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Marco Polo Can Hear the Sun Screaming


Ashley Denny Petch 


Sound as Self

It’s June. It’s always June. I’m in Paris and I’m depressed. I’m trying not to feel guilty about being lucky that I get to be depressed in Paris. I’m going to walk 18km a day. I’m trying to out-walk both the guilt and the depression.

I do not take my headphones with me.

I experience Paris by walking and hearing; I want the city to happen to me. I walk without trying to block out or escape my thoughts. This is uncomfortable, but important I guess.

I launder my thoughts through the city’s sounds. I stroll about and observe society with my ears. I am an aural flaneur! Nope, that sounds absolutely filthy. I’ve upset Baudelaire. I am an acoustic flaneur.

Sound is knowing: hot water sounds different from cold. I am listening to the city in order to know myself.

My world is now entirely sonorific. I divide my past and present life between good and bad sounds.
  • The car alarms that go off wildly and indiscriminately everywhere in Athens (bad). 
  • Thunder and lightning from a summer thunderstorm at Wavy Lake (good). 
  • Somebody spitting on the ground as they walk by (bad and disgusting). 
  • Distant τζιτζίκια heard from my open hotel window in Nysiros (good). 
  • Motorcycle engines (terrible). 
  • The Laiki vendors selling their fruit on Saturday afternoon in Kallidromiou (good). 
  • The squeak of marching through hardened snow in February in Ottawa (good). 
  • The robotic recording of the παλιατζής driving past my window on Plapouta street (very good). 
  • Foxes screaming bloody murder outside my window in Finsbury park (bad). 
  • Children singing (always bad - the government shouldn’t let children sing).

Sound as Place

I decide to buy a decibel reader. I carry it around the city like an epee.

I learn that the decibel (dB) scale is logarithmic, not linear. This means a small change in decibels represents a big change in actual intensity. For example, the 83 dB that I registered at Paraskinio cafe on Monday afternoon is not just a little louder than the 70 dB I registered on the Athens metro at 7am  - it's 10 times more intense in terms of power. Every 10 dB increase means a tenfold increase in power (or about double the perceived loudness).

40 dB is calm. 60 dB is a lively environment. 80 dB is hearing loss territory.




I take my emotional support decibel reader everywhere and I write down my findings. In Paris I record an average of 64 dB in cafes. I spend a lot of time in Parisian graveyards, where the feeling is languid and listless. Cimitiere Montparnasse registers a serene 52 dB, Montmartre a tranquil 45 dB and Pere Lachaise an almost anaesthetized 39 dB. Mais pour être franc, most of Paris is calm. There are no cars anymore. The mayor decided that cars ruin cities. The loudest things in Paris are ambulances and North Americans.

I read about Canadian sound pioneer Murray Schafer. He encourages me to go beyond simply measuring sound, but not experience it. He developed the concept of soundscapes - the sonic textures and experiences of any given environment. His book Listening Exercises provides the baseline for developing these soundscapes, for attuning ourselves more deliberately to the world through sound.



I sit outside the Zephyr cafe in the 20e arrondissement and begin with Listening Exercise #1.  In just ten minutes, I record over 37 unique sounds. Footsteps on gravel, cups being stacked, kids laughing, church bells, someone’s bracelets clinking together, book pages flipping, bicycle spokes turning, a baby crying. I learn to be present without total control.

But now I’m back in Athens, and I’m still depressed. And I have to say, I'm not exactly thrilled with the thoughts I’ve been able to access by walking around bare-eared.  The only difference appears to be that, thanks to my trusty decibel reader and Schafer’s dangerous Canadian ideas, I am now much more aware of how sound lodges into my body. My teeth grind when I hear a jackhammer from nearby construction. My shoulders clench at the accordion player who approaches me at dinner. Sound enters my body and I can’t filter it back out. My body holds onto the noise long after it's gone.

One of the most striking cultural differences between Athens and Paris is the soundscape. Consider a Greek cafe vs a Parisian one. Greeks treat cafes like a family gathering (and Greeks treat family gatherings like a WWE wrestling match). Cafes are loud: people are yelling, crying, debating, growling. They jump out of their seats to act out their tales. There are always 5,6, or 10 people squeezing into a table meant for 2, while barking kokonis weave underfoot. Greeks are experts in arguing without disagreeing.  

Whereas Parisians treat their cafes like temples. They rarely gather in more than 2 or 3. They sit quietly, they talk in low tones. They read. They play card games. They make small remarks to their neighboring tables. The atmosphere is respectful - there is an understanding that the space is meant to be shared.

As much as I love living in Athens, I must confess that the Parisian way is better. It’s nice to feel calm. Or to understand that there are places where we’ve all agreed to be calm. Agitation breeds anger. But in Athens, even joy is loud, and my body doesn’t always understand the difference. A chaotic Athenian cafe winds me tighter: I can’t read, I can’t write. I can’t concentrate. This is entirely cultural - neither bad, nor good. Only to say that different cities make different negotiations.

On the other hand, there really is such a thing as too calm. I’m reminded of this over dinner in the quiet town of Avenche, Switzerland. Despite the ‘Rock the Lakes!’ raging just down the street, billed as “Switzerland’s most beautiful metal festival”, I register an unnervingly moderate 54 dB.

Being in Switzerland makes me think of sensory deprivation tanks, and of the deafening loudness of complete silence. I’ve never been in one, precisely for that reason. Is it possible to be afraid of silence? If it is, I am.

I’m afraid of what silence can reveal. On balance, I think I’ll take an unreasonably noisy Athens cafe over paying 75 dollars to hear my own eyelids blink.

Sound as Commons

The city is a negotiated space, and sometimes we forget that this includes sound. We are invited to participate in the soundscapes of others and vice versa. But when the invitation becomes intrusion, there begins the real negotiation.

I haven’t yet mentioned the sound I like the least: people having drawn out phone conversations or listening to voice memos in public spaces. Being forced to listen to a one-sided phone call enrages me and gets under my skin, in the truest sense. Part of the problem lies in the social disconnect these calls create. This mystery ‘dream phone’ character to whom our cafe neighbour is speaking is separated from the social context that defines the environment and therefore lacks the ambient awareness of the shared space we all inhabit. At that moment, this phone user is a trespasser in our common space.

There are countless examples of the acoustic commons - the quiet carriage in the train, street musicians, traffic calming areas. Each city has their own threshold. Sounds are policed and political. Opera music is often used as a loitering deterrent. As a teenager, I remember the classical music constantly blaring out of the speakers on Rideau Street, in an effort to drive ‘undesirables’ away; a dystopian practice rich in subtext.




Sound as Memory

Sound is ephemeral. It’s over before you know it.  “To listen is to touch a reality without needing to own it, to know it without needing to have it.” Sound artist Saolome Voeglin says. But if we let sound pass through us without owning it, what becomes of the sounds that get left behind?

People who regain hearing after being deaf often remark on the things they expected to make noise that actually don’t: the sun or clouds, for example. It sounds strange, but of course the sun does in fact make sound. We just can’t hear them. All lighting makes sound. One can imagine the soft hissing of gas lamps in Belle Epoque Paris. Or the annoying buzz of an electric light in a motel. A neon sign outside a tattoo parlor inviting us in to make a mistake. We forget that light has a sound, and because of that, we pay less attention to it. LEDs have taken over the market: cold, impersonal, without texture or dimension. No crackle, no buzz. Light no longer participates in the urban soundscape; these are sounds the city forgot.

I am afraid of the sounds that will disappear.my childhood dog howling along with The Young and the Restless, the roar of the crowd at an Ottawa Lynx baseball game, my friends’ off-pitch singing on the drive to New York City, my grandfather’s cigarette voice calling me to the living room window to watch the garbage truck. My déjà-vus are always sonic. Your world slips away so slowly, you almost can’t hear it.

And so now, I am trying to hear things on purpose.

Sound as Event

More than how we are or where we are, sounds tell us what we are. I learn to think of sound not simply as a transmission, but as a conscious, embodied, situated event of the self. You can hear what you see, but you cannot always see what you hear.

In ‘À l'écoute" (Listening)’, bald French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy thinks about the philosophy of listening. He concludes that listening is an act of penetration, of movement, maybe even of invasion. Sound is resonance. It connects what is outside with what is inside. When you are seeing, you are also being seen, and thus you automatically become an object for others. This is necessary, because the only way to understand ourselves is through alienation from others. (See the pervert Lacan for more on this)

But when you are listening, you return to your own subjectivity - you become the experiencing object and turn inward, without yourself being an object to others. Yet even in this inward focus, listening is not entirely private: by attuning to sound, you participate in something larger than yourself. Listening is always a participatory act, a methexis. Methexis is as platonic as it gets - it means to share, to participate. Plato used the concept to explain how individual objects participate in perfect, eternal forms. A beautiful object (ie. A delicate white Orchid or Law & Order’s Sam Waterston) partakes in the ideal Form of Beauty.

In a sonorific sense, think of the chills you might get hearing your favourite song sung in unison at a concert. Or for us plebians, the crowd singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ at the seventh inning stretch. In these moments, sound becomes a conscious, shared event, a contagion of presence.

Listening is a lot more difficult to control than seeing. We can choose where to place our vision, omitting some things and highlighting others. But selective hearing is much more difficult. As I write this, I'm sitting in a cafe next to the ocean. I can put in noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the obnoxious κάγκουρας conversation that is happening loudly next to me, but then I lose the sound of the waves. The art of sonic compromise.

Sound as Exploration

I learn about acousmatic sound - hearing without seeing, sounds where the source is hidden from view. Acousmatic listening strips away our vision and forces the ear to work harder. This makes me think about Marco Polo, the man and the game. The man, primarily because I enjoy fantasizing about tiny Italian medieval men. But the game because it is exactly this type of acousmatic device. It’s a sport of sound and trust, played with echoes. The sound is separated from its visual source, forcing the seeker to localize and interpret using only their ears. You listen for an answer you cannot see, disoriented on purpose.

Marco Polo, the man, navigated way beyond his known world and misunderstood almost everything. What an elegant act of listening. There is no truth - only contact, only resonance. A map of geographic dislocation.

And now, it’s August. It’s never really August. The more I listen to myself, the more I realize there is no self to discover. I am porous. I am fragmented and dissonant, and I must estrange myself from the comfort of sonic narration. I decide that I too will move through places acousmatically. I will surrender my body to every sound I hear. Είμαι μόνο αυτιά. I am only ears.