Read by Gloria Sanders
Passing under the redbrick arches of Tidemarsh University, it is impossible to ignore the famous architecture that styles its buildings to resemble the subjects studied within the respective departments. The Institute of Zoology is a rabbit, the School of English is a stack of books, and the Film & Media Department is a camera (its windows call to mind the frames of a reel). The fresher’s eye eagerly devours every edge and corner of the place; even the jaded doctoral student will admit to its ingenuity and undeniable charm.
The Archive is, of course, Felix Schoendecker’s life’s work, and one of the most astounding (if rarely visited) collections of its kind in the world. Schoendecker himself grew up in a tiny hamlet near the north coast of Germany, the only child of a police inspector and a schoolmistress. His childhood was, by his own description, “quiet.” Most of little Felix’s young life was confined to the four walls of their crumbling cottage, his mother rendering the building in cross-stitch from every angle, his father arranging and rearranging their modest bookshelf.
It wasn’t until Schoendecker turned 18 and moved to London on a biology scholarship that he experienced his notorious revelation. The clatter of overhead train tracks, the clumsy flap of pigeon wings, the obnoxious roar of the daytime motor engine, the consoling hush of its nocturnal cousin, and everywhere the clamorous voices of people who actually had to shout to be heard – the city was an education in sound that quite overwhelmed the provincial young student.
It was then that Schoendecker began collecting sounds – perhaps envisioning an eponymous archive far into the future, or perhaps just enlivened by the blind energy of youth.
The first experiment was a disaster. He had stood on the pavement to capture external ambience, and the recording was a fuzzy, inconclusive jumble. So many sounds were crammed into the thin strip of cassette tape that none emerged with clarity. If one were to faithfully render the world, it seemed, it would first need to be itemised.
He started in his small bedsit, holding a Tascam microphone close to each surface to capture its sound. Pencil on paper, eraser on paper, pen on paper, paper tearing. And then the comprehensive adjuncts: pencil on eraser, eraser on pen, pencil broken in half. Dawn was creeping through the thin curtain of his window before Schoendecker had exhausted the possible sounds from his desk alone.
Compelled by a new vocation that he neither understood nor particularly enjoyed, Schoendecker would race home from his lectures to take up the Tascam once more, recording the vigilant flick of the light switch, the creak of a tired floorboard, the stubborn shuffle of hessian on iron. He collected the sounds on cassette tapes, and had then to add these too to the collection. Rattling case, squeaking hinge, the various disparities of clatter when dropped from different heights and onto different surfaces – all of this was recorded, noted, and stored.
His studies suffered. Deadlines passed him by as he pursued his obsession. Stern warnings from his tutors were met with vague, mumbled excuses. He had stopped going to class altogether by the time he took the microphone outside.
Initially, he limited himself to the small street that he lived on in Kensal Rise. It was not only space enough to contain an immense variety of sounds, but a shifting mosaic of parameters too. If he recorded the clunk of a loose paving stone baking under the midday sun, he would need the same sound on a rainy day. It wouldn’t do to simply capture a washing machine’s cycle in the laundrette; it was necessary to get each unit’s barrelling tarantella full, half-full, and empty.
It was common for curious passers-by to inquire of him what he was doing. Did he work for the radio? Was he a scientist? Or was he just unemployed and insane? Schoendecker would turn on them with the microphone, silently waiting for them to speak again, to be captured, to be catalogued. Most would walk away in fear. He was, after all, a fearsome image: bearded and gaunt, missing most meals as the better part of his stipend was spent on cassette tapes. The tapes had taken up almost all of the floor space in his room, save for a slim path from the door to the bed. Of course, each new tape had to be added to the collection, the sound of its fall onto the incrementally increasing pile recorded, catalogued and stored back in the collection.
As gossip spread of a rake-thin man listening to washing machines, Schoendecker was approached by the curator of a modern art gallery, who offered him a grant to enable his work. Schoendecker rented a studio where, after first capturing the aural possibilities of the empty space, he housed and properly indexed his tapes.
His work was relentless, and so it was by sheer profile alone that he was appointed as a junior instructor at Tidemarsh. His classes were merely a public illustration of his continuing work. He would face his class of students stretched across the length of his desk, tapping an oyster shell with each phalange of each knuckle, all the while indexing the tapes in his meticulous records.
Despite his increasing renown, Schoendecker was inwardly in turmoil. Each addition to the catalogue only revealed another lacuna. The crow of a cockerel at dawn, but not at noon? The zipper of a jacket worn by a stout man, but not a slim woman?
His own wrinkling skin and greying hairs spoke of an eventual deadline, and more importantly of the entropy and decay that afflicts all objects in space. Their undocumented changes in pitch and timbre pecked away at his mind day and night.
Even a shoe, he reasoned, wears away in time, and so he was compelled to document the expiration of his own shoe in the footsteps it made on the ground. But he also knew that this project was impossible unless he could capture the shoe’s every step. Not only a step on grass, concrete, carpet, wet tarmac, woodchips, and steel, but every instance of every footfall: only thus could the life of an object be properly captured. And yet, for all that work, that was all he could achieve. The life of just one object.
At length, he was persuaded to digitise the existing archive. Every sound in his tapes, from the remote rustle of brick dust in cotton to the minute plops of water sprayed on oak and the steady, sincere hum of an empty mall – it was all made available via the university’s computers. Though the technicians insisted that the transfer machines made no sound, Schoendecker recorded the transfer process of every single tape, in order to put those sounds into the archive as well. “Silence is a sound” became the ultimate Schoendeckerian maxim, making regular appearances in undergraduate dissertations and bathroom stalls alike.
When he was swept into the higher offices of academia, Schoendecker’s keynote speech was a rambling, though, by all accounts, rousing piece that spoke of an entire city recreated in sound.
‘Imagine,’ he said to the packed theatre, ‘every metropolitan sound extracted as individual, described, audited, catalogued and made ready for inspection. Ambience, in this cacophony that we call urban life, is nothing but noise. What if we could break down the entire chaotic sum and reassemble it, piece by separate piece, the model of cohesion?’
Schoendecker’s dream was never realised in his lifetime. Amidst the deafening standing ovation that followed his speech, he returned to his seat, exhaled once, and died. In his hand was a tape recorder – its tiny, patient whirring unheard by any of the auditorium’s eager ears.
Perhaps in the future an enterprising student will find their way into the Archive and assemble the world that he put there waiting to be built. Perhaps they will also piece together something of the man, down there in those dark, silent corridors that lie beneath us all.
(c) Joel Blackledge, 2016
Joel Blackledge has been a teacher, bartender, historian, potwash, furniture salesman, transcriber, cameraman, and for one day he was a lumberjack. Now he mostly writes stories and makes films.
Gloria Sanders’s work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
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