Songs for the Narrows — Danica Evering
This short soundwalk is framed as a five-segment musical composition. Recordings were gathered from the Don Valley Trail along the Narrows. This section of the Don River was part of the 1886 Don Improvement Plan to “solve” slow-moving polluted waters believed to cause miasmas and overwhelming flooding, barriers to city development. The river’s meandering curves were straightened, widened, deepened into a single concrete-lined channel. It didn’t work.
This soundwalk is meant to be heard in multiple environments, allowing the soundscape you’re walking through to blend with the piece. Listen with headphones that are not very soundproof, or with only one earbud, so the voices from your walk harmonize with sounds from the recording. If you listen with just one earbud, you may miss some spatialization but gain a different experience.
As a location, select a place where diverted attention will not cause any danger (not a busy street, heavily populated area, too close to a river). If you can, choose a place where you can walk roughly in one direction instead of a loop, where you can move like a river towards a lake. The Don Valley River and Parkway are parallel sonic spaces. Where I walk in Hamilton is a similar space, a footbridge over the Red Hill Valley Parkway, over a marsh, leading to the lake. Wave, wheel, wave, wheel, rushes—rushing, alike. Whose hands planned the road so close to the river? Did they think it made less of an impact since taxpayers only walked instead of lived there? Where is this space, for you, where you are?
a good August cricket, someone rings their bike bell but in an unassuming way
bees buzz close to the mic
click of gears as bikes whirr by
a young voice – “it’s still sad, like, hundred percent ”
a hum that could be a car or a bee, they blend back and forth
high to low – a plane or helicopter
thrum of a truck crests in the rush of traffic
more crickets, more bees, more bikes, faster this time
1. Descant / Solo - Riverdale Park Viaduct
A CLEARING - *ahem*
It is night. Wind murmurs past each branch and brush of grass. Below, before, the river begins a slow solo. After a sharp turn, it evens out straight, and then a wide curve. Can you hear it?
Two hundred years later, we’re on a bridge. An arc shooting across the sky. Beneath us cars whip past, an apocalypse of comets. Pushing frequency as they move through space: closer and higher as they approach and then their wake spreads out in low notes—fiery ripples from the prow.
Before this bridge was the Riverdale Park Viaduct across a highway, it was a butternut tree which fell across the river. The same gesture can mean a different thing, depending.
Thinking the river would be more useful and less inconvenient if it meandered less, the City spent years unbending. In the name of development, public health, industry, progress—they filled in dirt until it was straight, drawn on the land with a ruler. (To impose a line for your own benefit.) O, have mercy, river rocks reeds wriggling silver rustling wings.
What would it mean to trace a line by listening, instead? Kinesthetic sympathy is what we feel when we watch a dancer, a body winding through space. Our own muscles flex and release while watching.
Attention stretches towards—can listening be a choreography? Our ears reach out, yearning. As water curves and impacts—can we too?
Cars roar under our feet. Sound has a negative gravitational mass, waves fall through the ground to the water. Noise is a physical thing—a movement, a vibration, pushing molecules. All sound is a touch. The same gesture can mean a different thing, depending.
Who is pushing in this space?
Wind passes each branch and brush of grass, murmuring softly. Overhead, the night sky. Below, a river reflecting stars cascades and then narrows into one long note.
A CLEARING.
distant motors, and the trickle of the river
river moves from the right ear to the left and then back to the right, echoing the curve
a huge truck zooms by under our feet then heavy stereo cars
water continues at the same time
silence here, except for the voiceover
river resumes, construction, saw, rattling machinery
the river turns into a chord
chord gets quieter and narrows into a dial tone
voiceover only, no other noise
two recordings of the river, one splashing with birds chirping and one trickling stream with crisp traffic get louder and softer at different times to make the ear adjust
footsteps in mud
sweeping drone of traffic, ambient under a bridge
heavy motorcycle, rushing traffic like waves
2. Canon - Gerrard Street Bridge
Then the river divided: leading voice in one direction, heavy sweep.
The other follows (quiet for now; straighter).
Arching, an echo delayed by a few seconds.
Now a single channel where the straighter river runs.
The leading voice filled in.
Only the follower remains, hardened to stone.
This is a site of following and taking. You can see it in its map name, Don River. Seeing the valley, colonial lieutenant governor John Graves Simcoe named it after the River Don in England.
Don River Don.
That river was named after Dôn, a Celtic moon goddess, with banks also overflowing. A false identification and comparison, a grotesque yes, and.
A few millennia behind, the parkway echoes the river.
“Big Daddy”[1] Gardiner (an even later settler) dreamed of a road “winding through inaccessible land.”[2] In his dream no one was ever responsible for the forest or relations to these wet lands. In his dream even the squirrels can’t travel from treetop to treetop without ever touching the ground, holding up tiny arms to struggle before turning around dejected. In his dream it’s a blank page. He drives the first car through seemingly untouched vistas conquered with his wheels. Behind the first car, traffic roars.
Roads and Traffic Commissioner Sam Cass remembers this tracing: “The funny thing is we had to put those curves in it because that’s the way the Don Valley went,” he said. “Years later traffic engineers discovered you should put curves on highways because otherwise drivers start to do silly things and drive too fast.”[3]
quote enjoying end quote quote nature end quote
How can you listen without claiming?
Listen to the space you are breathing into.
Air fills and empties your lungs.
Here, the river divided around the first of many marshy islands, split and rejoined. A chorus of voices.
metallic pinging, ringing footsteps with delay so it echoes and gets louder with the traffic
distant motors, and the trickle of the river
river splashing, birds cheeping crests loudly
followed by the same sound only quieter, more muffled
traffic - musical howling fades
river returns
still river
traffic, ambient metallic, tires
footsteps in pebbles
a hush, the forest in the early evening—hum of crickets; a bird or a squirrel chirping
in the distance a child and a parent speak with one another
aggressive traffic
one zoom of a car which sounds solo and then followed by many many other engines
3. Interruption - Dundas Street Bridge
O backyard of a rapidly growing downtown!
O bold new chapter, revitalization!
O Master Plan!
This place has been “improved” many times. They’d never let it bend, barges can’t barge down a bent river. So, they straightened it out.
I’m trying to get across the river but a crane has fallen over the road. The wind moves and hesitates. Hovers like it knows it should do something. Transfixed, instead by the disaster. Indecisive fitful fingers stirring feathers though the body is still, crumpled—spanning city planters with their neat rows of popsicle tone petunias and ornamental grasses. Its long, slender neck is wrenched at a nauseating angle reaching higher than streetlights are. Or, were: warped now under the weight of the giant bird. Hollow bones are light but light is relative. Red feathers shadow fading yellow eyes.
The black beak glistens in the hot sun, spiked into concrete, narrowly missing a Wine Rack, a dry cleaner, and a croissanterie. People mill around, uncomfortable and uncertain. They narrowly escaped death so return to their lattes.
Someone in an orange mesh vest unfurls hands into a wide wingspan. Another holds an arm gesturing with the held arm in horror at the body on the ground.
The Don Improvement Plan was going to bring shipping to the Don, but it did not bring shipping to the Don. The Plan was supposed to prevent flooding and improve pollution, but it did not prevent flooding or improve pollution, “largely because it did not consider the full complexity of the Don River’s natural hydrology.”[4]
They drew a map over the winding river:
ROAD
SPECIAL RAILWAY
GENERAL RAILWAY
DOCK
CHANNEL
DOCK
GENERAL RAILWAY
SPECIAL RAILWAY
ROAD
A duck paddles over algae, blooming careful neon breaths into shallow water.
there is a very cute bird cheeping before and after this line like quotation marks
silence here
three big tracks of river and echo under the bridge crescendo until the end
domestic street in a courtyard on river street, a bit of hush, distant traffic, people speaking birds, a dog
construction enters thickly
saw rattling, a hammer (or a heel?) striking metal
a terrible crash, something very heavy falling
then
shouts
fluttery robotic screeching
sucking insects begin
warped metallic shrieks continue, but slowing
hasty footsteps, someone with a low rough voice says “I think so, man”
silence in a courtyard
a cicada rises
footsteps in grass
more cicadas droning
distant cars
4. Bow - Time and a Clock Bridge
Here, it became a bow. Two streams, running parallel.
Now the river is the channel and the highway sort of a river.
Sound is made of tension.
Some farmers say if you count the number of chirps a cricket makes in twenty-five seconds, divide by three and add four, you get the temperature. Rasping of leathery wings, a bow roughed up with rosin drawn against a string.
Sound ecologist Andra McCartney spoke about sound in marginal areas as “ecotones.” In ecology, an ecotone is a marginal zone where species from different ecosystems interact. Some live in the ecotone and nowhere else. “Tonos” is from Greek, to tighten, tension—even then, they connected it to music.
“What would it mean to pay attention to how sounds overlap, to how they rub up against each other, in whatever context?” she asks.[5] The straightened river rubs up against the highway, the railroad, the footpath. Construction overlaps with birds, the thrumming of bees.
How do the sounds of this place rub up against the sounds in your place? How do I find your matter in the air—can you feel my hand in the space between?
Early in the spring, the trees help me get down to the river. The heat of my fingers is melting the ice. I want to crack it. In the end, I just listen.
Over the bridge, wrought in iron: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” Everything is changing. Tension is power, power is contextual.
Can you hear the river running against the road?
cars rush by
metallic tracks
feet crunch on railway stone
water trickles
river rushes
water trickles
feet crunch on railway stone
metallic tracks
cars rush by
low drone of traffic under a bridge, and under that the river
metal rubbing up against metal like birds chirping
water and traffic—two different audio channels but getting louder in unison, motor shouts
crickets chirping
redwing blackbirds
a toad (or a saw?)
5. White Noise - Lakeshore
We’re at the lake. All we can hear is everything and nothing.
Collective sound energy of motorized vehicles = SUM (engines + air and gravel displaced by many moving objects + hiss of brakes).
Primarily though, traffic is the noise of tires rolling across pavement. Oil sings both the melody and descant: a mineral aggregate base held together by bitumen. Above it, rubber soars, impacts, departs.
Water moving over the riverbed, pushing insistently on pebbles, reeds, branches, fish. It only sings when it’s in motion. The roar of pressure and disruption.
Soft rhythmic pumping of plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets. Carrying oxygen and nutrients to the body, carrying metabolic waste to the lungs. So quiet you can barely hear it over the pulse of cardiac muscle clenching, valves opening and closing.
White noise has equal intensity at different frequencies, masking other noises. Deepening sleep, drowning alerts. Grant us rest.
Over hundreds of years, the Don curved into a meander. Twisting through the valley, moving glacial till, moved by stones and gravity and weather.
When the rain rushes in, it still floods over its concrete banks. Blurring the line between river and houses. An undoing, moving plants, animals, people.
It will not be contained.
They are digging a new mouth for the river. In a low-lying section of the valley, springing from the river’s lips (peat mouth): green rushes. From tiny seeds, covered by landfill for a hundred years. Bright ringing.
There—can you hear the lake?
birds, traffic, wind
bike bell
bees humming
hammer begins
more bees
in the background, crickets and birds above the cars
quick muddy footsteps
more distant traffic
dull tapping, hand shushing across a smooth surface, high glisten of melting ice
tires overlapping, water rushing as if from a pipe
white noise
geese honking
heavy motorcycle accelerating, shifting gears
traffic hisses past
left to right
cars
white noise
water enters—rushing, trickling over pebbles
white noise
pulsing of a heart through a stethoscope
lub dub lub dub
lub dub lub dub
white noise (alone this time)
river rushes again, birds chirping longer and louder
pouring rain
white noise
river joins the rain
rain gets even louder
white noise
kildeer cries over quiet traffic
geese honking
it could be waves
Endnotes
[1] His actual nickname.
[2] Dennis Duffy, “Historicist: How We Hyped the DVP,” Torontoist (September 3, 2016), https://torontoist.com/2016/09/historicist-how-we-talked-about-the-dvp/.
[3] Wheels, “Don Valley ‘Parking Lot’ hits milestone,” Wheels.ca (August 26, 2011), https://www.wheels.ca/news/don-valley-parking-lot-hits-milestone/.
[4] “The Straightening of the Don River (plaque)” Heritage Toronto, 2010.
[5] Andra McCartney, “Ethical Questions about Working with Soundscapes,” Organized Sound 21, no. 2 (June 30, 2016): 163.
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All sounds are field recordings except for two generated noises (a single note in the first song and white noise in the final song) and three pieces of narrative audio:
Cyborgcollective — Crash Thud — https://freesound.org/people/cyborgcollective/sounds/344677/
HerbertBoland — Heartbeat.wav — https://freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28343/
redpanda69 — Rainy Toronto — https://freesound.org/people/redpanda69/sounds/520953/