Chasing sounds in Dollar (on an empty stomach)

Text & pictures: Kaj Ahlsved

We have now arrived in Dollar, and our ears are slowly but surely starting to get tuned in to Dollar’s sonic environment. When meeting people, we usually point out that its they – the locals – who are the real experts on their sonic environment. We, the researchers, don’t have the same knowledge, especially on arrival, about sounds and their contextual meanings. This became evident in a somewhat funny way on the second day of my stay in Dollar.

As I was leaving our apartment, I heard a repetitive honking sound. It was moving around, so it had to come from a car or something another mobile object. From a theoretical perspective, the sound was obviously a signal. According to R. Murray Schafer, a signal is a type of sound with a specific function or purpose. Signals carry meaningful information, often serving to guide, warn, or mark events.

The problem for me as an outsider was that I couldn’t interpret what the signal meant and how to respond to it. Had something happened? An accident? Probably not since it was moving around. Was it an ice cream truck – maybe, but ice cream trucks don’t usually sound like that, at least not where I come from, and there’s no logic in an ice cream truck driving around in the middle of the day when the kids are in school? The sound puzzled me.

My hesitant attempts to understand the sound revealed that I lacked the soundscape competence that could have guided me to a relevant interpretation. Soundscape competence is an individual’s unique – but also culturally bound – ability to understand sounds as meaningful and to act based on that understanding (cf Truax 2001, 57).

After some clumsy and slightly sweaty attempts to locate the mobile sound source – which only teasingly revealed itself from seemingly new spots in Dollar – I gathered the courage to ask an elderly gentleman if he could tell me what it was. He immediately informed me that it was a fishmonger who regularly comes to the village. He didn’t know exactly where the van would stop, since it follows slightly different routes depending on where it has customers, but if I went and stood on the main street – Bridge Street – it would pass by sooner or later, and I would be able to catch it. For him, the sound was so mundane that he could no longer quite remember which days this fish van was in Dollar, but obviously at least on Wednesdays.

I must have looked hungry in my hunt for the fish van, because the gentleman offered to treat me to some local delicacies from the bakery next to us. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to stay and eat with me. With my hands full of local goodies, I couldn’t continue the search, so I sat down on a bench to eat. I thought the hunt for the sound source was over for now and, a little resigned, I started making my way back to our apartment.

Suddenly, the sound reappeared, and I quickly got up on my feet and started moving towards the sound – to paraphrase the title of a dissertation based on fieldwork in Dollar – and there it was: the fish van! The mobile sound creator that I had searched for around Dollar ironically now stood in all its glory just about 100 meters from our apartment.

Gordon – I assumed that was his name since it was written on the truck – had a few customers coming and going. He was in a hurry to get to the next village, but he could tell me that he regularly comes to Dollar and other villages in the area and stops in places where he knows he has customers or where he has received pre-orders on fresh fish. Before he drove off, I – of course – got his signal horn on tape. Both my curiosity and my hunger were satiated.

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Works cited:

Schafer, R. Murray. 1994 [1977]. The Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books.

Truax, Barry. 2001. Acoustic Communication. [2nd edition] Westport, CT: Ablex.

Uimonen, Heikki. 2005. Ääntä kohti. Ääniympäristön kuuntelu, muutos ja merkitys. Tampere: Tampere University Press.