An Irishman's Diary

In Muslim cities, it's the wail of the muezzin calling people to pray

In Muslim cities, it's the wail of the muezzin calling people to pray. But the classic sound of Dublin in the morning, surely, is beer kegs hitting the footpath. You can hear them first thing every day, ringing out like cracked church bells calling the thirsty to drink, or the hung-over to atone for last night.

Most city-dwellers live in the suburbs and are unlikely to be woken by the tolling kegs. If you're staying in some city-centre hotels, however, it must be nearly as good as an alarm call.

A visitor from one of the Muslim countries might even be forgiven for thinking there was a religious aspect to the daily ceremony, and that the houses from which the sounds emanated were places of worship (which of course wouldn't be far wrong).

If the visitor was staying in the aptly-named Temple Bar, the confusion would be even more excusable. Indeed, thanks to traffic conditions in the city, beer delivery lorries do sometimes evoke quasi-religious responses among drivers stuck behind them - from the throwing of hands to heaven, to the beating of breasts against steering wheels.

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Although I don't recall it ever featuring in the Patrick's Day parade, the beer keg is a musical instrument of sorts. It has only two notes, admittedly: the low one produced on the way out of the pub and the high one on the way in. Its capacity for harmony lies somewhere between the lambeg drum and the jew's harp. But maybe if you filled a few to different levels you could knock out a tune.

I don't know if the avant-garde composer John Cage ever used the beer keg in any of his works. If he did, it was probably on his 1979 Joycean epic, Roaratorio, achieving familiarity with which, regrettably, is still on my to-do list.

Roaratorio was an attempt to set Finnegans Wake to music. And Cage approached this mammoth task by first trawling the book for every reference to a sound and then recording that sound. The approach resulted in one of the very few formal musical scores to include a direction for somebody breaking wind.

The composer is probably best known for 4'33", sometimes inaccurately described as a work of silence in three movements. In fact, the whole point of the piece was to demonstrate "the impossibility of silence", something underlined during its 1952 premiere when the performer could be clearly heard opening and closing the piano lid and turning the pages of the "score" to Cage's precisely-timed directions.

I suspect the audience also contributed to the experiment by coughing. Audiences can't help coughing during quiet moments in the theatre. It's a well-known though as yet unexplained phenomenon that the mere experience of being in a hushed auditorium causes acute respiratory disorders in people who were perfectly well beforehand.

That's not what gave Cage

his epiphany about the impossibility of silence, however. Apparently, the idea came to him when he visited Harvard University's "anechoic chamber": a special sound-proofed room with surfaces designed to absorb all noises made within it.

He was expecting to hear silence there. Instead, like a tourist waking up in a Dublin city centre hotel, he was aware of two sounds: one high and one low. He learned later that the high sound was his "nervous system" and the low one was his "blood circulation". His subsequent composition was composed of small units of "silent rhythmic duration" totaling the 4'33" of the title, although Cage always claimed he had made a mistake in adding them up. He may have been having us on about this.

My apologies if you're still having breakfast, but I see that an impression of someone vomiting has topped an internet poll to find the world's worst sound. The survey was carried out by the University of Salford, and threw up (apologies again) other surprises. "Microphone feedback" finished second, for example, while "wailing babies" edged out "train scraping on tracks" to complete the top three.

Internet polls are not always reliable, given the risk of hijacking - as the BBC World Service found in 2002 when the Wolfe Tones' A Nation Once Again was voted the planet's favourite song. But the sounds poll does at least seem to have been patriot-proof, with the 1.1 million voters limited to a menu of pre-recorded sounds and then asked to rate them on a scale of awfulness.

Among other surprises, the dentist's drill didn't make the top 10, whereas "argument in a soap opera" did (at no 8). That old favourite, nails dragged on a blackboard, finished only 16th, and snoring was a lowly 26th.

There was no allowance for context, unfortunately. A train scraping on tracks might not sound so bad if, say, you had been waiting for 45 minutes on a draughty platform for it to arrive. And even the awfulness of "poorly played violin" (no 6) can depend on the size and design of a room. If the musician is in an anechoic chamber, for example, it can be quite pleasant.

Some interesting variations between the sexes emerged. Babies might have

featured even higher but for a gender split in the vote. Although women found most of the noises even more unpleasant than men did, wailing babies were one of the exceptions.

The Wolfe Tones were not one of the 34 options offered.