St. James Cathedral & Sounds of Excess

Those were the beginning words of a Sunday sermon by an unknown preacher hiding behind an elevated podium, made even more inconspicuous by the reverb and A/V system that tricks you into thinking the voice came straight from above, pouring out of the blinding stained mosaic glass.

As a frequent church skipper and occasional socialist, the sermon on consumerist tendencies was a pleasant surprise. Growing up, more of something has been taught to me as something objectively better than less of something (maybe with the exception of STD’s, but even this is open to debate if you’re the kind to brag about these kind of things). Why settle for your paltry wage when Scrooge McDuck is literally flipping you the bird every time he dives head-first into his physics-defying pool of gold coins? Deep down you know you want more of anything that could even remotely be of use to you. You want it all; more money, more likes, more pixels, more happiness, more sprinkles on your ice cream cone, more unprotected sex, and so on. This visit to the St. James Cathedral is the first of many attempts to document sonic and visual experiences. So, more to come I hope.

Building

Located on the aptly named Church Street and Adelaide, in downtown Toronto, St. James Cathedral is Toronto’s oldest congregation according to a rigorous wikipedia search. The cathedral offers multiple services in a week to various audiences, drawing in tourists and church-goers alike. Sometime in history between the black plague and fortnite dances, churches went from being the sole patron of scholarly research to a cool hang-out to walk your dog and weekly yoga sessions (they even provide yoga mats for the uninitiated). Nevertheless, walking towards it at a distance will reveal playfully ornate spires, providing your eyes a relief from the wall of glass-clad rectangles that architects like to pass off as buildings.

For a structure of modest height, the cathedral has significant visual, acoustical, and social impact in the neighborhood. The footprint of the cathedral exudes power, even in the modern age (affording various exemptions from government regulations ranging from taxes to sound emission limits , e.g. church bells are often excluded by noise by-laws, similar to police sirens). The bells, which can be terrifyingly loud, has probably been rung at the same times each week since the Cathedral’s construction in the 1800s like literal clockwork, reminding the residents to drag your asses to church lest you want to die from syphilis. The muffled sounds of the organ, choir, and clickity clackity footsteps of leather-soled shoes of the best dressed worshipers, combined with the bells, are interwoven in the sonic fabric of the neighborhood. Tourists look up and awe each time the bells go off, and locals have either grown to get used to it, or have fully embraced the sound, feeling somewhat cozy knowing that an old stone building down the street has its doors open to all your modern spiritual and yoga needs.

The ambient soundscape is dominated by bird chirps, traffic, and the occasional sirens as per downtown traditions. At 11:00am, the bells could be heard bouncing off the facades of nearby buildings. While high on the decibel scale, the bells don’t ring all that frequently in a course of a day, plus there is a strong case to argue that the bells contribute to a positive soundscape.

Thanks to the King Street pilot program that lowered vehicular traffic drastically, only streetcars are left as the dominant noise source in an otherwise relatively quiet environment for an such an urban space; a space quiet enough to walk your dog or read a book by the church steps.

Inside the cathedral, the acoustical environment is what one would typically expect from an old church with high ceilings and smooth, stone walls. Walking past the modern glass doors that separates the passive onlookers to participants will immerse your ears to a contradictory mix of “hush” and “bang” . Every sound the choir and speaker make seem to bounce around and forcibly dive into your ear canals while the audience lay dead silent, fearing that a cough will cut the beautifully drawn-out choir voices in half and induce some godly wrath. The choir projects well from the podium but it isn’t anything that will blow your socks off like a THX theatre. The organ pipes definitely make the place come alive with rich, fat chords that fill up the spiritual voids across the audible frequency spectrum, making the human voice seem puny and insignificant in comparison.

7/10. Beefy organs. Intimate Atmosphere. Free Entry. Retro vocals. Weak dining options. DJ doesn’t seem to take requests.

From my personal experience, seeing the excess of ice cream toppings available to choose from will make any sensible human being lock-up and breakdown into an existentialist crisis even if you’ve been to the same store a dozen times. It’s okay, these things happen. How much more of anything do we need to feel better? At what point will I be satisfied with the number of rainbow sprinkles on my ice cream? 16? 17? Is there a finite measure of things that can make us feel happy?

In the world of 1-day express shipping and 50-cents drink-size upgrades, it is fair to say we’re no stranger to excesses. A decision to address an excess will have consequences. Who cares about cardiovascular health when you want that 1 more extra sprinkle to bump up the ice cream sprinkle count from 16 to a perfect 17? Who cares about the air when coal is so cheap? Who cares about walkability and noise when your unmuffled car can take you anywhere you want to go?

In our physical world, sound comes as a consequence for most physical phenomena involving an atmosphere and energy transfer. Your fingernails scratching your pubic hair over your pants, desperately hoping that the itch isn’t syphilis, will invariably make a sound whether you like it or not, and I bet if you scratched loud enough, that sound is going to be heard by someone else. Every vehicle and loudspeaker and air conditioner and sprinkle-chewing and genital-scratching event all adds up, contributing to a general urban hum on top of non-anthropogenic sound sources. I won’t go into how sound is important to our quality of life or how noise literally kills, but if you lived anywhere close to a busy roadway or an airport then you’d know firsthand the importance of sound.

In our pursuit for more speed, more air conditioning, more rainbow colored sprinkles, and more unprotected sex, sound will come as a consequence. If left unchecked, soundscapes like St. James Cathedral could be permanently lost in a swelling sea of noise. Scrooge McDuck might get away with somehow not accumulating all kinds of cuts and fractures from diving head-first into solid objects, but we might not be so lucky with our consequences. We wouldn’t want our kids to drown in a sea of plastic straws, and certainly wouldn’t want the sounds of our loved ones reduced to silence amidst the screams of personal jet-packs, pop-up hologram advertisements, and your martian neighbor’s brand-new cyborg dog that just won’t keep both of its mouth shut.