Music in the Age of the Internal Combustion Engine | Jason Richardson
Music in the Age of the Internal Combustion Engine by Jason Richardson was the First Place Winner of the 2024 Murrumbidgee Short Story Competition in the Open Runner Up Category.
It began with a rumble.
This noise would rattle windows and, in one of my home's longer rooms, the vibrations generated a standing wave that shook the walls and gave an effect of mild nausea. A couple of times a day this engine idling nearby would make itself known. It washed over me like a tsunami and swamped the sounds of birdsong that I prefer to hear from outside. Sometimes that car noise chugs away, backing down a driveway and then there will be a roar of acceleration down the street like a Daytona soundtrack. More often it rumbles for a couple of minutes like an atonal tuba solo.
For a few weeks it seemed timed to occur for a few minutes before dinner and the growl of my somersaulting stomach could hide behind the pumping in this engine block. Slowly came the realisation that it was my neighbour's sparkling blue car and I assume he was conditioning the engine, by regularly giving short bursts of fuel to fire the chambers. This reminded me of a practice that was recommended when I bought new speakers for my home stereo, although those would struggle to reproduce these subsonic frequencies. I guess I can understand, just as I love shifting air with music featuring a deep bass from synthesisers, my neighbour must enjoy the throbbing of a V8 engine.
Cars have always been a convenient machine for me and a way of moving between locations when a bicycle was impractical, but in the movies they are presented as a potent symbol of freedom. For an iconic Australian character like Mad Max, for example, they are the means of escape.
For me, living on the outskirts of a small town in regional Australia, it has often made driving feel like the only option to get around; but using a pushbike still brings a sense of childhood adventure to mundane excursions. The way sunlight envelopes me as I move through breezes and cut across the railway toward the shops. I often joke with friends that I live on the wrong side of these tracks, where the setting of an industrial part of town has always appealed to me. Even the fact there are train tracks seems like I've achieved a childhood dream.
Feeling the locomotives passing by is a visceral thrill and one I find more pleasing than the road trains that travel along the thoroughfare which runs parallel to my suburban street. These extended trucks are more frequent than the rail trains and I have had to learn ways to overcome the fear of their size and those numerous tyres that could flatten me. I've gained confidence to ride alongside them and know that my bicycle should be equally respected as a road user. One time I felt emboldened to let a truck driver know that he'd pulled out in front of me by using the simple sign of a raised index finger. The truck quickly pulled over and a younger man alighted from the cabin, taking rapid strides towards me. I considered my option of pedalling away and then decided I owed it to him to explain myself. As I swung my leg off the bike seat, I saw the truck driver briefly pause mid-pace and knew he'd sized me and had noted that I am taller than him.
"What are you doing?" he said with a tone like he was chiding a child.
I explained he'd failed to give way and that my bicycle is legally recognised as a vehicle on the road.
"Mate," he began with an incredulous extension of the vowel so it should probably be written ma-a-ate. "You're a pushbike and I'm a fucking truck!" he concluded as though it were a self-evident law and something that Moses might’ve driven down from the mountain.
I shrugged and stood my ground, then he turned and walked back to his truck to continue his work. Now every time a semi-trailer passes as I ride on my bike into town, I will wonder if it's the same angry little man or one of his friends. Maybe they talk about me on their CB radios? Admittedly, this is a thought that passes quicker than the semi-trailers.
I recognise that truck drivers are professionals and most of those I witness are carefully working to shift huge loads around the country. The size of the vehicles they drive easily becomes their identities, but there's a human heart beating inside that chrome chassis. Sometimes I wonder how long it might be before self-driving trucks make the identity of a trucker seem like something from yesteryear.
Recently I pondered that, around the time of my encounter with the truck driver, the po'ouli bird was declared extinct. This Hawaiian black-faced honeycreeper had only been known to ornithology since the year of my birth and its last known sighting had been around the time my first child was born. Within a generation it had vanished from the high-altitude rainforests of Maui.
If you search for the song of the po'ouli bird it appears among the links to Youtube videos in a fragmented form. A lone male po'ouli in bursts of melody, pausing frequently. The gaps are identified by ornithologists in some of the videos as places where a female po'ouli would complement the music of the male. It's a poignant moment in these excerpts from Discovery Channel videos, as the colour of the spectrogram falls dark. You can see the representation of the male bird calling and imagine splashes of audible information linking these, but know they are now forever silent. Only the loneliness of the male po'ouli has been captured and I keep wondering how, when the female contributed, their song sounded as a completed soundtrack.
Working at Griffith Pioneer Park Museum has given me an appreciation for the sound of old machinery and also opportunities to hear the variety of calls from pied butcherbirds. For a while I enjoyed whistling the phrases from birds back to them and seeing if I could engage them in an extended exchange. If it had been a po'ouli then I might've made it hopeful that it was not alone, but the butcherbirds still have their mates.
While the pistons of the community museum's steam-driven engines move at a slower pace to my neighbour's V8 engine, they are punctuated with gasps of hot air. It sounds more like me when pedalling home from a trip to the town centre on a hot day and those summers are getting hotter. My bicycle is quieter than most of the traffic, except the electric vehicles that are starting to creep up on me along the roads. It makes me wonder how much longer I'll hear the roar of cars like the one next door.
Each morning I know it's approaching 6am when my neighbour’s blue car rumbles down the driveway and then throbs away along the street. In the distance I hear the traffic and occasionally the roar of other V8 engines as people make their way to work, presumably earning the money required to keep putting petrol into the tanks of those cars.
Then I wonder how the local landscape will sound in the future. Will it be replaced with a different man-made noise, or will we also fall silent?
When I began to joke with my family about the regularity of the neighbour's V8 revving, I would mimic the deep song of its engine. This sound is at the bottom of my vocal range and produces a pleasant sensation in my chest. To my surprise it feels like I am part of a choir again and this gives a warmth that replaces the nauseous feeling. I can imagine that I am sharing the swansong of the internal combustion engine. How will our landscape change when the roar of their pistons disappears?
Can a masculine-identifying audience learn to love the birdsong that they mask with revving?
A new soundtrack is waiting to be written for the freedom we associate with travel. Perhaps I need to record noises like the raspberry blown by an unregistered motorbike that often passes in the night before that lonely male falls silent.
Electric vehicles are now creeping up on us all.
