What follows takes place over a one-hour period.
Every sound is possible.
Key: In, out
It’s three-thirty in the morning and we’re far underground in one of the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. A hole has been drilled down through the ocean floor and a small microphone has been fed through the hole some considerable distance vertically downwards.
We are listening to huge plates shift subtly, but on a colossal scale. Slowly we fade up a hydrophone attached to a weight resting on the sea bed. We hear an echo of a long reverberant but distant boom. Then, nearer the surface, a thud on the bottom of a submarine. An identical boom again back down below. Further up, a string of bubbles.
Behind another vessel, the one that is recording what follows, there is attached a substantial length of cable. Along its line, at long but evenly spaced intervals, there are twelve waterproof speakers. As the vessel rises to the surface, slowly towing the speakers, the ocean-floor hydrophone records the following sounds, one sound per speaker, in slow succession:
A man asleep in Denver.
A girl asleep in Chibok.
A woman asleep in Monklands.
A man asleep in Sydney.
A woman asleep in Guangdong.
A parent asleep in Gaza.
A woman asleep in Uppsala.
A doctor asleep in Quetta.
A man asleep in Al Wakrah.
A person asleep in Kent.
A family asleep, on the move.
Something away from the earth, awake, listening.
It starts with a single dry sound, no reverb. It’s the sound of the hardback version of this book opening slowly in the late morning, quietly though, as if read in private in a dark corner. The paper subtly creaks as the spine separates and opens. A tiny buzz from a nearby table lamp is the underscore. The crease of the paper on the first page-turn mixes with the wet ping and dry crackle of wood on a fire. Once the page-turn is finished, there is a too-soon silence. Within that void you can hear your own breath bristling against the hairs on the inside of your nose as you exhale. There are two of these exhalations but on the third a surprise: a recording of a strong January wind catching the remaining winter leaves of four old oak trees artificially planted in a row. The sound is contained, though, as if through double glazing. This wind fades up over a minute, slowly evolving, the higher frequencies filtered out in a slow sweep as we become aware of a tone that simultaneously contains a hum, a whine, a throb – the lonely, dull drama of a Boeing 777 at night.
Riding above it is the snore of a white, fifty-year-old American male asleep in first class on an Emirates flight to Dubai. He snores at a similar pace to your own breathing through your nose. Now a ‘fasten seat belt’ alert sounds. After a pause, it is chopped up and repeated quietly at different pitches. Its rhythm ducks and twists its way round the sound of the manmade fibres of the carpet as they rub against the soles of air stewards’ shoes as they make their way through the sleeping cabin. The pace of the crew matches the snore of the man. Someone else is hurriedly stepping aboard the rear section of an articulated bus in Basel and their footsteps merge with, and then are interrupted by, a shrill, dense cacophony of 1,129 alarm clocks belonging to garment workers going off at once in Bangladesh. The alarms are recorded separately in their bedrooms but overlaid upon each other. The recordings are placed in a room-simulation reverb, mapped from inside Philip Green’s most expensive car. Over the tail of these brash sounds fading out, we hear the tiny sound of someone putting in a disposable contact lens, then a child on a bike setting off down a hill, then a car with blacked-out windows pulling up to a border and then a petrol tanker glancing its wing mirror off a rusty drainpipe in Sabaneta. The driver gets out of the truck and as he slams the door, the alarms stop in unison and we hear the dust and gravel scatter round his worn suede boots. He walks towards the boundary-type microphone lying flat on the ground. A crescendo, a rising of different lifts and escalators in government buildings, a small cluster of seatbelt-sign sounds from different flights. He stops. A hood slides clumsily over someone’s head. A soda can drops from a vending machine. The winding of a watch. Curtains are pulled back. One by one, in quick, rhythmic succession, there is now the slamming-shut of truck doors from every country in the world, forming a fierce pattern some way between a samba and a glitchy beat from an early-1990s circuit-bent drum machine. We sometimes hear the backgrounds to these slams too: a cockroach scuttle in Guadalajara, a smeared call of a bird of prey mid-swoop, a checkpoint in Riyadh, breaking glass, a blur and tangle of five motorway service stations in Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Belgium. As they come to the end, we hear a warning klaxon on an aircraft carrier and then a blizzard of spot-welds recorded at the MINI factory in Oxford, precisely ordered at a rapid tempo. One weld for every new car made since the Kyoto Protocol was signed. A slowing down, a dry pumping of feet on bike pedals and then, in miniature fractions, we hear hard rain splitting on a mechanic’s roof in Colombo. Thunder overhead. A van full of empty Nestlé water dispensers goes too fast round a roundabout and they tumble around in the back. A sudden gush of spray off a ship’s bow. The secret flush of a train toilet. A historic water mill slowly turning but doing nothing.
From this lull, the irregular throb of the main road from Moscow to Kiev at night. People everywhere are tiptoeing up flights of stairs in the dark. Men are gently moving pianos in broad daylight. Armed robbers are climbing casually into the back of getaway vehicles. Taxis are pulling slowly in to hotel forecourts. Elsewhere a civic parade is starting, but there’s no music yet, just flatbed trucks with generators and elaborate fake scenery, and people walking and dancing in step behind the floats to keep warm. A drone by a prison jerkily takes off. An ambulance rushes through traffic, in the back an imminent birth. All the cars on the school run, sped up drastically into a curt, deathly buzz. The snap of a lid on a Tupperware lunchbox. Jeans are hurriedly pulled on at dawn. The screech of metal beneath trains. A family is leaping from a boat onto rocks. A cat knocks a broom over. Someone bangs their head on a low wooden beam in an English pub. A child’s bare thigh down a slide. A carpenter turns on a circular saw. A large group of cyclists is just about to pull away from traffic lights in a city. A transporter is overturning on a country road, spilling broken wind-turbine blades across a field.
Over the top of this plastic, aluminium and steel is laced a delicate prickle of water drops from the bottom of a just-watered hanging basket of petunias into a rusty tin bath on a crisp morning in a Chadlington garden. They have such a clear pitch, it could be the sound of glass. Through these sharpened drips is woven a searing melody, skewed and burned out by amplified distortion and metal-plate reverbs to resemble music for a sunset. This melody sounds like the cry of some mistaken, misc-Asian folk instrument, but it’s made from the squeal of the brakes on the cream-coloured Mercedes taxi that picks up another half-asleep white American male from the airport. We hear it in its raw form as the phrase falls, muddier now beneath the wheels of Asian-made carry-on suitcases leaving over the roughed-up mats by the automatic doors exiting customs. We hear the rasp of these rolling wheels in brisk, perky grinds before being swept up in a rising pitched-up swoop of military planes on takeoff until we find ourselves listening to the dry sound of 35 to 135 doors opening in Coventry and Dresden alternating in each ear. This is doubled up with the repeated slap of failed skateboard tricks on a Nissan Qashqai TV advertising shoot. A model NASA rocket takes off abruptly and its whoosh ends just in time for the final drip of water to hit the Chadlington bath, resonating and reverberating onwards.
Our American’s carry-on bag has a fake-leather detail on it which is now rubbing against the black, piecemeal, composite leather of the rear seat in the taxi as it bumps and turns, each disturbance progressively louder. The rubbing is at the same tempo as the truck doors but doesn’t quite fit with the aircraft engine – he is already out of sync. But there are still uneven moments of silence between squeaks, moments that are filled with a waiter coughing while on his lunch break, a waiter the American once overtipped in Café de Flore in Paris in 1998. The brakes squeal in a long slowdown as the taxi overshoots the red traffic light and the aircraft engine disappears within it. A miner sneezes.
Now the hurried shuffle of four people into a lift as the doors close. A bolus squeezes through an oesophagus. A husband and wife – a pair of Chinese cocklers – rush back to a minibus. Someone drags a dining table across a carpet. An air-traffic controller grabs a printed strip of a flight number in a control tower. The plastic grasp-handles creak and strain on a full Tokyo subway train. A Chinese satellite-launch vehicle fires up. The roar of a race car across a desert. Two-and-a-half thousand coffee-shop workers unknowingly bang out grinds in unison. The brisk click and flip of wooden geisha sandals on tarmac. Five hundred and forty-eight train tickets are hastily clipped. The clapper on the bell prepares to strike on Dublin harbour lighthouse. A loud bang as a worker empties a portafilter at an AMT coffee outlet in Chicago airport. Hundreds of thousands of people empty their pockets into plastic trays. Bottles of water tumble from plastic crates. A thousand cardboard boxes drop into the back of a thousand removals lorries. A million automated passenger gates open. A rising shimmer and gurgle of hundreds of people cleaning their teeth in bathrooms in public places. It becomes intense, overwhelming almost. Then they all come to an end at about the same time. A slither, a smeared shuddering of teeth and spit and taps and hand dryers and children. The driver gets back in his truck and slams the door behind him.
A dog pulls its owner along through a park; it is damp underfoot. A crow at the side of a road taps on a piece of rotten bark. Someone tears open the paper backing from a packet of AA batteries. A father is blowing on damp tinder by a newly set fire by some trees in the hope that it catches. A teenager is cutting something out of a magazine with scissors in the back of a camper-
van in a layby. Someone is listening to a recording of plane turbulence on headphones on a stationary tube train. A child is tying a shoelace – we hear it in close-up. A car-parts delivery van idles in a layby. Parents are arriving at a school concert. Two brothers run through a forest in the distance.
Inside the cab, the truck driver taps his as-yet-unlit cigarette on the back of the packet. A regular part of the tapping becomes a loop: soft, familiar, enticing, but a little menacing after a while. The almost inaudible friction between stone chippings in a pavement as a sea-cadet marching band walks over them. The rolling wheels of 1,800 buggies, pushchairs and prams while the children inside are asleep. In the distance a night train passes quietly over points on its way through the Alps. People are licking stamps, but we probably don’t hear it. We do hear for certain the subsonic booms recorded from a boat across the estuary from Shoeburyness in quick succession. They loop and become a huge rounded warm boom, a structure on which to measure everything that follows. And then the upwards whine from an aeroplane’s engine as it ramps back up, ready to move on to its next destination.
Now, the propeller of the Queen Mary as it leaves New York recorded from underwater. The grind of a bulldozer heading towards a wall, recorded from the wrong side. The steam of a coffee machine on the lower deck of a tourist barge. The meowing of two distant quad bikes chasing through the pattern of poplar trees across a field in summertime, the leaves shuddering in the breeze. A tank lumbers through Fallujah; a tank is accelerating in Afghanistan. Startled birds fly up out of heather and gorse. A clap to indicate someone should start running. But instead, a single step from John Major in the Houses of Parliament. A single step from someone towards a noose. A single step of someone onto the set of a TV show. A single first step out of hospital on crutches. A single step onto an iced river. A single step into a tent in a refugee camp. A single step on grass at some important football match in Dortmund. A single step onto the tail of a cat. A single first step by a toddler in Syria. A step towards a lover. A single heel on an unwashed marble floor. A single muddy boot on the steel floor of a cabin atop the tallest crane above São Paolo. A single step backwards from an approaching bear. A single tiptoed step in a Greek tax office at midnight. A tentative first step on skates to a roller disco. A step to the urinal by Paul Singer. A step into the branch of Pret A Manger on The Cut. A step in the dark by a lake. A step towards an unknown judge. A step up an ill-set ladder. A step towards an unknown shape by the waves. A boggy step through marshland. A step onto a landmine. A step onto a stage. A step forward through dark rock and dripping water in blackness. A step on a just-mopped floor. A step in snow, exhausted. A step, a step, a step. A boom from Shoeburyness at the same time as our truck doors close together again. Another flight lands in Dubai at the same time as a cathode-ray TV set powers up in a prison about to show Days of Thunder, one TV turned up in a different prison, one turned down. One plane up. One TV down. The poplar trees shudder, the tin bath is emptied down a grate, spliced into the demonic sucking of the uneven drains in the British Airways First lounge showers at Heathrow Terminal 5. We just listen to the horror of the sound as it gets louder and louder, this bizarre squelchy sucking noise that sounds so alien.
A load of cutlery lands in a drawer at the same time; it’s later, darker. An unripe lemon falls off a conveyor belt. A woman drinking lemonade on a bus is reading a magazine article about David Oluwale. A mouse or a rat is hidden in a wall, scurrying up and down in bursts. In the gaps between the rat we hear a car horn in the distance. Someone is indicating something, but it’s not clear yet. All we know is that unedited, it falls exactly in the gaps of the rat journeying down the wall. The running of young children at the gates of a Catholic school in Jakarta. A crab scrabbles, stuck in a plastic bucket with no water. A red-faced woman jogging too fast with headphones on. The car horn fades up. As it gets louder, more horns. A funfair is arriving in town on the back of trucks. A military parade is setting off in the distance. Phones going off next to kettles boiling. All the climbers clipping on ropes and carabiners on the sides of mountains. All the wind heard rushing through spinning spokes, through railings on boats, through computer fans. The sound of all hot air balloons rising. All canoes down rapids, all motorbikes overtaking, all ships setting sail. All the helicopters taking off, recorded from above. All the mopeds pulling out, recorded from underneath. Now the ooze of Canadian tar sands.
Now the muddied sound, recorded from inside, of a hundred male commuters’ hands randomly thudding on a metal handrail at a London station recorded from the inside of the rail itself. One commuter’s hand creates a particularly long bong on the rail that resonates languidly and painfully. The sound is fed back through empty sections of the keystone pipeline with a ribbon microphone and some huge speakers, creating a howl of lugubrious bloom, a purity of tone that baffles and booms and slips and terrifies and tips and excites and punishes and leaps and rewards and scares and grows and grows and grows and rises and leaps and blooms and blooms and overwhelms and at its peak stops dead with a short break followed by a thud: a suddenly headless pigeon has fallen out of a tree and hit the tarmac by your feet next to a front gate on Tankerton Road. The sound is like nothing you have heard: a mixture of feather, and guts, and air, and dust and cedar needles. A whoomph, like a central-heating boiler firing up. But there’s a thwack to it too, as if someone punched a hollow wall with a thick cushion over their hand. There may be other birds still heard in the background, and there’s no sign of the head, but you don’t notice either of these things. You notice how recent the blood is, though. It should have never happened, but it did. And it can be heard here.
A schoolgirl with black hair, dirty shoes and a short scar on her arm is sitting on the end of an unmade bed at dusk with headphones on. We hear the tinniness of the sound for a while as it leaks from her ears, but it’s impossible for us to work out what it is. There is a slight breeze through an open window. An occasional insect, the angry bark of a stray dog.
We crossfade into a different sound – 180,000 hotel mini-bar refrigerators, many of them empty, grimly buzzing in unison. It takes ten minutes for the sound to rise up slowly, as if distilled through a filter that only allows lower frequencies. A man is playing the recording of these fridges from a set of speakers somewhere outside Los Angeles, in a semi-desert area, and we’re hearing it from the perspective of a shotgun microphone held by a woman carried towards the speakers on another woman’s back. The sound of the fridges has been carefully put together according to the star rating of the hotel system, with the lowest-rated hotel fridges heard at the start. The fridge sound is stacked as the hotel rating gets bigger. The five-star hotel fridges are the last ones we hear and are likely to be quieter than many of the others – the world gets quieter the richer you are. We may hear a little dust kicked up along the way, or a light aircraft overhead.
Just as the sound of the fridges becomes overwhelming, intense, it cuts suddenly to the inside of an empty shipping container inside a depot at night in an unknown Chinese port. We think the container is empty but again, slowly rising over twenty-three seconds, we hear the sound of every black prisoner in America breathing in unison. This is played out of a mobile phone left on a bright-green plastic seat.
Over the top of these two long recordings, we start to hear layered sounds. An overhead projector on full in an empty boardroom. A bleep of a cash machine. A slow knock. A different room tone – an air conditioner is positioned some distance from our vantage point, but its grey wind and greyer noise can be heard through a small grille in the ceiling of the room. Someone has knocked again on a neighbour’s door with three quick knocks in succession, but there’s no reply and it’s not clear if the person who knocked has left yet or is waiting there. There appears to be no sound from inside. In fact there is someone in the room, and there’s a microphone very near their head. We can tell from their breathing that the person is not asleep. There is an anxiety in the unevenness of the breath and we hear their mouth open a little after the third inhalation. There is a slight crisp brush as their head tilts a little on the stiff cotton of the pillowcase. We carry on hearing that, but underneath there is now the slight rustle of thirty to forty people of mixed ages trying to be still, in a different kind of space, a presence. After thirty seconds or so of this, a rhythm fades in of a chugging air valve on a recently empty beer keg in the basement of the Queen’s Head pub in Downe. Beneath it, the tone of an empty, windowless bathroom. People are staring in silence up at the departures board in a train station. A knock. Many people are ringing a loved one but their call isn’t being answered. A life jacket is thrown towards a dinghy. New recruits at a call centre sit in silence as they wait for the supervisor to arrive. Another knock. We then hear all the different ringing tones from around the world. They are layered and organised so that the person who is holding the longest is the last call that we hear. At the exact point the caller hangs up, a huge metal urn for heating water has been turned on by someone a long way from home. The bubbling is layered up underneath what follows, but it never reaches a peak, we never hear the urn switch off. Instead it fades out slowly over two to three minutes. By the time it has gone, you won’t have noticed. You may hear the sound of your own clothes as you shift your position instead.
The girl slowly turns the handle of a roughly painted wooden door.
A dog is scratching the closed door to a flower shop. A few musicians turn the pages of their newspapers over as they wait for a studio session to start. A cook is filing his nails with an emery board next to a pan full of hot oil in a prison kitchen, but it’s not at temperature yet. A page of scribbled notes is torn from a book. The doors release on a Eurostar train with a tough exhalation of hydraulics. Seventeen washing machines in seventeen women’s refuges have finished their cycle but they haven’t been emptied; we can hear the last of the water draining away. A bath is run but nobody is in it – we just hear a dripping tap. A doorman is gently kicking a brick wall to keep his toes warm. Trainee priests are practising swinging incense at the same pace. Tourists are queuing up to use a bathroom near the Egyptian Pyramids. The watch of a waitress is ticking furiously in Istanbul – a microphone has been set in her sleeve. A teenage boy in black is walking towards his school with a variety of weapons in his bag. The slipping of thick lenses into testing glasses at an opticians. A huge but quiet crowd looks around nervously. Every time someone opens a back door, the wind passes through the ground floor of a hotel in Kampala and the fronds of a plastic palm tree in the lobby rub against themselves. An elderly man is yawning by a fence at night. The snap as someone stands on a twig.
All the hotel TVs on standby in Korea buzz together for a minute. A text message is received at a bus stop. A scientist’s shoulder clicks as she bends over in a yoga class. A traffic warden writes out a parking ticket. A person working on the front desk of a hotel listens to the scratching of the pen of the overweight guest filling in the form and then there’s a tight click as one hundred credit cards are put on ninety-nine countertops. Now a firm yank on a ticket from a machine that gives you a place in a queue at an embassy. A traffic jam in a New Jersey tunnel. A spy in a hotel room with headphones on absentmindedly fiddles with a Hot Wheels toy car. A woman on hold to a bailiff quickly presses her phone to her ear in such a way that we hear it click against her earring.