I work in an area of Brooklyn which lacks the tact and threatening signage of midtown Manhattan in this way: People lean on their car horns. My window faces the street near the intersection with an avenue, so I have a lot of red lights and a lot of cars waiting for their turn to pass through, and a lot of cars wanting to go straight while certain other cars have drivers that are trying to turn onto the avenue in opposite directions. I also have dwindling patience for these pinheads who think a honked horn is the magic elixir for what the French call un embouteillage. It’s a stoplight, it’s cyclic, it’s indiscriminate. You make it now, or you don’t. But you will, so sit tight and upright and take your forearm from the center of the steering column, please.
Thankfully, there is a technological solution to this problem of honking horns. (Lord knows machines are more responsive than the stubborn lackwits described herein.) Casinos, in fact, have re-engineered this problem, crafted an opportunity, and have inspired me to suggest it here: Vehicle horns should all be tuned to a certain key. Harmony. Loud car horns are obnoxious, for sure, but the most irritating situation, physiologically irritating, is loud, obnoxious dissonance. One driver lays on his horn, another driver is insulted and defensively sees his honk and raises it in volume, so that bystanders hear an out-of-tune din they had nothing to do with creating. Nothing is gained and everyone suffers.
Check this out: Trucks’ horns should fill out the bass, say an F. SUVs, a little bigger, a third above that at an A. Standard cars, the fifth, C. Standard but smaller cars, a full octave above, F. If you have a fancy car, you have the privilege of playing the smooth 6th above that F, a D, turning the whole endeavor into an F6 that might have ended an early Beatles’ song OR Dm7 that would fit somewhere in the bridge of an early Beatles’ song. I might also suggest in place of the fancy car-D, a comical car-Eb, making the chorus a pleasant and even jokey seventh chord, turning formerly contentious drivers into smiling and deferential citizens. (Naturally, we can’t have fancy cars and comical cars honking at each other with Ds and E-flats.)
All of these notes, of course, must be kept in tune. I don’t know enough about cars to say if horns drop out of tune after time, but on the occasion that they might, the horns would have to be “tuned” by a mechanic annually, say at inspection, so that the harmony can be maintained. Otherwise this whole suggestion is useless.
The point of a horn is to grab someone’s attention, in a good or a bad way, a rudimentary communication device, relying more on volume to alarm people than on pitch. And in all communication, there are better, more effective, more considerate, more polite and more elegant ways of doing it. We must finally consider the collateral damage of spreading disharmony in our world!
