Sonic Geographies

Or, what do a Chicago blues joint and the Apostle Islands have in common?

A rainy night in Lincoln Park. Wet pavement on Halstead Street glistens with reflected neon making even the sidewalk a kind of statement of art deco. Half a block away, the air begins to vibrate with sound, the atmospheric score of the Blues mixing with the caccophony of Chicago’s north side. Car doors slam in bass notes. A siren wails a frenzied guitar solo, the orange and blue sign flickers with the sound of someone snapping their fingers.

The door opens: a blast of hot air, loud music, smoke, and light. We are inside the beating heart of the Kingston Mines Blues Club.

The largest and oldest continuously operating blues club in Chicago, the Kingston and its two stages have been graced by blues legends with names like Sugar Blue, Magic Slim, Koko Taylor, and Carl Weathersby, as well as rock royalty such as Eric Clapton, and Mick Jagger and Stevie Ray Vaughn. The walls vibrate with the echoes of more than 50 years of music. In Chicago, this is where the blues live.

I knew even before the end of the first set that this night in the Kingston, whose motto is “Hear Blues - Drink Booze - Talk Loud,” would forever be the soundtrack of Chicago for me. Even now, more than ten years later, the first chord of just the right song instantly transports me back to that rainy night when the music painted the night in neon colors and the air was filled with the blues.

That is the power of sound. Despite that fact that we are such visual creatures - an estimated 80 percent of sensory input to our brains comes in the form of what we see - sounds can also play a crucial role in shaping our sense of place. “Sonic Geography" the researchers call it. It is the way that certain sounds can evoke memories, connect us to a place, like audio brushstrokes in a kind of sound-colored landscape painting. The snap of laundry on a clothes line, the click of pool balls, the throb of music from a blues club.

The wail of blues may seem a world away from the silence of a morning spent drifting quietly aboard the Little Dipper in the Apostle Islands, but this place too has its signature sounds, a “sonic geography” as distinctive as any blues riff.

In a park that is mostly Lake Superior, the first chords would come in the sound of water - the strumming of waves on a cobble beach, the rustle and slosh against the cliffs, the drippings inside a sea cave like the plucked strings of a harp, or the chatter of an ephermal waterfalls after a passing rain squall. There is the shhhhhh of rain on still water, and the drumbeat sounds of storm waves that seem to vibrate in your chest.

The lake is the blue heart of this place. To stop and listen is to hear its music, a song in every wave, the smallest ripple to the breaking curlers.

But, there are other sounds too. Foghorns on misty days, the yodeling of loons in the bays, the more urgent calls of geese passing in long arrows overhead. Once, I stepped into a wall of sound on Hermit Island - the shrills and shrieks, galumps and groans of a near-deafening frog chorus in a spring bog. Stepping quickly to the edge would make one part of the bog go silent; stepping away would bring it back to full-throated life again while the frogs I was now closer to would hush.

Each step turned one part of the music on, hushed another. I pictured myself hopping around the bog, arms flailing, a kind of conductor of the frog orchestra, quieting the string section while urging the percussion to a crescendo, a performance without an audience in this one small bog on this one small island, my own laughter a kind of thin applause.

There are softer sounds too, quieter strains often left unheard while we are so focused on what we see. The whisper of wind in the white pine, the staccatto chatter of gulls trailing a fish tug downbound through the West Channel after pulling nets. Step barefoot onto the beach at Stockton Island’s Julian Bay, and the sand “sings” with every step.

Could you, I wonder, close your eyes and without peeking know you were in the islands simply by the sounds? Could I know a place well enough to distinguish it only with my ears? As dependent as most of us are on our eyes to truly “see” a place, there is more to the landscape than just what we detect with our eyes. The islands are more than a collection of postcard views. The “sonic geography” of a place, researchers say, is “the unique collection of sounds that define a particular location and contribute to its identity, as well as our personal experiences and associations with those sounds.” Maybe it is coyotes singing behind the lagoon at Little Sand Bay, or waves lapping against a hull at anchor in a lee, the echo of a single set of footsteps on a wooden dock. What is it that whispers “the islands” into the ears of our memory?

In the Kingston that night, I remember many in the crowd closing their eyes, tilting their heads, as if to listen even more deeply. I try to listen more carefully in the Islands now too, closing my eyes as a raven passes overhead to hear the brushing of its wingbeats sweeping the morning air or tilting my head with my eyes shut tight to hear the scratch of beach grass against the sand. I listen for the signature sounds, the blues riffs of these islands. Like music on a long ago rainy night, certain sounds can transport us. Sometimes we need only to hear the luffing of a sail or the rythmic spash of a kayak paddle to be instantly whisked away to another place and time, to be carried to the islands of the wings of sound.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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