Saving sounds and smells from extinction

Saving sounds and smells from extinction

The smell of old books, the sound of church bells, a local dialect or the smell of a city without pollution could today be considered endangered heritage. Their degradation is less visible than that of a monument, which is precisely why their protection is more urgent. “The bell ringers are in danger of extinction,” the Campaners d’Albaida association in Valencia, Spain (pictured) lament.

(Campaners d’Albaida)

From the most illustrious cathedrals to the humblest of chapels: whenever Manuel Mendo calls up a church asking to play one of its ancient pipe organs, he is unlikely to encounter resistance. A piano teacher by trade, Mendo has over the years become the guardian of the centuries-old sound of the Iberian organ, a baroque instrument that has been slowly falling silent over the last century. Of the nearly 3,000 that remain in Spain, only about 1,900 are currently in use. The rest have no one to play them. And, if they are not played, they die.

“The simple act of turning them on, making them sound, letting the air pass from the bellows to the pipes is vital for their maintenance,” says Mendo. “Many organs have not been played in 30 to 40 years.”

Mendo works selflessly to maintain these instruments. Because once an Iberian organ goes out, its sound can never been replaced. “If an organ breaks down, replicas can be made, but the original sound can no longer be revived – unless it is restored. Its sound is unique,” says Mendo.” Losing it, he argues, should be as painful as watching Notre Dame burn. Like cathedrals, sounds too are part of our heritage.

In January 2021, France became the first country to legally recognise ‘sensory heritage,’ a concept that refers to sounds and smells that form part of a people’s identity and should therefore be protected and passed on to future generations.

“When we think of heritage we generally think of buildings, works of art, even intangible expressions such as traditions or folklore, but we rarely think about the sensory dimension of that heritage,” Cecilia Bembibre, a researcher specialising in the study of historical smells at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, tells Equal Times.

“The connections between sensory perceptions and identity are very strong. There are places where you can experience the culture of a country through its sensory input,” says Bembibre. She cites the example of Japan, which in 2001 compiled a list to preserve the places whose smells it considered most representative. In most cases, unfortunately, the empire of the visual prevails over the remaining senses. Like Spain’s church organs, certain sounds and smells that are significantly more vulnerable to the passage of time have succumbed to social and economic changes, population movements, environmental degradation, the advance of new technologies and the lack of generational replacement.

The smell of old books, the sound of church bells, a local dialect or the smell of a city without pollution could today be considered endangered heritage. Their degradation is less visible than that of a monument, which is precisely why their protection is more urgent.

The French law

In early 2021, in a novel decision, France ordered the protection by law of several of its sounds and smells, specifically those of the French countryside. It all started with an incident involving a rooster.

In 2019, a couple in the village of Saint-Pierre-d’Oléron took their neighbour’s young rooster Maurice to court for crowing too early in the morning. It was one of many conflicts that began to arise between neighbours with the arrival of new residents who, attracted by the idealised image of the countryside, would soon discover that rural life also sounds and smells – and not always to everyone’s taste.

While the court ultimately ruled in favour of Maurice, in order to avoid further confrontations, the decision was made to create a sensory heritage law that would recognise the crowing of roosters, as well as the smell and mooing of cows, the braying of donkeys and the sound of tractors as part of rural identity and thus protected from any future lawsuits.

“The problem with photos is that they don’t have a smell. People have to understand that landscapes sometimes smell of manure and that’s the way they’re supposed to smell, it’s their essence,” says Luis Fuentes, deputy mayor of Ribadesella.

Officials in this municipality in Asturias, Spain decided to put up a poster warning tourists to “assume the risks” of rural life, including the sounds of church bells, cowbells and roosters. “If you can’t handle all this, you may not be in the right place,” concluded the message that made headlines in the Guardian.

“The problem isn’t tourism, it’s the lack of rural culture,” Fuentes insists. “We want people who come here to respect the maize plantations, the cows, the hens, the donkeys, because they are the ones who provide us with the products we consume every day. We have to defend what is ours, what is essential.”

Against the showcase city

If we were to cover our eyes and walk through the centre of any modern western city, it would probably be difficult to tell which one we were in. Today they all sound and smell pretty much the same. The traffic, the relentless shuffling of feet, the background music being piped out of shops and the sickly-sweet smell of perfume wafting from shopping centres all combine to create the same artificial atmosphere. As anthropologist Cristina Larrea Killinger points out in her book La Cultura de los Olores (The Culture of Smells), urban centres have become “showcase spaces, packaged into just another commodity”.

Something similar is happening with sounds. Íñigo Sánchez-Fuarros of the Institute of Heritage Sciences acknowledges that “we are witnessing a loss of experiential diversity, especially in the cities most oriented towards tourism.” Sánchez-Fuarros, who has spent years researching the impact of tourist activity on the soundscape of Lisbon, sees the city gradually losing its “soul”.

“Right now in Lisbon you would be hard-pressed to find a lookout point or a terrace that doesn’t have a DJ, a live band or recorded music playing,” he explains. “Western cities have long since been transformed into cacophonous spaces for tourist consumption.”

Faced with the homogenisation and commodification of our cities, several research projects seek to safeguard our sensory heritage. One such project is Sensory Maps by researcher Kate McLean, who designs original maps of city smells. Another is the European project Odeuropa, whose mission is to investigate and even to reproduce now extinct smells such as those of the Industrial Revolution or the bourgeois salons of the 19th century.

“The senses of hearing and smell have never been respected as a source of knowledge. One of the objectives of Odeuropa is to change that,” says Bembibre, a member of this ambitious project that brings together historians and linguists to identify and trace olfactory references in paintings, medical treatises and novels with the help of artificial intelligence. Like artefacts from an excavation, these recovered smells can then be preserved and exhibited in museums for future knowledge.

Some interesting initiatives that focus on sound include Sound Earth Legacy, which works to preserve the sonic legacy of nature, and the Museum of Endangered Sounds, whose extensive collection ranges from the sound of a two-horse Citroën to a typewriter and an old telephone.

The Sonotomia project currently being developed in Portugal, Spain and Hungary collects and catalogues sounds from a variety of environments – natural, rural and urban – which sound artists then use to create musical compositions.

“We know that some of these sounds can disappear with the passage of time, either because of the evolution of the ecosystem itself, the displacement of species, the arrival of mass tourism or because something is built that emits noise. This sound archive is intended to preserve the heritage we have now,” explains Mónica Busquets, coordinator of Sonotomía in Albarracín, the Spanish municipality participating in the project. Her archive is made up of the voices of local residents, the murmur of the river, the electromagnetic sound of stones, and of silence, the most threatened sound of all.

Protected by UNESCO

In the absence of laws like the one passed in France, most places in the world seeking to protect their sensory heritage turn to UNESCO, whose Intangible Cultural Heritage List covers all kinds of traditions, artistic expressions, festivals, knowledge and crafts which are fundamentally linked to the identity of a people. While the list includes neither castles nor thousand-year-old ruins, its value is nonetheless incalculable. This ethereal heritage, handed down from generation to generation, represents a last bastion of authenticity in today’s increasingly homogenous world.

The list features nearly 600 instances of intangible cultural heritage from 131 countries, including of course sounds – the tamborradas of Spain, the cowbells of Portugal, the Turkish silbo, the work songs of Colombia and musical styles such as flamenco, tango and reggae – and, to a lesser extent, smells – the preparation of coffee in Saudi Arabia, the perfumes of the French region of Grasse and the smell of gunpowder in the Fallas of Valencia.

“The main requirement is that the heritage must be living, that the communities themselves keep these cultural manifestations alive, that it represents a unifying element, that it builds community,” explains Sara González Cambeiro, anthropologist and author of the book El Patrimonio Inmaterial (Intangible Heritage). While the list may seem long, securing a place on it is by no means easy; in fact, UNESCO only reviews fifty applicants each year. This year, the bell ringers of Albaida will try their luck.

People in this village in Valencia, Spain, have been ringing their bells manually every day since the 13th century. Thanks to the efforts of some 20 volunteer bell ringers, this tradition carries on to this day. “The bell ringers are in danger of extinction,” laments Antonio Berenguer, their spokesman.

As he explains, most of the bell towers in Spain were electrified in the late 1950s. “The thinking was that bell ringers weren’t needed. Mass electrification drastically simplified the immense wealth of the art of bell ringing and a certain authenticity was lost.”

In 2018, as part of their bid for review by UNESCO, the bell ringers of Albaida succeeded in uniting more than 1,000 bell towers across Europe to ring their bells manually at the same time. The idea worked, and in 2021 their candidacy was approved. “Recognition alone isn’t protection, it’s not a guarantee that something will be saved, but it does help to make a heritage site visible, to give it the importance it deserves,” says Berenguer.

Íñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, however, has his doubts. Recognition, he argues, can sometimes turn heritage into another object of consumption. He cites the case of Fado, which was included on the UNESCO list in 2011.

“Fado is a living genre, with a large community of practitioners in Portugal, but its existence today is linked to tourism. With no tourism during the pandemic, Fado disappeared because the Portuguese themselves no longer go to the Fado houses.”

As Sánchez-Fuarros argues, sounds and smells have no intrinsic value but are given value by the people who experience them. For a smell, good or bad, to go down in history, the most important thing “is the value that the community confers on it,” adds Bembibre.

“We must educate ourselves,” she argues, to smell and listen, so that, in the midst of this visual universe full of filters, we learn to identify the sounds and smells that make us who we are, to begin to value them and demand that they be preserved, just as the bell ringers of Albaida have done. “Every time we hear bells being rung by hand we are hearing the same sounds that our ancestors heard,” says Berenguer, and that alone makes it worth saving. It is just as important as saving a cathedral.

This article has been translated from Spanish by Brandon Johnson