The sound of sirens

Tuesday afternoon, reading week, University LRT station, Edmonton.

New Orleans, late August 2005, just prior to Katrina.

What would these soundscapes have in common? Maybe a sound like this:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/56859945da463dde/

R. Murray Schafer, in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), describes the "civil defense siren" as a (potential) sound that is common to "almost every modern city" (p. 202). He writes that loud sounds evoke authority and inspire obedience; the LRT siren certainly did the trick for me. It was strange to travel to a campus I expected to be fairly dead, and then to walk off the train into this huge wall of acoustic urgency--not to mention seeing police in jumpsuits reminiscent of bomb squads on television. The police walked casually, calmly; their body language and averted eyes suggested that the auditory assault wasn't to be taken seriously. Had it been a different day, a different place, a different context, that siren, so loud it was almost tangible, would have left very little room for misinterpretation. As it was, I was already skeptical. Would something truly siren-worthy really be occurring here, now--in Edmonton, of all places?

Schafer writes that the civil defense siren is a proscripted sound, a sonic taboo "held in reserve for that fateful day, then to be followed by disaster" (p. 202). By banishing it from the soundscape except for true emergencies, "we do it the ultimate honor of making it all-powerful" (p. 202). When it does sound, its power comes not so much from its use as from its default state of absence. This is, perhaps, the reason I couldn't quite take it seriously on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of reading week--in Edmonton, of all places.

I'm trying to find information about acoustic alerts during Hurricane Katrina. So far, searching for hurricane katrina sounds, hurricane katrina alarm, and hurricane katrina siren, I've pulled up sound metaphors on news sites and blogs, and interesting pieces about how Katrina has changed the music of New Orleans, but very little that directly discusses what New Orleans sounded like during the calm (?) before the storm. I imagine the incredibly high winds and pelting rain would have dominated once the devastation hit, but what about while people were being evacuated? Were there alarms sounding? (Not here, and not here ...) If there was a siren sounded before Katrina, along with the warnings and states of emergency issued by all kinds of governing bodies, its message, I think, would not have been lost.

The siren sounds; following its sound comes disaster; and following disaster comes, in some ways, the most frightening sound of all, a reminder of human mortality: silence (Schafer, 1994). Whether or not a 'real' alarm bell sounded before Katrina, Jordan Flaherty's piece, "New Orleans Culture of Resistance" (Steinberg and Shields, What is a City?, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), makes clear the magnitude of the silence that followed. Socially marginalized and non-privileged residents of New Orleans, displaced and destitute, had their voices silenced. In turn, the communicative silence of government and other agencies about the state of relief efforts helped to reinforce the futility of speaking up. In the end, Flaherty expresses hope that acts of resistance will break the post-disaster silence and help to restore community voices to the New Orleans soundscape, but the power of silence has already done significant damage of its own.