In “I Have Never Seen a Sound” Murray Schafer states he “imagined the soundscape as a huge musical concert that is running continuously. The tickets are free, and we are all listeners. But we are also performers because we make sounds.” Although the goal was to capture religious sounds, silence and non-religious sound was most prevalent throughout the University of Vermont campus and North Prospect Street area.

Ira Allen Chapel located at the University of Vermont was recorded around 8:30 in the morning. Usually, there is a hymn that plays music from a loud speaker followed by a low pitched, deep “DONG” sound audibly announcing the time every hour. For instance, one “DONG” signaling one o’clock; two “DONG”s for two o’clock, and so on. However, since the recording was between the hour, neither the hymn nor bells were captured. It was a Saturday afternoon and classes were not in session, resulting in little non-religious sound other than the occasional car passing by.

Chabad of Vermont located on South Williams Street in Burlington, Vermont. The recording of this location also found no religious sounds. Again, the occasion car passing or steps of people walking by were the most prominent sounds captured. The Synagogue holds Shabbat services every Saturday at 10:00 am, we recorded on a Thursday at approximately 6:30 pm. There was supposed to be an event—unknown to us—that evening. After recording, the Rabbi pulled into the institution.

The last two locations-- Ohavi Zedek Synagogue and the Quaker Meeting House—were located across the street from each other. They have the same recording and can be analyzed together. These religious institutions were the quietest according to the decibel readings. This could be due to the time they were recorded as the sound was captured at approximately 6:45 pm on a Thursday. This is a conflicting time as dinner is usually served during this hour in most households. It would explain why not must noise in general is captured in the recording.

What is interesting enough is that all of these religious institutions all have special moments in the day. In Judaism, for instance, the day usually begins with the onset of night (the appearance of the stars) followed by the morning (with the appearance of the North Star). According to some Jewish teachers, night and morning begin with sunset and sunrise, respectively because Torah describes “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” So why is that in the middle of November-- when the days start to get shorter-- when these recordings were taken, there was no sign of sound to mark the day such as a bell would from the surplus of church organizations throughout the city, such as Ira Allen Chapel and Christ The King church? In his book, “Religion Out Loud” Isaac Weiner proposes a possibility from the data he has collected and analyzed: Christianity over-powers other religious sounds because it is acoustically dominate over all other religions (20). Protestant-based religious sound (such as church bells) “exemplifies” what it means to be a proper Christian. Throughout U.S. and world history, there is no argument Protestantism has over-powered many other religions. So are the near by churches silencing these other institutions?

In the North End of Burlington, we made sound recordings at several religious institutions: the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul Episcopal, the Rock Point Episcopal Center, and the North Avenue Alliance Church. These churches span an area of the North End from the top of Battery Street to the intersection of North Avenue and the Ethan Allen Parkway. The diverse locations also led to some greater diversity in recordings. At the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul Episcopal, the salient sounds were from the passing traffic at the intersection of Battery Street and Pearl Street. As we moved up North Avenue and reached the Rock Point Episcopal Center, traffic sounds had minimized and the most salient sounds were from the wind and the trees. When we reached the North Avenue Alliance Church, the traffic sounds had resumed, though not as strongly as before. The North End of Burlington, as a site for the refugee resettlement community, is often understood as an area that houses more racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity than other areas of the city.

According to information from city-data.com, the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul Episcopal is located in a neighborhood with a median annual income of $33,636. The racial demographics in this neighborhood are 78.1% white, 17.4% Black, and 1.5% Hispanic. The Rock Point Episcopal Center is located behind the Burlington High School, in an area that is more rural than residential. In this area, the median annual household income is $70,714. The racial demographics in this neighborhood are 89.4% white, and 4.7% Asian. The North Avenue Alliance Church is located at the intersection of the neighborhood mentioned above and a neighborhood with a median annual household income of $56,122. The racial demographics of this neighborhood are 80% white, and 18.4% Asian.

Isaac Weiner explains that our hearing, as a socially constructed process, is “mediated by and expressive of a range of culturally specific values.” (Weiner, 110) He continues by explaining how hearing is also a historically specific process, which allows “broadcasters and receivers to invest sounds with significance.” (Weiner, 110) Burlington has a unique history as a refugee resettlement community, a history that creates an environment with diverse cultural influences. If we understand Burlington, the North End in this analysis, as a place where there are diverse cultural influences and hearing as a process that is constructed according to specific cultural values, then we can consider how our city presents a distinctive opportunity for studying the interactions between sound, religion, and environment.

Lastly, if we understand the North End of Burlington as a site of contact between groups of different cultural identities, including both religious and non-religious identities, we can consider how the absence of any “religious” sound from our sound recordings is significant. I found myself wondering which religious groups were present in the North End, and why their presence could be seen, in the small Halal grocery store on North Street and the Tibetan prayer flags hanging from the porches of many houses, but could not be heard. Additionally, I wondered what would happen if these religious communities could be heard, if we understand the city of Burlington as a quiet and non-religious environment. The Christ the King church bell controversy, presented in the “South End Neighborhood Analysis” presents an opportunity to further explore how our hearing as residents of Burlington is constructed by our relatively quiet and non-religious environment, and how we can be inclusive to the sounds and presence of minority religious groups while maintaining the right of individuals to regulate the acoustics of their private spaces.

In the South End of Burlington, we made sound recordings at three religious institutions; Christ the King Church, the Dormition of the Mother of God, and the First Church of Christ Scientist. Christ the King Church and the Dormition of the Mother of God are located across the street from each other on Shelburne Road near the intersection of South Willard Street, though they are considered to be a part of two different neighborhoods, the Seven Sisters neighborhood and the Hill Section. The most salient sounds in our recordings are from passing traffic, as Shelburne Road connects Downtown Burlington with the commercial area in South Burlington. While we were recording at Christ the King Church, we were able to capture the sounds of their church bells at 2:45pm, used to signal the release of school. From previous reading, we knew that these bells caused controversy in the Seven Sisters/South End neighborhoods surrounding the church. To help quantify the sounds experienced at the church, we took decibel measurements. Surprisingly, the sounds of traffic passing the Dormition of the Mother of God had higher decibel measurements than the sounds of the bells at Christ the King. After recording at the two churches on Shelburne Road, we made a sound recording at the First Church of Christ Scientist on South Union Street. This church is located in a noticeably quieter and more residential neighborhood, where traffic was much more occasional. Also noticeably different in the South Union neighborhood, was the presence of more pedestrian traffic, and with that, the sounds of conversations audible from the steps of the church where we were recording.

The controversy about the bells at Christ the King Church presents an opportunity for exploration about how religious sounds in Burlington are perceived, evaluated as noise, or respected as sacred. In order for a sound to be considered invasive or “unreasonable,” there must be an existing understanding of what is normal or “reasonable” in a community. As it exists within a primarily rural state, Burlington could be considered a “low-fidelity” environment surrounded by “high-fidelity” environments. In an article titled “Ethical questions about working with soundscapes” by Dr. Andra McCartney, high-fidelity and low-fidelity environments are explained “as an ideal of clarity and clear communication to be searched for in preferably natural quiet soundscapes, while lofi noisy soundscapes are associated with modernity and city life.” (McCartney, 2) R. Murray Schafer also highlights the differences between hifi and lofi environments in his article titled “I Have Never Seen a Sound.” In this article, he defines soundscape as “the total acoustic environment, its evolution through history, and its variations around the world.” (Schafer, 1) His classification of soundscapes as hifi or lofi is explained similarly to McCartney’s, as the difference between quiet rural spaces and bustling urban environments. Schafer elaborates this classification by explaining how the hifi soundscapes have become overwhelmed by the sounds of drones, or “generators of low-information, high-redundancy sounds.” (Schafer, 5)

After reading Schafer and McCartney, we became interested in how demographic information about the neighborhoods surrounding these South End churches could be connected with perceptions of religious sounds given that Burlington is a small lofi city. Using the information from city-data.com, we discovered that the Seven Sisters neighborhood, which encompasses Christ the King Church, has a median annual household income of $54,598 with 86% white residents. The Dormition of the Mother of God, as it is located on the East side of Shelburne Road is considered a part of Burlington’s Hill Section, a neighborhood with a median annual household income of $88,088 with 98.2% white residents. Lastly, the neighborhood surrounding the First Church of Christ Scientist, has a median annual household income of $56,750 with 96.7% white residents. In September 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the national median income as $53, 657 annually. From this, we can understand that the three religious institutions mentioned above are situated in neighborhoods where most families earn more than the national median income, with families in the Hill Section earning considerably more per year.

In conclusion, understanding the neighborhood surrounding Christ The King as predominately residential, quiet, homogenous, and upper-middle class might explain why the introduction of new church bells from Christ The King church would generate controversy. There were no sounds near the other two institutions that could be identified as overtly “religious” in nature, though defining a sound as “religious” presents a unique set of challenges. Further considerations of this neighborhood might include research about the religious demographics of its residents. Given the available data, we were unable to determine whether the churches located in the South End had congregations that were primarily composed of the residents from the surrounding neighborhoods.

Downtown Burlington, Vermont may be seen as north of Maple Street, west of Willard Street, and south of Pearl Street (including all properties along Pearl Street). In that span there are residential sections as well as commercial ones. This particular area is a large attraction due to its closeness to the heart of downtown, Church Street. While there are several churches of note, I will discuss St. Paul’s Episcopal, First United Methodist, and First Congregational Church.

In order to observe, I along with several classmates, sat on the southern steps of the First Congregational Church facing the north side of the First United Methodist Church and made a three minute sound recording. And, when recording St. Paul’s, we sat across the street on the steps of H&R Block facing the back entrance of the church. We made the recordings around three-thirty in the afternoon on a Thursday. There was a small group of people on the steps to the east of us while at First Congregational and First United Methodist that seemed to be a part of the homeless population.

The sounds of this area included voices of the people on the steps, voices of pedestrians, footsteps of pedestrians, car horns, the squeal of car breaks, car “zooms,” wind, “chirping” of cross walks, doors opening and closing, etc. Using a decibel app on my iPhone, I measured a max of ninety-four decibels for all three of the churches. Interestingly, there were no distinctly religious sounds. Perhaps the absence of religious sounds has something to do with the religious denomination. "While sounds and gestures may accompany religious observances and modes of worship they are to be viewed as inessential to, when not outright destructive of those expressions of religious adherence.” So, as Hirschkind suggests, perhaps sound is just not something that should accompany religion. Or perhaps the noises of the religion stay inside the church or can only be heard when worship is happening. In his book Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner discussed what “a public,” “the public,” and “a counterpublic” all are. He says that,

A public, in practice, appears as the public. It is east to be misled by this appearance. Even in the blurred usage of the public sphere, a public is never just a congeries of people, never just the sum of persons who happen to exist. It must first of all have some way of organizing itself as a body and of being addressed in discourse. And not just any way of defining the totality will do. It must be organized by something other than the state.

In this sense, Burlington’s public is not religious. And the public soundscape is not religious, nor influenced by religious sound. Rather a public of Burlington is the religious, in conjunction with the numerous other publics. Therefor, the religious silence of Burlington is significant. It does not mean that there is just no religious presence in Burlington at all, it simply means that the religious presence of the city is quiet.