Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 Sound as a considered design parameter in the Japanese garden michael fowler Historical perspectives It is perhaps not by coincidence that the most common conception of the Japanese garden is found in its striking miniaturizations, stylizations and manipulation of scales through the use of effects such as forced perspectives1 as well as the dialectic they establish between notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ or human and made.2 That both of these impressions are a function of the immediacy that the visual presents to our sense making in the encounter of such designed landscapes somewhat slights what those other elements of a Japanese garden have to offer. In particular, the high sensitivity paid to the auditory qualities and acoustic properties and principles of the various soundmaking elements:3 both those that are embedded within the topography of the landscape, and those natural, temporal, seasonal and fleeting effects from fauna and flora. Given that there are numerous types of sounds occurring within a Japanese garden, not least those that require a great attention to their design because of the intrinsic connection between the form of the landscape and the auditory flow-on effects (such as in waterfalls or moving water), specific references to sound design within the traditional Japanese garden treatises are practically non-existent.4 What are more common though are allusions to the nature of sound and the conditions that may create a change in the sound of a designed feature. In the eleventh-century gardening treatise sakuteiki (trans. Records of Garden Making) the following advice is given: If it is preferred that the water fall freely away from the surface of the Waterfall Stone, then a stone with a clean, sharp corner should be chosen and set leaning 312 slightly forward . . . In addition, if one sets two or three stones in front of the main Waterfall Stone, gradually stepping down and away from it, then the water will splash left and right as it falls.5 There is an obvious visual guiding here of the preferred manner in which the design of waterfalls is to be approached, though at the same time even such subtle changes regarding the flow and splashing of the water will greatly affect the sounds emanating from the fall. It is highly unlikely, then, that sound design within the traditional Japanese gardening tradition, which stretches back to the eighth century, was simply a function only of considerations of landscape form. Indeed, one of the more notable literary references to the nature of the Japanese gardening tradition as a multi-sensory design approach occurs in the Heian (794–1185) text Tale of Genji: The new grand Rokujo mansion was finished . . . The hills were high and the lake was most ingeniously designed . . . Clear spring water went singing off into the distance, over rocks designed to enhance the music. There was a waterfall, and the whole expanse was a wild profusion of autumn flowers and leaves.6 That Seidensticker here translates the sound of the waterfall as a type of ‘music’ reveals what Tadahiko Imada views as those traditional Japanese notions regarding sound, music and the environment. In fact, Imada argues that ‘according to the Japanese tradition there is no distinction between noise and music. Any musical sound has to be heard with environmental sounds around it’.7 The sounds of nature, human-made endeavor and instrumental music, then, are an inseparable conglomerate, a form of auditory scenery that is to be issn 1460-1176 # 2015 taylor & francis vol. 35, no. 4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2015.1049478 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden regarded ‘as an abstract image rather than as a pragmatic acoustic event’.8 This type of thinking, therefore, may explain how the subtleties of sound design within the tradition of Japanese gardening have remained somewhat hidden within the larger visual image of Western encounters with ‘otherness’ in the Japanese garden.9 With the borders between sound, noise and music indistinguishable, and the sociocultural context of their creation playing a distinctly important part, it is the manner of listening that perhaps enables the clearest avenue for understanding the role of sound design within the traditional Japanese garden. Thus, experiencing a Japanese garden traditionally involved a way of listening that amalgamated notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, with the knowledge that the environmental sounds produced by the garden represented a complete aesthetic tableaux of cultural significance. Conceptualizing sound-space Indeed, the significance and the cultural meaning of sounds has been a key influence for the discipline of acoustic ecology, which since its inception in the late 1960s, has attempted to formulate a way in which to understand sounds within their cultural, spatial, historical and acoustic contexts through a listenercentered approach. In a perhaps somewhat similar vein as the traditional holistic approach within Japanese culture of accepting the entirety of sounds of the environment as of equal aesthetic significance, the founder of the discipline of acoustic ecology, R. Murray Schafer, is a noted composer and music theorist. Schafer, and his theories and terminologies regarding the sounding environment, or what is referred to as the soundscape, similarly approaches the notion of everyday sounds as a significant, aesthetic and meaningful phenomenon. Those traditional distinctions between the notions of music and its antonym, noise, is best described by Schafer as a difference of cultural significance and the relationship of a sound to its acoustic community, that is, a formally or informally organized group of people who share (regularly or irregularly) a particular soundscape.10 Schafer, along with colleagues at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC, Canada), developed an approach to conceptualizing, analyzing and identifying sounds initially within the test bed of the urban environment of the city of Vancouver. It is this rich heterogeneous field of sounds that provided the initial investigations of the field of acoustic ecology in the 1970s as an important basemetric for better understanding how a classification systems might be developed that describes and analyses sounds as ‘sonic objects’. As a term that is directly derived from landscape, a soundscape includes all auditory phenomena within any given sounding environment. Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project (WSP) at Simon Fraser University as a means to bring a diverse number of researchers together from music composition, cultural theory, acoustic engineering and urban design. Under this guise of interdisciplinary thinking Schafer saw that: The home territory of soundscape studies will be the middle ground between science, society and the arts. From acoustics and psychoacoustic we will learn about the physical properties of sound and the way sound is interpreted by the brain. From society we will learn how mankind behaves with sounds and how sounds affect and change this behavior.11 The ongoing investigation into acoustic ecologies and the sounding environment has been further codified through its enthusiastic uptake in Japan via the Japanese Society for Acoustic Ecology, whose 1996 project together with the Japanese Ministry for the Environment was responsible for the documentation of ‘100 Soundscapes of Japan’. The project sought to engage local people with promoting and nominating important sounds and soundscapes as cultural symbols. This approach to understanding sounds within a cultural and semiotic context is what Barry Truax has suggested as the paradigm of the ‘communicational model’ rather than the standard applied acoustic or noise engineering approach of the ‘energy transfer model’.12 Indeed, both approaches have been variously integrated by the acoustic ecology movement as a means to understand soundscape not only in terms of quantitative site conditions (i.e. of the measurement of auditory phenomena via standardized acoustic metrics), but similarly the semiotics of sound as signifier. But more pertinent to the notion of sound design within a Japanese garden, and for a method for a closer reading and understanding of its auditory and spatial properties, Schafer nominates three important key terms of acoustic ecology: ‘soundmarks’, ‘keynote sounds’ and ‘signals’. Any studied soundscape invariably contains all three phenomena, though the content and relationships between each are contingent on cultural paradigms, economic factors and degree of built infrastructure/landscape form. Like soundscape, the term soundmark is a derivative meaning ‘a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community’.13 Typical soundmark examples may include temporal markers such as church/temple bells, 313 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 Adh! an (Muslim call to pray), town square clocks and foghorns or a waterfall in a Japanese garden (figure 1). The notion of a keynote is based on the musical concept of key center or home tonality. It is used primarily as a means to describe an anchoring sound within a soundscape: Keynote sounds are those that are heard by a particular society continuously or frequently enough to form a background against which other sounds are perceived.14 Such sounds are also described as drones, and examples include the sounds of the sea for maritime communities, air conditioner or fan noise as well as traffic sounds. For Jean François Augoyard though, drones are not only present within an acoustic environment as the ground against which the figure is distinguished, but equally as an indicator to the qualities of a space.15 The third key term used by Schafer for auditory classification is signal. Signals are regarded as foreground sounds within the soundscape and form auditory warnings of that community within urban acoustic ecologies. In the twentyfirst century such warnings have become predominately electronically generated (sirens, horns, etc.) though the sounds of whistles and bicycle bells, etc., allow for complex layers of information to be communicated to a members of an acoustic community. But the notion of the soundscape of a Japanese garden, its acoustic community, plethora of soundmarks, keynotes and signals, is for acoustician Barry Blesser and environmental psychologist Linda-Ruth Salter only half of the picture. Their concept of ‘aural architecture’16 seeks not only to place an importance on understanding the cultural, historical and spatial significance of sounds themselves, but also the landscape or architectonic context in which they are situated. Blesser and Salter speak of the importance of recognizing what are termed ‘passive aural embellishments’ or those architectonic or landscape features for which such features’ materiality, geometric form or positioning in space cause particular types of acoustic behaviors or auditory signatures to occur regarding the sound of the space in question (figure 2). As a foil, they suggest considering the actual sounds (whether these are ‘imported’ or ‘indigenous’ to the space) as ‘active aural embellishments’. The two concepts then highlight the necessity of considering the effects of the spatial environment in creating particular types of listening experiences, where sounds and the landscape or architectonic context in which they 314 appear produce particular types of auditory encounters. Of a similar importance, too, is what Blesser and Salter call the relationship between the ‘acoustic horizon’ (first defined by Schafer) and the ‘acoustic arena’. An acoustic arena is the total area in which a listener (who is located within it) can hear a sound source, and the acoustic horizon is the distance measureable to the most remote source that can be heard. The acoustic arena, then, is a measurement relative to the sound source and its area of perceptibility (figure 3) and the acoustic horizon relative to the listener and their notion of a maximum distance of auditory perception. Sounds of the Japanese garden By using the approaches of Truax, Schafer, Blesser and Salter as a suitable conceptual framework, a closer examination of the function and taxonomy of sounds occurring within a Japanese garden can be illuminated and thus a clearer picture regarding the notion of sound design within a Japanese garden explored. Indeed, from historical accounts of Japanese gardening treatises such as the fifteenth-century Senzui narabi ni yagy! o no zu (trans. Illustrations for Designing Mountain, Water, and Hillside Field Landscapes)17 or the Tsukiyama teizo den (Transmissions on Mountain Construction and Garden Making),18 a strong emphasis is placed on considerations regarding the selection, placement and meaning of rock groupings. Nineteenth-century ex-patriot British architect Josiah Conder (1852–1920) also used such a taxonomic approach in his first writings regarding Japanese garden design. By building on past historical treatises, Conder describes over 100 named varieties of stones that are appropriate for specific areas of the garden in terms of their contours, colors and textures, as well as their usefulness as illusionary devices to evoke native fauna or mythical mountain peaks from China.19 What, then, is the taxonomy of sounds that can be attributed to a Japanese garden, and, moreover, how may such a taxonomy give a clearer picture regarding notions of its sound design and the manner in which such a sound design has historically produced particularly meaningful auditory encounters for its acoustic community? Historically, the Japanese garden tradition has been, as Peter Jacobs and Josée Desranleau have argued, ‘closely associated with spirituality, and is indeed rich with symbolic meanings, and thus, even secular aesthetic choices are often rooted in ancient religious beliefs’.20 It is not Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden figure 1. The upper garden waterfall at Shugaku-in Imperial Villa, Kyoto, provides an impressive soundmark to the garden through the design of its three-stage drop, moss covered banks and deliberately nuanced shadowing path the closely placed steps of which requires a slowing down from visitors and thus a greater chance for a deeper auditory awareness. Source: original image ‘Shugakuin Imperial Villa, Kyoto, Japan — Upper Garden male waterfall’ by Daderot, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2007. 315 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler figure 2. Topographic manipulations at Koishikawa Korakuen, Tokyo. Here, a small hill named sho-rozan forms not only an intriguing landscape feature, but also an effective passive aural embellishment. The geometry and materiality of the sculpted mound, in addition to the heavy tree cover, absorbs and filters incoming sounds from the exterior urban environment it directly faces. Source: photograph by author. 316 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden classes and their relationship to semiotic constructions, soundscape, landscape forms and other influential spatial phenomena. Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 Integrated sound design features figure 3. Shiraito-no-taki, Koishikawa Korakuen, Tokyo. An exceptional example of the creation of a highly defined acoustic arena occurs at the shiraito-no-taki due to the materiality of the rocks and topography of the immediate surroundings. Sounds from the waterfall are reflected out across the shallow pond and off the numerous rocks directly to the visitor, though due to the nature of the winding access path, the feature can only be heard within a relatively small area that is congruent with the viewing perspective from the path. Source: photograph by author. therefore such an egregious notion to consider the importance of sounds and sound design within a Japanese garden as an equally well-considered and symbolic compositional structure. To begin with, there are, as Schafer has already indicated, a number of sound classes operating within a Japanese garden that can be classified at the uppermost level as collections or families of sounds specifically designed or known for their premeditated effects. In addition to these considered or premeditated sound objects are those that are free or existing outside of the design proper of the garden. The sound design of a garden is thus a natural consequence of the garden as a small ecology of fauna and flora as well as its situation (at least in modern times) within urban areas and the built environment. Below I will discuss at more length particular or typical elements or instances of these sound Of the family of sounds that I have nominated as integrated within a Japanese garden are those most obvious and appealing instances that occur from the many designed waterfalls and watercourses that are such an integral part of Japanese garden design. Water is a particularly important element within the Japanese garden,21 whether it is alluded to through the use of setting stones in the shape of a dry watercourse or virtual waterfall (karetaki), or through the placement of rocks within a bed of raked gravel (kare-sansui). Waterfalls are subtle yet highly considered design elements of a Japanese garden because they are often the loudest element within a garden. Additionally though, they also create numerous acoustic arenas within a garden such that notions about distance or scale can be conveyed through, for example, the muffling of the sound of a waterfall to depict a vast divide between viewer and object.22 Equally, a waterfall such as the exemplar ootaki at the Taisho-period Kyu Furukawa Teien in Tokyo has a particular frequency content that allows it to be heard at crucial points within the garden such as at the garden’s karetaki (figure 4).23 The burbling sounds of a brook or small stream are also important soundmarks of a Japanese garden because they orient the viewer in the visual and auditory scene and are a constant reminder of the sense of a garden as a living ecology. Within a number of cultures water has universally been associated with pleasantness and peacefulness24 such that its use in Japanese garden design is as a complementary device to the more obvious landscape forms, plantings and architectonic features. But within the family of integrated water sounds are two more mechanistic sound-producing devices that both use a natural means for their operations (falling water), but firmly sit within what Carlson25 identifies as the ‘artificial’ or the man-made aspects of Japanese garden design. Both the shishi-odoshi (figure 5) and the lesser known suikinkutsu (figure 6) are mechanized soundinstallation devices within a Japanese garden that produce periodic and more rhythmic soundmarks that act as a foil to the screen-like qualities of waterfalls and watercourses. The shishi-odoshi, or s! ozu, literarily translated as ‘deer scarer’, is a device constructed usually from wood and bamboo. A hollow tube is pivoted 317 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler figure 4. Karetaki, Kyu Furukawa Teien, Tokyo. Because of the relatively large drop of 10 m of the waterfall ootaki at Kyu Furukawa Teien, here at the karetaki its sounds are still audible. But because the waterfall at this point is unseen as it occurs at the other end of the heavily tree-lined pond shinjiike, it provides a type of ‘borrowed’ soundmark to the obvious connotations of slow moving water embodied in the rock arrangements at the karetaki. Source: photograph by author. 318 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden figure 5. Shishi-odoshi at Shisen-d! o, Kyoto. Source: original image ‘Souzu, a kind of Shishi odoshi, in Shisendo’ by w:ja: 利用者＋－, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2005. beyond its natural balance point and thus while it is at rest its heavier end is sitting on a flat rock. As water enters the spout and the tube fills to capacity, the off-center nature of pivot causes the tube to empty the water, after which a strong and loud percussive ‘thwack’ is usually heard. The cycle repeats as long as water is flowing into the spout. Shishi-odoshi were originally used within farming communities as a means by which to scare animals such as deer or wild boar that might be grazing within a vegetable plot. Their current use in Japanese gardens provides a striking and obvious soundmark given the size of the acoustic arena they command within a garden. In conjunction with a major water feature such as a waterfall or stream, the shishi-odoshi provides a recurrent and rhythmic counterpoint to the more constant and often backgrounded sounds of falling water. Their percussiveness and regularity provide an invariable reminder and perhaps awakening to figure 6. Suikinkutsu at Shinsh! ogokuraku-ji, Kyoto. Source: original image ‘Suikinkutsu in Shinsh! ogokuraku-ji, Kyoto, Japan’ by Ryosuke Hosoi, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, 2007. 319 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler visitors of the connection between the obvious aesthetic qualities of their sounds and their agrarian history. The somewhat lesser known suikinkutsu or ‘water koto cave’ is a device that found its way into Japanese garden design in the middle of the Edo period (1603–1867). The device consists of an empty clay pot that is inverted and buried in the ground.26 Having a hole located at its top (originally the bottom of the pot) allows water to enter such that the forming of drops and their splashing at the base of the pot cause a pleasant, rhythmic melody given the resonate qualities of the clay pot and its relative nearness to the ground level. Visitors to a garden activate the suikinkutsu given that they are always located directly within the vicinity of a stone basin, the ch! ozubachi or tsukubai. Because of the rise of the Japanese tea ceremony, of which a vital part of the ritual is the washing of hands before entering the garden and the tea house, the suikinkutsu found a wide spread use and appeal given its subtleties and melodic qualities. Thus the sounds of the suikinkutsu present themselves as particularly important soundmarks as they are indicative of the concept of ritualistic cleansing. This is also reinforced given that suikinkutsu are located near ch! ozubachi, which are an integral part of both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, where, similarly, the most common ritual conducted before entering either religious precinct is the washing of hands or rinsing of the mouth. Water, then, holds a particular importance in Japanese garden design, with larger gardens usually equipped with a pond or small lake (figure 7). But from within such landscapes other non-human sounds emerge. The primary residents of ponds within Japanese gardens are ornamental carp, or koi. Additionally, turtles are also extremely common within gardens in Japan. Both animals creates noises from their splashing or movement into or within the water, and it is a common feature of gardens that ponds are designed not to be more than a meter or so deep. The animals are thus always close to the surface of the water, which causes sounds from their activities to be heard and potentially amplified because of the acoustic nature of water as a reflector and its ability to diffract sounds towards, rather than away from the ground. The presence of water within a Japanese garden also attracts numerous bird species, whose activities on the ground when feeding, roosting in trees, bathing in shallows or flying and communicating above the garden are an essential part of the soundscape. Indeed, at the otowa no taki in the Edo-era garden Koishikawa Korakuen in Tokyo there is a particularly ingenious 320 integration of bird sounds into the sound design of the garden (figure 8). As a large expanse of still and shallow water, the otowa-no-taki is punctuated by sawatari (stepping stones) and other rocks. Here, in a clever play on words on the ambiguous naming of the feature (read in Japanese as ‘the waterfall of Otowa-san’, where Otowa is a common family name), the sounds of bathing birds is used as a soundmark given that the shallow water produces no audible sounds of an expected waterfall: from the ideograms, the meaning of otowa-no-taki (音羽の滝) may also be read as ‘waterfall of the sounds of bird feathers’. The types of birds found at the otowa-no-taki are generally of the smaller species, though within Japan crows are particularly common visitors to gardens, as are a host of other species whose calls and communications differ greatly in rhythmic and melodic content. The presence of birds, then, is often variable according to the species, available food and planting regimes found within the garden. Such appropriate conditions for interloping animals is also a factor in the presence of insects such as cicadas, which provide particularly strong melodic and rhythmic soundmarks to a garden and are indicative of the hotter temperatures and humidity found during high summer. Crickets may also be heard in late evening though they are much more subtle compared with the higher frequency content and louder nature of the sounds of cicadas. One cannot forget though the sounds that accompany human visitors to a Japanese garden, which have obviously changed considerably over the centuries. This is particularly evident in the sounds that accompany walking within a garden. Typical footwear used in the Edo-era included geta or wooden shoes. The sounds of such shoes and the necessity of walking slowly and assuredly meant that encountering paths made of gravel or earth produced a starkly different soundscape than today’s soft-sole shoes. Large stone sawatari would have provided subtle yet distinct sounds from period footwear, as would other hard surfaces such as wooden or stone bridges. Of course, in modern times, and particularly within the last 20 years, smart technologies (especially in Japan) have brought any number of unusual sounds into a garden from foreign languages to electronic warnings and various musics. Attitudes of visitors in those principally larger Japanese gardens that are now public are contemporaneous to other open public spaces such as parks or urban squares in which attitudes and behaviors have shifted greatly regarding the amount of noise and auditory impact a visitor Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden figure 7. Small ike or pond at Jish! o-ji, Kyoto. The small pond at Jish! o-ji, like those at numerous other Japanese gardens, is shallow and filled with koi whose feeding and social behaviors provide temporal soundmarks for the garden. Numerous rocks placed within the pond also act as islands for turtles whose movement into the water is often also marked by an acoustic event. Source: photograph by author. 321 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler figure 8. View looking from the otowa-no-taki southwest towards the depiction of the oigawa, Koishikawa Korakauen, Tokyo. Here, and because of the shallowness of the water and numerous partially submerged rocks, is a specially designed area for bird bathing and its associated soundmarks. Source: photograph by author. is permitted within a garden. This cultural shift has thus changed the soundscape of the Japanese garden with regard to those sounds that are brought into its spaces by visitors. Other sounds and sounds of the exterior Although the shift towards modernity and post-modernity may not have affected the physical layout of extant Japanese gardens in Japan to any large degree, it is obvious that the surrounding urban and architectural context has changed significantly.27 Even during the rise of mechanization and the greater Western influences that afforded Japan’s reopening to the West through the Meiji Restoration beginning in 1868, the manner in which a Japanese garden constructs its particular acoustic arenas and often manages to isolate its internal sound world from the outside sounds of the urban environment is telling. Today, in a metropolis such as Tokyo, numerous outside sound signals can be 322 heard in gardens such as those at Koishikawa Korakuen. Here, because of its proximity to a rollercoaster theme park, ongoing construction sites, vehicular traffic and transportation systems, all manner of electronic and mechanized sounds or keynotes are often audible through the effects of shifts in wind direction.28 Indeed, the auditory effects of weather, from rain, hail or even the extremely subtle sounds of snow underfoot, are equally part of a garden’s soundscape, though the particular presence of the sound of wind, especially through pine plantings provides both a keynote sound to other sound classes of the garden, while at the same time complementing landscape scenes, especially those depicting shorelines or seascapes, with an evocative auditory foil. In these instances an auditory analog of the sounds of waves and the ocean are provided to the localized landscape formations, thus greatly enhancing the meaning of the encounter. Wind also helps, though, to distribute sounds within the garden (especially from water features or waterfalls) to other parts of the garden, thus producing dynamic and changing acoustic horizons. This, then, plays discretely on the sense of the dimensions of the garden and the notion of where exactly the garden’s boundaries lie according to the stretching and contracting of the acoustic horizon. But historically, outside sounds have played a major part in the construction of a Japanese garden soundscape when one considers that, at least until the Meiji and Taisho eras, Japanese gardens were most often formed within the grounds or precincts of Buddhist temples or imperial courts. Therefore, most typical sounds that would be considered ‘outside’ or exterior sounds, though by consequence of their proximity, equal in their contribution to a garden’s soundscape, would be those from Buddhist ceremonies or monastic life.29 Given the reliance within Buddhist monasteries on a rejection of the use of language for the communication of activities (such as meals, meditation, work, etc.), and instead a use of myriad instruments to indicate these times, the types of signals that arise are myriad. Typical of these, and outside of the expected chanting, are the use of musical instruments such as the rin (metal gong), mokyugo (wood block), shakuhachi (wooden flute) and daiko (drum). But in addition to the Buddhist sounds from temples, festivals or celebrations of the imperial court may have also brought to a garden’s soundscape the music of gagaku and musical drama of Noh, as both of these genres were often performed outdoors. sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 Reconsidering the multi-sensory nature of Japanese garden design Though there has been an extensive discourse regarding the spatial and aesthetic properties of Japanese garden design, as I have outlined above, there is also a plethora of different soundmarks, keynotes and signals that form the soundscape of a Japanese garden and thus creates multi-sensory encounters. The majority of these sounds must have been even casually considered in the historical design phase of a garden given their particular acoustic effects and more importantly their semiotics (figure 9). This is in addition to the qualities that each gives in terms of their unique textures, rhythms and seasonality. But as John Murangi has noted: We think of the garden as subject to sight. A garden lies within the domain of the eyes. It is seen. When we think of a Japanese garden . . . we think about what is subject to sight.30 Nevertheless, I have formulated in table 1 those acoustic effects that are produced from the integration of numerous landscape forms with other devices and organisms that synthesize to form the totality of a Japanese garden’s soundscape. As can be seen from table 1, the sounds that are endemic to a Japanese garden vary considerably with regard to rhythm, seasonality, frequency content and relative loudness. They are in many ways design parameters of a garden and even a casual consideration of their qualities indicates that they provide a true multi-sensory dimension to approaching garden design. The choice then, for example, between the design of a waterfall whose drop is 2 m rather than 4 m will effectively produce an audible difference in the sound: as will the placement of stones, paths and other landforms within its acoustic arena. Hence, as Blesser and Salter note, the effectiveness of the sound design within a Japanese garden is also contingent on those passive aural embellishments that abound. For instance, consider the effect of rocks at or around the base of a waterfall. As Seiko Goto observes, ‘stones are the first element to be considered when determining the character of a Japanese garden’,31 though the importance of their placement also relates equally to their acoustic properties and effect on sounds. The hard and non-porous qualities of rock produce a reflective condition such that sounds coming from the falling water are amplified through the rocks situated at the base and around the exterior of the waterfall. This creates a type of ‘aliveness’ or reverberation in which sounds are prolonged in the air and thus tend to produce a sense of an enveloped space for the listener.32 Ponds and small lakes also assist in the distribution of sounds given their reflective qualities and their abilities to diffract sounds towards the ground and throughout the garden rather than skyward and into the diffuse state of the atmosphere. Similarly, thick stone walls can be often found at the boundaries of a garden, again a means with which to reflect those exterior sounds, and especially low frequency mechanized sounds from urban environments. Hillocks and artificial mountains also serve to contain the diffusion of sounds within a garden, given their absorptive qualities, and the effects of trees and ground cover can likewise produce filtering effects of high frequency sound content. There is, then, a unique synthesis between the creation and composition of landscape forms and the effects and qualities that arise from the sounds that emerge from such forms. Indeed, the combination of the calming and serene effect of the sounds of falling water and its obvious connotations to the ‘natural’ environment are often offset by those more percussive sounds emanating from a shishi-odoshi or perhaps the melodious polyphony created by the suikinkutsu. In any event, as Carlson33 observed, the sense of a dialectic being established between the natural and the artificial (or human made) also pervades the sounds of a Japanese garden. Even the actions and movement of visitors through the garden and along a path are a part of the sound design given the often great variability between materialities used on paths and, in particular, the stark differences between the sound of loose gravel compared to that of hard stone. Added to these subtleties are the seasonal differences found in insect and bird life. Animal visitors to a Japanese garden inevitable bring sounds too, and the various bird species in Japan produce a rich variety of potential soundmarks, often according to seasonal variations. High summer is a particularly active time for insects such as cicadas and crickets whose distinctive sounds bring an even greater significance to the visitor’s sense of the time of year and the meaning of the cycle of time as it appears not only in the shape and color of trees and plants, but similarly the sounds that accompany these colors and textures. The Japanese garden must be considered, therefore, as a total synthesis of landscape and soundscape forms such that encounters within a 323 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler figure 9. Small stream at Murin-an, Kyoto. The stream at Murin-an displays typical auditory qualities arising from its design, such as the considered placement of rocks within the flow of water to produce burbling sounds, the control of the speed and volume of water through the stream to adjust loudness and the relative shallowness and closeness to the ground level of the water flow to enable diffraction and diffusion of the sounds into the garden. Source: original image ‘Murinan, Kyoto, Japan’ by Oilstreet, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2005. 324 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden TABLE 1. Sounds endemic to Japanese garden design, classified as sets of objects according to family (or collection), class (or group), subclass (type) and some notes regarding particular acoustic properties found within elements (or instances) of each subclass. Family Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 Water Fauna Classes Waterfalls None Water courses None Shishi-odoshi Suikinkutsu None None Water basins Ch! ozubachi Ponds Tsukubai None Birds Insects Fish Flora Turtles Trees Human activity Shrubs Paths Weather Subclasses 619 subclasses Crickets Cicadas Koi Visitors None Conifers Deciduous None Gravel Stone Earthen None Wind None Precipitation Snow Rain Hail Element properties Instances may vary in loudness and frequency content according to various factors (drop height, water flow, rock placement, etc.) Instances may vary in loudness and frequency content according to various factors (incline, water flow, rocks, bends, etc.) Variability in loudness and rhythm according to size of tube, volume of water, pivot point, etc. Variability in rhythm and pitch according to size of pot, volume of water, materiality of pot, hole size, etc. Frequency content stable among subclasses, though variability in loudness according to size, number of users, etc. Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness and frequencies according to size, number of fish, depth, etc. Large variability in rhythm, pitch and loudness according to the 619 recorded species Large variability in rhythm, pitch and loudness according to the species of each subclass Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness according to size, number, particular activity, etc. Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness according to size, etc. Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness according to size, shape, etc. Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness according to size, shape, season, etc. Frequency content stable, though variability in loudness according to size, etc. Large variability in frequency and loudness according to the materiality of each subclass and the materiality of footwear of the visitor, e.g. geta vs. running shoes Stability in frequency content of human speech, though greater variability in introduced by sounds from smart phones, etc. Slight variations of the loudness and filtering effects of wind through different materials, e.g. pines, temples, etc., though stable regarding frequency content Variability in loudness of precipitation falling on different materials according to each subclass, e.g. rain on pond, hail on temple roof, etc. Source: the author. 325 Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: fowler garden are not simply those that are constructed from the visual immediacy alone, but from a sense that each encounter and moment within the landscape is an equal opportunity to experience a balanced and considered sound design. Perhaps what is needed, then, is a return to what Imada34 nominates as the lost approach of traditional Japanese culture, which as the historical catalytic forebear of the Japanese garden, regards the totality of the sounding environment as a capable aesthetic potential in which listening experiences between the sounds of music and the sounds of a waterfall are neither a separable nor divisible aesthetic encounter. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Universität der Künste, Berlin NOTES 1. David Young and Michiko Young, The Art of the Japanese Garden (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2005), p. 20. 2. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, the Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 167. 3. Barry Blesser and Ruth Linda Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening: Experiencing Aural Architecture (Boston: MIT Press, 2007), p. 66. 4. For a discussion on this matter and its implications, see Michael Fowler, Sound Worlds of Japanese Gardens. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spatial Thinking (Biefield: Transcript-Verlag, 2014). 5. Jiro Takei and Marc Peter Keane, Sakuteiki, Visions of the Japanese Garden (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), p. 170. 6. E. G. Seidensticker, translator, The Tale of Genji (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1976), Vol. 1, p. 384. 7. Tadahiko Imada, ‘The Grain of Sound: Does Music Education ‘Mean’ Something in Japan?’, in Wayne D. Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 154. 8. Tadahiko Imada, ‘The Japanese Sound Culture’, The Soundscape Newsletter, 9, 1994, p. 5. 9. See, for example, one of the first nineteenth-century Western accounts of the Japanese garden by Josiah Conder, Landscape Gardening in Japan (New 326 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. York: Dover, 1964) as well as Kuck’s reading of the meaning of various elements of a Japanese garden in Loraine Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden (New York, NY: Weatherhill, 1968). For an in-depth discussion on acoustic communities, see Chapter 15 of R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977). Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 4. Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001), p. 5. Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 10. Barry Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Burnaby, BC: Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999) [CDROM]. Jean François Augoyard, A l’écoute de l’environnement: répertoire des effets sonores (Marseille: Éditions Parenthéses, 1995). Barry Blesser and Ruth Linda Salter, Spaces speak. David Slawson (transl.), ‘Senzui narabi ni yagy! o no zu’, in Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens (New York/Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987). Einkinsai Kitamura, Tsukiyama teizo den (Osaka: K! ochiya Tasuke, 1735). Conder, Landscape Gardening in Japan, p. 41. Josée Desranleau and Peter Jacobs, ‘From Conception to Reception: Transforming the Japanese 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. Garden in the Montreal Botanical Garden’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 29/ 3, 2009, p. 211. Günter Nitschke, Japanese Gardens, Right Angle and Natural Form (Köln: Taschen, 1999). See in particular Slawson’s discussion on traditional waterfall design in relation to the historical garden treatise ‘Senzui narabi ni yagy! o no zu’ in Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens, p. 163. Michael Fowler, ‘Hearing a Shakkei: The Semiotics of the Audible in a Japanese Stroll Garden’, Semiotica, 197, 2013, pp. 101–117. Wei Yang and Jian Kang, ‘Soundscape and Sound Preferences in Urban Squares: A Case Study in Sheffield’, Journal of Urban Design, 10/1, 2005, pp. 61–80. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, p. 167. Yoshikawa Isao, Elements of Japanese Gardens, transl. Christopher Witmer (Tokyo: Graphic-sha, 1990), pp. 93–94. Bognar Botond, ‘Surface Above All? American Influence on Japanese Urban Space’, in Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (eds), Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 45–80. Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 13:28 24 February 2016 sound as a considered design parameter in the japanese garden 28. Michael Fowler, ‘Sound, Aurality and Critical Listening: Disruptions at the Boundaries of Architecture’, Architecture and Culture, 1/1, 2013, pp. 159–178. 29. For an excellent overview on the sheer variety of Buddhist instruments see Helen J. Baroni, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Zen Buddhism (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2002), p. 231. 30. John Murangi, ‘Gardening at a Japanese Garden’, in Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (eds), Symbolic Landscape (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009), p. 313. 31. Seiko Goto, ‘Maintenance and Restoration of Japanese Gardens in North America: A Case Study of Nitobe Memorial Garden’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 29/4, 2009, p. 305. 32. Michael Fowler, ‘Mapping Sound-Space: The Japanese Garden as Auditory Model’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 14/1, 2010, pp. 63–70. 33. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, p. 167. 34. Imada, ‘The Japanese Sound Culture’, p. 5. 327