They were a mixture of minority groups in traditional embroidery as Tianjin Vacations well as Han Chinese. They wouldn’t let me slide unobtrusively on to a back bench, Tianjin Vacations but insisted that I took a seat near the front. A family made space for me and the man behind me whispered, I can speak a little English and can tell you what is happening. ‘ Thus I came to see a Chinese opera. The actors were a man in black robes and scraggy long wig, waving a silver wand, an emperor or god who sat on a throne, and an old peasant who sang a propaganda song about the terrible conditions in which people had lived before communism. He sang it to the music of two wooden boards being clapped together.
Not everyone adopted the celebratory approach of the Futurists or Ruttmann to the incidental acoustic environment of the city. Ironically, in the late 1890s the car and the electric tram were seen as bringing about a tranquillity of noiselessness’ in the urban
Figure 2: Walter Ruttmann, Tri-Ergon optical sound recording, 1922. Copyright: unknown. Source: Medien Kunst Netz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/tri-ergon-lichtton-aufzeichnung/? desc=full. environments, replacing the noise of horse and cart over cobblestone streets (Coates 2005: 641). R. Murray Schafer (1970) was particularly critical of the noise pollution’ of contemporary urban environments. Despite his deterministic and didactic critique of urban auditory conditions, Schafer highlighted the imbalance between the sonic and visual articulations of space in developing the field of acoustic ecology (2004). His research provides important recognition of the multi-sensory experiences of urban environments.
