There often are some specific sounds that one associates with specific places, so much so that when you hear those sounds your brain seems to automatically register you present at that specific place. These sounds seem to have become so familiar and so connected to a place, that their presence is not questioned any more, they are part of the place, part of the background. For example in Athens, there have always been some mobile sellers who use pick up vans to sell everything, from pots and soil to fruits and vegetables. Others collect old household items, from chairs and beds to fridges and washing machines and others simply ride around to advertise forthcoming theatre productions. What they all have in common is a megaphone and someone calling out what they are selling or buying and what they are advertising. These days some of the sounds are pre-recorded, but when I was small they used to improvise on the spot and call out loudly to everyone, making rhymes or even singing out to advertise their services. The theatre production callers often used music too to attract their audience. These sounds are so familiar and associated with Athens in my mind, that if I heard them one day in London, for an instance my brain would think I am in Athens. It would be a confusing thing.
I believe that a similar sound for a British person would be the ice cream van. I think that its music must be so synonymous to a childhood place or a vacation town, that it would bring you straight back there, were you to suddenly hear it in a foreign country. Ironically, when I first came to study in Newcastle, I often heard this strange music playing in the late spring afternoons underneath my house. I had no idea where it was coming from, as the van remained obscured from my view. I could tell that the sound was moving closer, then staying at one place and them moving away. But I found it an eerie and melancholic sound and it took me two whole years to finally work out it was an ice cream van announcing its appearance. I still find it quite extraordinary that two principally identical means of advertising mobile goods and services -using loud music or words- have such a distinct and unique association with a place, that I was unable to make the connection and guess that the music was there to advertise and sell something, just like it does in Athens.
A few years ago, I accompanied a good friend of mine to a short trip to Bucharest. Her apartment was in the centre of the city and we used it as our base for our ventures further out. The first day I was there, I was woken up by the most melodic singing voice I have ever heard in a man and sat up on the bed completely astounded. I had no idea what to think of it and I could only tell it was live and not recorded singing and that it was coming from outside the window. The second morning, I woke up before I heard anything and was waiting to see if I would hear the singing again. Soon enough I heard the same man singing and I opened the window to try and locate where it was coming from. I could not see anything below, the protruding balconies were blocking my view of the road. I could hear though some brass tingling and jiggling noises and some clicking noises too. I then thought that maybe someone was singing to a girl they liked below, in the fashion of a "candatha" love song of some Greek islands. On that day I told my friend about it and was thinking of this singing voice and its tune all day. The voice was stuck in my head and the tune was very haunting, repeating the words that sounded to me like: fare lui, fare lui.
I find this occurrence quite disturbing. I suspect that a similar thing might be happening with other very familiar things, not only with sounds and their connection to places. I find the beach where I spent a big part of my childhood summers so familiar to me that it almost feels it is my own. This summer I came across some pebbles on it which I have never seen there before. I came across them by chance when Aretousa picked up one and gave it to me. They look quite normal when dry, but once they are wet they reveal a very strange, almost futuristic network of lines all over their surface. There are not that many of them on the beach and I made a point of collecting only a few. These small little pebbles were such a shock to my sense of knowing the beach and my familiarity to it, that they fell literally like small bombshells on the whole summer. I took them out of my pockets and wet them and placed them on whatever was around and kept on checking them again and again. I found it quite amazing that a natural thing like those pebbles could have such a linear and geometric design on them; that what I considered a very natural place, with earthy colours and familiar single-colour pebbles, would suddenly produce these strange, almost man-drawn lines.
But mainly, the shock was to my sense of familiarity to the place, to a place where I feel extremely comfortable, and to the arrogant -and of course false- notion that one might really know a place or a person inside out. The crucial detail that things could change or that you simply fail to notice things seems to become obscured by that sense of comfort and familiarity, to the extent that I was unable to recognise something so familiar as a sound advertising some mobile goods, in a slightly different context, twice. But these pebbles were such a big surprise to my personal notion of the beach, that I suspect in the summers to come I will be much more perceptive to it and the way it has become now, after so many years.
I believe that a similar sound for a British person would be the ice cream van. I think that its music must be so synonymous to a childhood place or a vacation town, that it would bring you straight back there, were you to suddenly hear it in a foreign country. Ironically, when I first came to study in Newcastle, I often heard this strange music playing in the late spring afternoons underneath my house. I had no idea where it was coming from, as the van remained obscured from my view. I could tell that the sound was moving closer, then staying at one place and them moving away. But I found it an eerie and melancholic sound and it took me two whole years to finally work out it was an ice cream van announcing its appearance. I still find it quite extraordinary that two principally identical means of advertising mobile goods and services -using loud music or words- have such a distinct and unique association with a place, that I was unable to make the connection and guess that the music was there to advertise and sell something, just like it does in Athens.
A few years ago, I accompanied a good friend of mine to a short trip to Bucharest. Her apartment was in the centre of the city and we used it as our base for our ventures further out. The first day I was there, I was woken up by the most melodic singing voice I have ever heard in a man and sat up on the bed completely astounded. I had no idea what to think of it and I could only tell it was live and not recorded singing and that it was coming from outside the window. The second morning, I woke up before I heard anything and was waiting to see if I would hear the singing again. Soon enough I heard the same man singing and I opened the window to try and locate where it was coming from. I could not see anything below, the protruding balconies were blocking my view of the road. I could hear though some brass tingling and jiggling noises and some clicking noises too. I then thought that maybe someone was singing to a girl they liked below, in the fashion of a "candatha" love song of some Greek islands. On that day I told my friend about it and was thinking of this singing voice and its tune all day. The voice was stuck in my head and the tune was very haunting, repeating the words that sounded to me like: fare lui, fare lui.
The next day I woke my friend up earlier yet and we sat out on the balcony to wait for the man to sing again. And then we saw it; a horse and a carriage coming from all the way down the road, the hooves of the horse on the pavement clicking and the voice approaching, already really melodic from so far away. The cart was full of metal bits, parts of copper pipes, rusty cylinders, oil drums, brass handles hanging from ropes; everything was moving and making brass bell like noises. The man's voice was approaching so loud and haunting, I wished I was some sort of talent hunter person to take him off the street and straight into the opera house. If he wanted of course. I have never heard anything like his singing and my friend said he was saying "Fiare Luăm", which means literally, metal I take. For the second time I was unable to identify sound as the means for mobile sellers to advertise their goods and services; my familiarity to the Greek mobile sellers was so place-specific, so localised, that years of listening to their megaphones in Athens seems to have made no difference at all.
I find this occurrence quite disturbing. I suspect that a similar thing might be happening with other very familiar things, not only with sounds and their connection to places. I find the beach where I spent a big part of my childhood summers so familiar to me that it almost feels it is my own. This summer I came across some pebbles on it which I have never seen there before. I came across them by chance when Aretousa picked up one and gave it to me. They look quite normal when dry, but once they are wet they reveal a very strange, almost futuristic network of lines all over their surface. There are not that many of them on the beach and I made a point of collecting only a few. These small little pebbles were such a shock to my sense of knowing the beach and my familiarity to it, that they fell literally like small bombshells on the whole summer. I took them out of my pockets and wet them and placed them on whatever was around and kept on checking them again and again. I found it quite amazing that a natural thing like those pebbles could have such a linear and geometric design on them; that what I considered a very natural place, with earthy colours and familiar single-colour pebbles, would suddenly produce these strange, almost man-drawn lines.
But mainly, the shock was to my sense of familiarity to the place, to a place where I feel extremely comfortable, and to the arrogant -and of course false- notion that one might really know a place or a person inside out. The crucial detail that things could change or that you simply fail to notice things seems to become obscured by that sense of comfort and familiarity, to the extent that I was unable to recognise something so familiar as a sound advertising some mobile goods, in a slightly different context, twice. But these pebbles were such a big surprise to my personal notion of the beach, that I suspect in the summers to come I will be much more perceptive to it and the way it has become now, after so many years.
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