Listen up: In these disquieting COVID-19 times, hushed cities are making a loud impression on our ears

For a blind man in London, Ont., it's the pitter-patter of approaching footsteps on the sidewalk.

For a librarian in midtown Toronto, it was the rhythmic singsong of a robin perched in a tree.

And for a post-doctoral researcher in Vancouver, it's the mundane everyday things, such as a cable thwacking against a flagpole in the wind.

In the disquiet of COVID-19 news and the hush of locked-down cities, peoples' ears are suddenly perking up to new sounds - or sounds that were always there but just drowned out by the whir of urban life.

Because the usual cacophony of noise from car traffic, construction and aircraft has diminished, city dwellers are now able to home in on the contours of our urban soundscapes, turning them into amateur acoustic ecologists.

"Our ears, when we can pull them away from Spotify or Netflix or the latest family argument, can now potentially start hearing the sounds around us in newly sensitized ways," Jeremy Eichler, music critic for the Boston Globe, wrote in a recent column, which heralded the levity - even wonder - that can be found in aural discoveries in empty public spaces.

People in areas around the world hit hard by coronavirus have made similar observations.

"Here in Rome, all of a sudden the city's usual chaotic, horn-honking soundtrack has been transformed," NPR reporter Sylvia Poggioli wrote online last month. "With hardly any traffic, you can actually hear the squeak of rusty door hinges."

The chirping of birds, she added, is "almost too loud."

Outside the purview of human ears, the reduction in human activity has been a boon for scientists who study Earth's seismic vibrations. The journal Nature recently reported that the shut down of transport networks and industrial machinery could make it easier for detectors to "spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events."

Scientists have suggested that marine mammals could also stand to benefit from reductions in ocean noise - or "acoustic smog" - due to reduced traffic from cruise ships, ferries and oil tankers.

'Soundscapes in the Pandemic'

Academic researchers and sound artists are trying to harness this moment of sound appreciation, creating impromptu digital sound-mapping projects through which they invite people from around the world to submit short recordings from their neighbourhoods.

The recordings are then posted online, allowing listeners to drop in on a toe-tapping fiddle performance in Cape Breton or the majestic gong of cathedral bells in Murcia, Spain.

One such digital sound curator is Udo Noll, a Berlin-based communications engineer and media artist who founded the website Radio Aporee, which provides a platform for field-recording projects. So far he's received several dozen submissions to the "Soundscapes in the Pandemic" portion of his website.

The audio files, he told the Star, provide a "glimpse into a sonic utopia without the sounds of fossil-fuel driven engines," but also "the sound of depression and absence of social interaction."

He said one submission that stood out to him was from the town of Zidlochovice in the Czech Republic. The audio file begins with everyday sounds - birds chirping, a child screaming, a dog barking. But they are suddenly interrupted by an Orwellian-like radio announcement on loudspeakers with a COVID-19 message to seniors, as well as a call for volunteers to help sew masks.

Not all submissions are so haunting.

A Danish resident submitted a recording to the website Cities and Memory, which has a section devoted to #StayHomeSounds, along with a written description.

"Recorded in my garden on Sunday 22 March - the weather was cold and clear, with some wind from the northeast " It was pretty quiet, there's birds of course " and a group of ravens - six or maybe eight - they're flying around 'talking' or whatever, very funny. You can hear them flying by a couple of times and even hear the wings flapping. You hear the wind rustling the dead leaves on the hedge, and making the tall trees whisper."

The joy of 'soundwalks'

Barry Truax, a retired communications professor at Simon Fraser University, says one thing he's noticed on walks in Burnaby, B.C., is how the acoustic space has opened up.

"You hear more distant sounds you normally wouldn't hear, including distant birds and other types of activities," he said.

"It's actually the kind of soundscape at high definition that probably our ancestors would've heard in a smaller town, a smaller village, where sound played a much more pervasive role in orienting ourselves to the environment."

Truax is a big endorser of going on "soundwalks" as a way to de-stress during these anxious times. It basically involves walking at a slow or moderate pace while listening discriminately to all the sounds around you.

"Most of the time, we're caught up in our mental noise and chatter, so it's a way of re-engaging with the acoustic environment," Truax said.

But standing in your backyard can also do the trick.

On a recent evening, Hildegard Westerkamp, founder of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective, wrote the following passage in her sound diary:

"I am sitting on my back balcony as I write, after sunset, the sky red, the stars coming up. Normally I hear the ubiquitous urban hum from here, especially on a clear night like tonight. I always wish I could turn it off. Now it is turned off! A blissful quiet, just a few voices, maybe a barking dog in the distance, an occasional car."

Westerkamp told the Star the reduction in the urban din has given her ears a kind of "depth perception."

"It's unbelievable," she said. "It's a little bit like this great relief - physical relief from the constant inundation of sound waves into our bodies " There's also a psychological relief that allows us to feel a bit more spacious."

This new quiet, she acknowledged, can feel "freaky" and "oppressive" to those who might clamour for a return to normal life. But take a moment, she said, to consider how we're usually inundated with sounds that are close to us, especially when we pop in our ear buds.

"We may enjoy that music very much, but it's also really close and so our ears - actually I would call it the muscle that reaches out to sound, that wants to listen into the distance, that wants to figure out what is going on further in our neighbourhood or further out on the acoustical horizon - that muscle is underused in our urban societies these days. So there's a pleasure in re-experiencing that."

For the birds

Whether you're a bird enthusiast or not, it seems people can't help but stop to notice our feathered friends these days.

William Denton, a York University scholarly analytics librarian and sound artist, says he was taking a walk in midtown Toronto near St. Clair Avenue West recently when he was immediately drawn to a robin singing "loud and clear" in a tree.

"I stood under the tree where I thought it was, got my recorder out and pointed up at the robin and stood there for a few minutes listening to it and thinking: 'I can't remember the last time I heard a bird singing so cheerfully and loud,' " he recalled.

"The street was quiet, there was no one about, and the birdsong demanded attention."

Andri(C)s Jimi(C)nez, urban program co-ordinator for Birds Canada, a non-profit dedicated to wild bird conservation, said he's heard similar comments from friends in the Toronto Islands, a car-free chain of small islands just offshore from downtown Toronto. Residents there are reporting "crazy" levels of bird activity.

Jimi(C)nez, who lives near Highway 401, says he, too, noticed for the first time the signature "conk-la-ree" call of red-winged black birds in a small park near his home.

Is this a change in behaviour of birds? Or are our ears adapting to life with fewer competing artificial sounds?

He suspects the latter.

Birds have an amazing ability to adapt to urban environments, he said. Some might travel away from the noise. Other species might adjust their volume and sing louder or start their calls before the morning rush.

Others still might adjust their frequency, going to a higher pitch to cut through urban noise. Or they might truncate their songs, opting for short, quick bursts to convey messages.

Now that cities have become quieter, it stands to reason that birds have chilled out, reverting to behaviours that might be found in a forest instead of in the city. So it's not that birds have become louder, it's that humans are just able to hear them more clearly.

Imagine a dinner conversation where everybody's talking, and you are yelling, he said. Suddenly, you go quiet and just listen to everyone else.

"Birds have always been speaking to us, but we might've been too loud to listen."

For blind people, a blessing and a curse

For blind Canadians, our quieter cities have turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.

Roger Khouri, who is on the housekeeping and facilities staff at the YMCA in London, Ont., says when he goes for walks, the clarity with which he's able to hear birds allows him to visualize where trees are located.

"The physical landscape of my neighbourhood took on a new dimension because I never knew there were trees in those specific locations," he said.

"It gave me a better view, so to speak, using my ears, of the physical makeup of the neighbourhood."

The new quiet of the city has also enabled him to hear people approaching on the street, he said.

"I can hear people walking towards me " hear their footsteps," he said.

"They can obviously see me. But now I can hear them coming towards me. So I'm like, 'Hey, how are you doing?' I feel that has built up a sense of community."

Halifax resident Milena Khazanavicius, who is also blind and walks with a guide dog, says there's no question the pleasures of nature - she recently marvelled at the sound of a woodpecker in her neighbourhood - have intensified.

But so, too, have the stresses.

What irks her is standing at an intersection and waiting to cross the street.

Normally, she relies on vehicle traffic moving parallel with her to judge when it's safe to cross. But with fewer cars on the road, that has complicated her decision-making.

"Then there is the closing of businesses," she said. "Most of us are familiar with numerous pubs, bakeries, shops and can identify where we are by the sounds coming from the business. Coffee shops with jazz playing constantly, the bakery with the delightful fresh-baked bread. Those have all disappeared for the most part as well, so now, as blind or partially sighted travellers, you really have to stay ultra-focused."

After the pandemic

The French novelist, filmmaker and essayist Georges Perec once wrote about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: the "infra-ordinary."

"How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?" he wrote.

Jacek Smolicki, a Swedish post-doctoral researcher in Vancouver studying the past, present and future of field recording and acoustic ecology, says he's been following Perec's advice during solo walks.

Last month he walked through the SFU campus in Burnaby just before it shut down.

"You could hear all these crazy frequencies from ventilation shafts and vending machines, sounds that normally are not easily perceived. But because of the absence of usual sounds like people chatting and students, all of a sudden they become audible."

On a recent walk around B.C. Place Stadium, Smolicki said he marvelled at the ominous notes coming from cables hitting empty flag poles outside the stadium in the wind.

And during a visit to Trout Lake Park in Vancouver, he noticed that people sitting on the grass while keeping a safe distance spoke louder than usual allowing him to eavesdrop on their conversation.

"The distance actually makes people amplify their speech."

Smolicki says it is his hope that after the pandemic ends and cities roar back to life, citizens will be able to retain a sharper perception of the sounds around them - "to notice those details and find moments to tune with the soundscapes around them and understand what those sounds mean, how those sounds are produced, what those sounds convey and how they affect our lives."

It's a question that Westerkamp has been asking herself: Is it possible to go back to normal life with a bit more mindfulness toward the impact of sound in our lives?

"Can we build in more quiet spaces in parks? Can we build in things that are truly stimulating like the 7 o'clock (cheers in support of health-care workers) " so that we can understand what's positive in noise and silence and what's negative in noise and silence?"

Before, we used to have to go into rural areas to get away from man-made sounds, Denton said.

"But now those boundaries have shrunk. If you set aside why that's happened, that's a great thing. It'd be nice if we could keep hold of that."

Audio files recorded by Jacek Smolicki.

Douglas Quan is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dougquan