.
Vehicles, too, are subject to noise laws in the City, required to stay below 90 decibels at a distance of 50 feet. Vehicles engaged in interstate commerce are exempt.
The County ordinance is much briefer than the City’s, generally relying on the clause that prohibits people from bothering others with their noise. The County is tougher on cars, specifically forbidding drivers from causing too much noise by peeling out or revving their engines. Like the City, the County exempts noise caused by public events, parades, athletic contests, public facilities, church bells, construction, demolition and yard maintenance. The County also tolerates noise from the lawful discharge of firearms, animals and free expression protected under the First Amendment—as long as it’s not amplified.
As a place where people work, play and live in a public setting, the Downtown Mall is governed by the City’s most liberal noise laws.
Charlottesville’s City Code Section 16-10 covers the Downtown Business District: "It shall be unlawful for any person to make, cause or continue any sound generation in such a manner as to unreasonably disturb the comfort, health, peace, quiet, safety, or welfare of others" from 10pm to 6am Sunday through Thursday, and from 12:01am to 6am on Saturdays.
On Friday, it’s okay to be a little louder, so long as you don’t exceed 75 decibels at 10 feet.
You can also be guilty of a noise violation on the Mall if "a person of normal hearing acuity" offers "credible testimony" that you made a noise "plainly audible above the background noise level at a distance of 125 feet or more from the source of the sound generation." The laws do not apply to a "community event," such as Friday’s After Five, or any event with a special-use permit. Also exempt are emergency signals, public and private transportation and refuse collection or sanitation services.
The Mall flows with Charlottesville’s richest aural streams––a ringing bell, the trolley’s engine groaning through the Second Street crossing. Sandals thwacking. Splashing water. Fragments of conversation: I look 18, don’t I?…I’m enjoying not working…If I don’t like the way it tastes, do I have to pay for it?
Every block has its own music—the hardcore rock sounds of a Fugazi record blasting from an apartment window. Rubber mallets on a wooden "slit drum." Guitars, a lute, male and female voices: It’s corn shucking tiiiime… Bob Marley’s "Iron Lion Zion" greeting shoppers at an office supply store. A Beatles cover band soundchecking in the Amphitheater. A woman named Stormy shaking her hips and a tambourine beside a boom box tuned to some country station, beckoning pedestrians to slip dollar bills into the teakettle at her feet.
"I used to come down here with my sister years ago, and we’d each make like $60," she says. "But now, there’s so much more competition."
Is this music or noise? It depends on the sounds, how they mix and flow and bounce off buildings, says architecture professor Morrish. But it also depends on the aesthetics of the listener.
"The mix of sounds is attractive to some people," says Morrish, recalling the energy of New York City’s aural landscape. "There’s music in it. The Downtown Mall is a great example. It’s such an interesting place because you have everything from voices to harmonicas to the hum of traffic. But if you live in a neighborhood four blocks away, all those sounds are considered a nuisance."
The price of silence
Noise laws have their origin in England’s industrial age, written side-by-side with the first zoning codes that drew boundaries between industry and residential life. "The first noise laws were designed to protect wealthy people from the noise of industry and the rabble of the street," says Morrish.
In Charlottesville and Albemarle, industrial noise is mostly a thing of the past. There are still pockets where it exists, of course—River Road, northeast of Downtown, still screams with the noise of machines, as do the auto repair shops on Hinton Avenue in Belmont. Almost any sound is allowed in such industrial areas, which is why City officials had to find a different reason to close down Belmont’s Pudhouse, a warehouse that hosted underground rock shows [see sidebar, page 14]. CSX and Amtrak trains still rumble through the center of the city just south of Downtown. Every night, the huge locomotives pulling cars full of people or coal shake the foundations of some of the most valuable real estate in Central Virginia.
By and large, however, the noise of industry and the rabble of the street are just memories in Charlottesville and Albemarle. "We ship all those jobs to India," quips Morrish. But sound is still a close relative of our zoning laws.
Most residences in Charlottesville are single-family homes, the choice for those affluent enough to insulate themselves from the sounds of their neighbors—the embarrassing shouting matches you hear from an upstairs apartment, or the equally embarrassing squeaks and moans from the bedrooms afterward.
In Albemarle, the promise that you can buy enough space to escape the unpleasant sounds of your community and your neighbors is taken to an even greater extreme. Despite their name, the so-called rural areas that make up 95 percent of the County allow development. Property can be divided into five units totaling no more than 31 acres, and the rest of the property can legally accommodate one house per 21 acres. The ideals of silence and tranquility make those properties very valuable, especially for people who think Charlottesville has become too urban.
Crozet is one of the fastest-growing suburban areas, as people seek out a combination of rural tranquility and urban convenience. There, a forest of oddly shaped yet perfectly identical brown houses dot the hillside in a subdivision called "The Highlands at Mechums River," where $200,000 will get you a house on about two acres. On a recent afternoon at 6pm, the silence was broken only by the swell and decrescendo of cicadas.
"Everyone comments on how quiet this neighborhood is. That’s what I love about it," says Krista Weih, taking a stroll with her one-and-a-half year-old son, Aibek Quirk. "If a flock of geese is flying over, you can hear the flapping wings. Another great sound here is the ice cream truck that comes through and rings its bell."
Highlands resident Andrew Bishop says he doesn’t hear too much construction noise from the homes that are still being built on the hillside. The worst sound, he says, is the mechanical cacophony of lawn maintenance.
"There’s too many blowers. Those are always annoying, especially on Sundays. You hear them all day long," says Bishop.
Much of Albemarle’s growth consists of people seeking refuge from bigger East Coast cities. Those people tend to be more tolerant of noise, says realtor Susan Reppert.
"The thing I’ve noticed," she says, "is that people who move here from someplace else, especially other cities, aren’t particularly choosy about living close to a road. It’s the people who have lived here for a while that are seeking out a little bit of silence."
For some people, even the country is too noisy. "We get complaints about tractor noise in the morning," says Joan McDowell, a County rural planner. "One farmer says when he weans his calves, they make a lot of noise."
Reppert says people are always asking about quiet properties, but no one ever asks for a home where they can hear what Morrish considers the urban symphony. The prospect of noise, especially of cars, can "really detract" from the value of a home in the County’s subdivisions and rural areas, she says.
The City, however, is pushing in a different direction. The zoning laws recently given tentative approval by City Council will dramatically increase the density in Charlottesville. Part of the new ordinance will put expensive condominiums, lofts and apartments in areas that are also zoned to allow commercial activity. Developers are hoping that trends will reverse and people who can afford to chose between city and country housing will opt for the urban symphony of a diverse environment over the tranquil uniformity of the suburbs.
"Around here, we have the contradictory desire to have all the services of a densely packed city and all the evening sounds in a quiet countryside," says Morrish. "Look at Jefferson. He loved Paris, but he set Monticello away from the city. As this region grows and gets richer, it’s going to have to change the definition of what it sounds like."
Say what?
The listening process is complex and poetic. It can also be dangerous.
Sound forms when an event in the environment causes an object to vibrate. This vibration causes adjacent air molecules to vibrate, and sound waves travel through the compression and expansion of any elastic medium—air, water or solid objects. Since there is no air outside the earth’s atmosphere, outer space is perfectly silent.
When we hear, the question mark-shaped cartilage appendages that keep our glasses secure channel sound waves that vibrate our eardrum. This transmits the vibration across tiny bones in the middle ear—the hammer, anvil and stirrup—which actually evolved from gills that were no longer needed.
These bones act as amplifiers, pushing sound through the cochlea, a fluid-filled bone shaped like a snail shell. On the left side of the body, the cochlea spirals left. On the right side, it spirals right. As waves move through the cochlea’s fluid, they stimulate hair-like appendages on cells that translate the mechanical energy into electrical impulses. The brain turns these signals into images—the whoosh of traffic on 29N, a cash register, the dreadlocked harmonica guy playing a tune. Whether we are asleep or awake, our ears hear everything within hearing distance.
Sound is measured in decibels, which describe the relative wave pressure of two sounds. Typically, decibels refer to the difference between one sound and the ambient background noise of an environment.
How loud is too loud? According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, hearing damage can occur if a person is exposed to sounds at 85 decibels for eight hours, 110 decibels for one minute and 29 seconds, or instantaneously if the sound is greater than 140 decibels. The human ear can perceive changes of about 3 decibels; when a sound increases by 10 decibels, people perceive the sound has become twice as loud.
The table at right lists the decibel levels of some common sounds.—J.B.
Sounds like teen spirit
Shopping with the party people at Abercrombie & Fitch
The promenade at Fashion Square Mall resonates with layers of voices and music, from the lite jazz trickling from speakers hung near faux-Jeffersonian skylights to Britney Spears seeping from the bright Disney store.
"It always sounds like a babbling brook in here, the way the voices resonate," says one man watching his children scream and cavort on a Thomas Jefferson play area outside J.C. Penney’s.
Walking past a Precious Memories picture frame stand, the gentle aural mixture disappears in the overwhelming thump of a dance track laced with a songbird voice: I want to be freeeee… The robotic music perfectly compliments the emotionless expression of a handsome, shirtless, tousle-haired young man captured in a giant black-and-white portrait standing in the doorway of Abercrombie & Fitch, the source of the music.
On a recent Friday night, Abercrombie & Fitch is easily the loudest store in Fashion Square Mall. "We get complaints all the time," says a bright-eyed clerk, who asked not to be named, citing a company policy forbidding employees from talking to the press. The national chain is being sued for alleged racially discriminatory hiring practices.
At A&F, the sound sends as many messages as the images about who is—and who is not—welcome there. First, the sheer volume repels adults, reflecting the store’s 18-25 target demographic. The music is strictly white-bread techno, featuring computer-perfect production. No hip-hop, no rock, no funk, no soul. Strange, since the artificially frayed, dirty jeans that sell for $60 at the store exude Hootie and the Blowfish more than Justin Timberlake.
The official noise policy at Fashion Square Mall is that stores can play whatever music they chose, so long as it stays inside the "lease line," says Misty Parsons, marketing director at Fashion Square. She says she most often hears noise complaints about Abercrombie & Fitch, as well as Sam Goody.
"We don’t have too much problem with noise here," says Parsons, although she says she’s seen e-mails concerning A&F’s problems with noise in other malls.
According to a customer service representative for A&F, company policy dictates that an outlet’s music should always be kept between 80 and 85 decibels.
"That’s within OSHA’s regulation," says the rep, named Denise. "Technically, if a customer comes in and complains, the manager isn’t supposed to have access to change the volume."
If the problem ever came to a head at Fashion Square, Parsons says the mall’s general manager would have to call A&F corporate headquarters to negotiate a solution. Customers may not be too upset, but what about the employees? Is it hard to work in an environment where bad techno pulses as loud as a shouted conversation? "I just try to tune it out," says the clerk. "All I can say is, this is the only store I’ve been in where we see customers dancing."––J.B.
Requiem for the Pudhouse
Noise and a club crawl doom the City’s coolest rock venue
For legions of gutterpunks, goths, hip scensters and indie rockers, the Pudhouse was more than just a practice space for rock bands. In recent years, the twin warehouse buildings on Goodman Street in north Belmont served as a flophouse, anarchist ‘zine library, clubhouse, woodworking shop, art space and socialist rock utopia. But for all the anti-capitalist ranting and libertine cavorting of staple Pudhouse bands like The Racists of Farmville and The Dirty Fingers, the most dangerous thing coming out of the Pudhouse, apparently, was soundwaves.
According to local oral history, the Pudhouse was born in 2000 when Bostonites Colin Matthews and Tom Hohmann moved to Charlottesville and leased room A3 at 106 Goodman St. from landlord Richard Spurzem. With a cabal of creative and often unwashed cohorts, Matthews and Hohmann brought in underground rock bands who performed with the promise of a free meal, an attentive crowd and the proceeds from a passed hat. Residents in the neighborhoods east of Downtown, however, didn’t care to hear the strains of Aluminum Noise or Praying for Oblivion at 2am (not an uncommon starting time for Pudhouse shows).
The diverse bands had one thing in common––high volume. But there was nothing City officials could do. The lot is zoned M-1, or light industrial, and therefore not covered by the City’s noise ordinance.
"There were complaints about [the Pudhouse] for a long time," says City attorney Craig Brown. "But the noise ordinance only applies to sound that’s generated in a residential district."
Then, in July, a music writer included the Pudhouse in an article about local clubs. This gave City zoning and planning director Jim Tolbert an idea.
"The article talked about the Pudhouse as a music venue, but that building wasn’t designed as a music venue," says Tolbert, citing the Pud’s lack of restrooms and handicap accessibility.
The Pudhouse does have a bathroom, though. And since no one ever charged admission or sold drinks there, it’s hard to see the difference between a house party with a band and a Pudhouse show. Furthermore, music venues like Starr Hill and Tokyo Rose—not to mention most of the UVA frat houses that host bands—aren’t handicap accessible, either. "That place [the Pudhouse] is approved for storage, period," Tolbert replied.
On July 11, Tolbert told Pudhouse leasers Tyler Magill and Davis Salsbury that they didn’t have an occupancy permit, and the Pudhouse had to stop holding "illegal assemblies." Tolbert says the Pud could host shows again if the renters and Spurzem approached the City and drew up a new site plan for the site that would include new entrances and exits plus more parking.
"That’s not going to happen," says Magill. "If we had known people in those neighborhoods could hear us, we would have taken care of it. But, there won’t be any more shows at the Pudhouse."––J.B.
The sound of wine-ing
County winery has to fight for its right to ferment
"Good fences make good neighbors" says the famous poem by Robert Frost. But when sound crosses property lines, it’s time to call the lawyers.
Last year, Albert and Cindy Shornberg announced they were planning to open a retail space at their Keswick Vineyards. Neighbor Art Beltrone, who owns a horse farm 600 feet from the winery, launched a campaign to stop the Shornbergs, complaining about dust from incoming traffic, strangers milling about and noise. Beltrone boards horses on his property, and he says several customers decided not to leave their animals there because of the noise.
At the June 11 meeting of Albemarle’s Board of Supervisors, Beltrone’s lawyer, Richard Carter, said the Board should force the Shornbergs to install a noise suppressor on the chiller units.
The Shornbergs unleashed their own lawyer, of course. Their attorney, Garrett Smith, told the Board that Beltrone––a former publicist for Keswick Winery––harbored a "long-standing animosity" toward the Shornbergs, who refused in 2001 to purchase Beltrone’s property. At the June meeting, Beltrone denied there was any animosity.
In the end, the Board of Supervisors rejected Beltrone’s arguments and approved the retail space. For one thing, the County’s noise ordinance doesn’t apply to agricultural uses (the Board didn’t buy Carter’s claim that the winery constituted "tourism" and not an agricultural use). Furthermore, the chiller units are part of the existing winery, not the retail space.
Still, the County planning commission required the Shornbergs to pave the road leading to their winery. Also, before it opens, they will have to put in vegetation to shield the noise from the chillers. Beltrone now says he’s satisfied. "Things are much quieter now," he says.––J.B.