Why should the passing sound of a city be important? If we possess eyesight and touch, then why should we even trouble to give any significant attention to a sense impression that is just the side effect of city life, movement, and human communication? Surely if we listen to words addressed directly to us, to favourite music, a knock on the door or the ringing of a phone, to danger sounds such as that bus coming too close, or a child in distress, then all other environmental noise can be ignored or shut out.

This has been the big question for more than 30 years now for those musicians, sound artists, audio recordists and sonic researchers who try to listen at a deeper level in order to understand how sound functions in human society. To think consciously about sound seems to be fairly unusual, yet ask anybody about sound, or listen carefully to the way in which people behave, and then it becomes clear: sound functions as a cohesive force in society; it activates spaces and events, lives in memory long beyond its own duration, and forms an essential part of a person’s inner life of emotions, thoughts and consciousness of the world. Very few people can tolerate complete silence for long: a frightening emptiness opens out to infinity; faced with this pressure of nothingness, the inner dialogue of the mind threatens to run out of control.

Perhaps this fear of total silence is based on its rarity. At night, if I cover windows with thick curtains, shut the door and close my eyes, then I experience absolute darkness, yet sound is still present: the faint noises of my own movements, whistling in the ears, voices in my head, cars passing by outside. Even the air in a room can seem to have a sound, simply because there are many variable echoes within normal spaces and these echoes give a particular character to the way in which we hear even the faintest sonic disturbance. Sound has no edges, no boundaries, so sounds mix together in accidental proportions. We become accustomed to separating out the important information in those common situations when speech, music and the ambient sounds of the environment are flowing all around us, coming and going in every direction and blending in ways that are not always pleasing or ideal.

What is typical in modern cities wherever they are is a homogenisation of sound. The volume of motor traffic blocks out a certain frequency range and prevents anything close to silence. This is true even in the depths of night, since modern cities tend to be encircled by ring roads and penetrated by expressways for fast, long-distance traffic. Residential areas at the perimeter may once have been quiet but now they are close to the 24-hour noise of heavy lorries. Add the sound of aircraft passing overhead, loud music, police, fire and ambulance sirens, and a proliferation of machines for construction and destruction, and the more personal or unusual sounds are drowned.

Another aspect of many northern cities that shapes their soundscape is the high value placed on privacy. People may have interesting lives but these are invariably conducted indoors.

Given this background elsewhere in the world, Beijing is a truly remarkable city, since people are less self-conscious about being active in public and as a consequence, the Beijing soundscape is full of incident, personal character and constant change.

I called my project Beijing Water Writing. This caused some puzzlement since there was no clear reference to sound, but I remember quite clearly the chain of events that led to this decision. On our first afternoon in Beijing with Peter Cusack and Clive Bell, we three old colleagues were taken to Tiananmen Square and then to the shopping streets nearby. Two incidents stick in my mind: the first was breathtaking for all of us. We had been told about the flocks of pigeons that fly overhead, whistles attached to their tails, but suddenly we heard this sound, a noise with no distinct locations in space, no edges, no apparent source and no similarity to anything else. At ground level, people were busy with their lives, through familiarity probably indifferent to this sound that was so exciting to us, and all around us in the human sphere were noises of commerce; above, wheeling in mysterious patterns, was the pigeon flock, and as it passed so the strange sound of the whistles followed like a trail of thin, perfumed smoke. All sounds are difficult to describe, even when they are very distinct and familiar, but using words to convey the feeling of what it is to hear pigeon whistles during flight is like discussing air. To me, it sounded like an orchestra of ancient instruments – the keening drone of bamboo mouth-organs used in Confucian music – but even this doesn’t quite capture the special character, since there is constant movement, and the odd experience of hearing a sound from above without being able to necessarily pinpoint its source.

Eventually, we tracked down the pigeon loft that was home to these birds, then in a quiet back street found the owner. He was happy to show us one of his birds, and the globular whistles, some of them surprisingly large. The one I have on my desk now, a souvenir of this moment, can produce eight pitches simultaneously, two of them low and six very high, so even if I blow it I can hear traces of a complex, ethereal chord, a faint memory of that first audition of sonic pigeons. Shortly after this, we stopped walking to allow Peter Cusack to record the sounds of the street. One of the interesting aspects of deep listening is that it needs full concentration to take effect. A place can seem sonically uneventful, quiet, lacking any specific interest, but stop and listen and gradually the atmosphere will make itself felt, the sounds will seem to accumulate. The truth is that the sounds don’t grow in response to our listening; instead, our perception becomes sensitised to what exists already, but time is needed for the effect to work.

Standing in this narrow street, I think we all began to realise that the soundscape of Beijing was highly unusual. Such differences in the quality of a soundscape can emerge from complicated causes, relating to cultural diversity, overall volume level, the amount of extraneous noise audible from distance, the materials used in building, road surfaces and the layout of streets, the way in which people interact, and the way they move around. For a sound recordist, movement gives energy to a soundscape, and it could have been this factor, along with the high proportion of interesting sounds heard within a quiet context that made all three of us feel momentarily entranced.

The following day we visited a sequence of sites that were thought to have good sonic potential. It was just inside the entrance to Tiantan Park that I saw elderly gentlemen practising their calligraphy, drawing on the ground using long foam-tipped brushes dipped in water. For me, this was exceptionally poetic, both for its quiet dignity and for the way in which each mark faded as the water evaporated and became absorbed into the paving stones. Thinking about this later, it seemed like a metaphor for sound, an event which is always destined to fade and vanish in the air. The sounds of pigeon whistles fitted closely with this idea, since they also fade in the distance like fugitive marks on the sky, written with sound. Perhaps they will also fade in memory as the city is modernised, young people are less inclined to keep pigeons, and so this ancient hobby disappears into history.

Here sound is vulnerable. Objects can be preserved in a museum, historic buildings can be protected, people and scenes are painted or photographed, important events are described in texts or preserved on film and video, but sounds are rarely considered important enough to save before they vanish. Only much later do they resurface from memory, like shipwrecks rising from the abyssal deeps, and as they return to the conscious mind they bring with them all the deep feelings connected to those small events from daily life that seemed so insignificant at the time. To see an old man walking along the street carrying songbirds in cages was a reminder of how sound is a vital component of social life, an element that can be shaped in positive ways rather than simply accepted passively.

Later that day we heard many sounds, or combinations of sounds, that were unique to Beijing. In Tiantan Park, and then during a second visit to Beijing, in Jingshan Park, I heard an enormous variety of music. Here is the contrast between Beijing and the private activities of northern cities: many people exercising by practicing various sports or their ballroom dancing, and small groups of musicians and singers playing in different styles, such as accordion bands, harmonica bands and small string ensembles performing songs from opera. Usually set up in close proximity, the sounds from these groups, and from the portable tape players of the ballroom dancers, overlapped and fused into strange combinations.

Elsewhere in the city, the accidental mixing of disparate sounds was continually surprising. My favourite recording was near to the market selling insects, in itself a paradise for environmental sound recordists. Peter Cusack and Clive Bell were recording the buzzing, droning noise of diabolos on sale in one of the shops at the edge of the market. Because the sound was so intense I moved away with my microphone, walking slowly into a narrow side street where a stall holder was demonstrating bamboo clappers. Moving further away to emphasise the contrast of his rhythms heard against the drone of the diabolos, I came across a cage containing pigeons. Their quiet cooing, the gentle fluttering of their wings, imposed an atmosphere of calm on a soundscape that only a few moments before had been alive with noise. The further I moved into this street the closer I came to a man working with a small, electrically-driven wood-turning lathe. He was seated outside his workshop, concentrating on his job, so oblivious to me with my microphone or to the juggling demonstration at the other end of the street, yet the variable drone that accompanied his work seemed to act as a mirror to the drone of the diabolos. Simply by moving less than 50 metres, I had encountered, to some extent composed, a sound piece with contrast, textural and dynamic variety, and formal structure.

My installation, a specially designed and constructed brick building within Zhongshan Park, allowed visitors to listen to these environmental sound compositions on headphones. The idea was to create a special enclosed place, like a museum of sound, which would emphasise the predominance and richness of sound in city life. My recordings were overlapping, so that edited sections flowed into each other, and at certain points I used small amounts of digital sound processing to recreate a sense of the otherness of this first experience of the Beijing soundscape. At the same time, I am sure that all of the sounds could still be identified by a resident of Beijing.

As an outsider, my strongest initial impression of Beijing was the feeling and clear evidence of rapid change. Dramatic changes in an urban landscape precipitate many effects, and even when these changes will clearly improve living conditions for people, some of the old ways of life, the landmarks and the soundmarks, will be lost. Often these are intangible, so difficult to protect or preserve. For me, the most distinctive aspect of Beijing’s hutongs is their sound. By this, I mean not just the sounds heard within the streets (in my recordings these sounds included conversations, the scrape of leaves caught up by gusts of wind, a door creaking, passing bicycles, the cries of street traders, and a quiet hum emanating from a metal box attached to a telephone pole) but the acoustic atmosphere. Because the streets are cut off, enclosed, relatively free from cars and other technological disturbances, they are suffused with a quiet tranquillity in which specific sounds stand out with great clarity.

To answer my initial question – why should the passing sounds of a city be important? – this is the point. Sound, our way of hearing, gives flavour and texture to our lives. I can listen to my recordings of the hutongs and refresh my memory of each tiny sonic incident, but lodged in my being I now have a deeper memory which is an alert feeling of being in that moment, listening hard and experiencing the nature of a place.