In Pursuit of Silence

Nietzsche had a great deal to say about silence from both a positive and negative perspective. He was one of the first philosophers to make explicit the idea of “thinking out loud” so as to make manifest the deceptively muffled truths of reality. Thus, near the opening of Twilight of the Idols, he writes, “For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels — what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears — for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible.”

He also, however, placed a high value on the role of silence in making philosophy and observes in the appendix to Ecce Homo that “Silence is as much of an instinct with me as is garrulity with our dear philosophers. I am brief; my readers themselves must become long and comprehensive in order to bring up and together all that I have thought, and thought deep down.” Nietzsche understood the difference between a text that loudly spells out its message and one that demands, in the gaps, in the interruptions, pauses and depths of thought, that the reader expand, mustering the force of intellect necessary to become a partner in the text’s creation by way of engagement with its ideas. This is a notion akin to that Thoreau articulates in Walden when he writes that ”Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Nietzsche reserves his quietest, deepest scorn for those readers who know not what they read because they in fact have not known how to live their own lives; readers who yet will use their own perceptual limitations as a yardstick of what actually exists. (This is the reverse of that enlarged sensory awareness we derive from John Cage’s attentive mind in the anechoic chamber at Harvard. ”There is no such thing as an empty space, or an empty time…try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,” Cage wrote after that experience.)

Nietzsche puts the case like this: “Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience — that it is the first language for a new series of experiences. In that case, simply nothing will be heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.”

Even if we hesitate before Nietzsche’s brazen self-annuniciation, we would do well to heed the warning that he and Thoreau express: reading worthwhile literature will strain our minds; it’s up to us to concentrate with sufficient seriousness of purpose to “hear” the meaning of the lines. But perhaps if we exist in too much noise, with too little quiet in our lives and sensibilities, we’ll perceive an absence outside of us which is really just a reflection of an interior void.

Einsturzende Neubauten’s riff on the idea of eroticized quiet. Okay, it’s a bit of mixed message, and silly, and funny; but there are things to savor, smilingly, in that sinuous smoke stream and tilting cigarette, interlaced with silence and a spectrum of noises. It makes me think of the slogan that turn-of-the-century antinoise activist Theodor Lessing developed for his ill-fated but often inspirational pro-silence organization: “non clamor sed amor” – roughly translated, make love not noise. We need more such slogans today to give cachet to the out-of-style pleasures that can efflouresce from the pregnant pause.

One of the arguments my book puts forward is that while the world may not be noisier today than it was 100 years ago, we are, paradoxically, living in a world with less silence. By this I mean that while in, say, late Victorian London one might well have been living nearer to a loud factory than any one in the developed west is likely to be living today, there were also more places one could walk to without great exertion where it was possible to find some escape from the din – places off the grid of commerce and infrastructure: a riverbank not closely bordered by a highway; a patch of land left to nature; etc. Professionals who work with urban sound issues speak of cities in the past having greater “acoustical contrast” than do  typical metropolitan areas today.

I came across a reference to an article written by Michel F. Phillippot several decades ago for a journal called New Paterns of Musical Behavior that points to further evidence for the diminished availability of quiet spaces — and the rise of incessant low frequency ambient noise.

Philippot analyzes reports of the noisiness of 17th century Paris, describing the taxonomy of different sounds that residents described: “shouting, carts and carriages, horses, bells, artisans at work.” Thinking about the nature of these sounds, Philippot writes that “the average sound level must have shown marked fluctuations, that its envelope must have had peaks and lows so that it was actually ‘cut up.’ He also points out that this noise “must have been very poor in low frequencies” since the different sources Parisians described were all in the medium to medium-high frequency range.  However in recent times “with the invention of the automobile, the noise became more continuous and the lower frequencies were strongly increasing,” Philippot writes, “(the deep rumbling of urban traffic, the continuous noise of cars that are driving, the broad spectrum and long envelope of approaching and departing planes.) The ‘modern’ ambient noise might be briefly characterised as heavy and continuous, with slow fluctuations that are difficult to identify and locate, as this kind of noise tends to encompass us.” Philippot extrapolates eloquently from a remark the mathematician and philosopher d’Alembert made near the end of his life, “I stop talking, when a car drives by…” We know from this that d’Alembert “could still enjoy moments of silence between two cars, a blessing of which the victims of the low and continuous noise in big towns have meanwhile been deprived.”

This is why, rather than just telling obnoxious noisemakers to pipe down, I think we have to make a larger societal commitment to upping the quotient of spaces in which moments of silence can still happen. As the work of the urban planners I write about in London, Scandanavia and elsewhere proves, it’s not a utopian fantasy to think that by taking advantage of our expanding understanding of psychoacoustics, along with technological advances in noise abatement, these spaces could be created even under today’s economic conditions. Here’s the thing: we could get rid of all the boom cars, leaf blowers, jet skis and Harleys and still find we didn’t have a moment’s respite from the “heavy and continuous,” physiologically degrading effects of “modern” ambient noise.

Scientists from the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences have discovered that the process whereby coral larvae identify a secure habitat to colonize depends in part on the sound of the reef. As reported in PLoS ONE , researchers found that acoustical cues play a critical role in helping the larvae of tropical corals identify a suitable settlement opportunity — a real estate decision that must be made very rapidly or the coral larvae will perish. While chemical compounds produced by organisms already aggregated on a given reef issue important cues as well, these can only be perceived at very close distances downcurrent of their source. For many larvae, sound may thus provide the key signal as to how to orient their quest for shelter. Dr. Stephen Simpson, the lead researcher on the study built a chamber that allowed coral larvae to choose which way to swim, with recordings of an established coral reef broadcasting through loudspeakers from one direction. The larvae rushed toward the reef noise.

One of the interesting aspects of the study is that this is the first time that any members of the invertebrate phylum Cinidaria, which also includes jellyfish and anemones, have been shown capable of sound perception. Simpson hypothesizes that tiny hair cells on the surface of the larvae may “waggle” in response to the stirring of the water molecules brought about by sound waves.

The event that I did in April at the New York Public Library (a podcast is available) was partly dedicated to the idea of “tactile sound.” Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the numbers of creatures that can perceive sound very acutely through their bodies, though they were previously believed to be entirely impervious to auditory perception. This tendency to think that the only way to perceive sound is through the ears has been a bias that has not only affected our ability to understand the animal world, but has also led to negative stereotyping of the Deaf as a community of people “locked into themselves.” We all can feel sound through our bodies — whether in the way that low frequency sound waves shake our skeletons and internal organs or, like the coral larvae in the movement of intensely sound-pressured air across our skin cells and hair follicles. The Deaf are often just much sensitive to these other forms of bodily listening than the rest of us; I often think in this context of a remark made by an early 19th Century Deaf educator in France who described the hearing population as “children born to opulence,” hence numb to the wealth of sensory impressions lavished upon them.

In any event , the coral larvae are certainly highly sound sensitive and here, once again, dire, hitherto unsuspected effects of man-made noise become apparent. As Simpson remarked, “Anthropogenic noise has increased dramatically in recent years, with small boats, shipping, drilling, pile driving and seismic testing now sometimes drowning out the natural sounds of fish and snapping shrimp.” This noise may well also be interfering with the capacity of coral larvae to navigate toward the dwindling array of reefs where they can establish a colony. Indeed, with coral reefs already recognized as one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world on account of heightened acidity due to global warming, the new noisiness of the seas may deal the final blow to these beautiful, intricately soundscaped habitats.

A nice primer on using plants to dampen traffic sounds (or any other ambient noise) around your living quarters from The Washington Post. The tactics presuppose that you have a hefty chunk of property and open ground, but lite versions of some of these techniques can be applied to window boxes and small urban gardens to at least bring some measure of green acoustical relief.

The author, Joel M. Lerner, who runs an environmental design company, notes that the first step is to create a barrier without openings — ideally with a continuous soil bulwark eight to 10 feet high. (Again, this kind of advice isn’t going to help those of us who live in large cities — though, depending on where you live, it might be an appealing prospect to surround your apartment with a ten-foot high wall of dirt.) But the point is that any opening is going to let through a lot of noise. As I note in my book with reference to gardens and courtyards on the back of a row of townhouses, a five percent gap in a perimeter enclosure will admit 80 percent of the noise.

Once you’ve got your earth wall,  select your plants to cover the wall. And the most important thing here is to create a rich mix of foliage, since greenery of different dimensions and texturex will dampen and deflect different frequencies of sound. And you want to snare all the waves you can! If you want your plants to continue providing noise-muting effects throughout the year, you will need, as Lerner notes, “mixes of evergreens, including arborvitaes, spruces, pines and hollies.” It’s also important to have ground cover, since grass and other shade-tolerant, low-growing vegetation will absorb sound in ways that dirt, cement and tiles do not.

Lerner also gestures toward the noise masking and distracting potential of a water feature and, lamentably from my point of view, of outdoor speakers. “Music in the garden can have a profound effect on the ambiance of any outdoor space,” he writes. So can a firing range. Of course it’s true that one can effectively mask just about any traffic noise that exists if you’ve got speakers with good subwoofers vibrating to the right playlist; or you could just put on your headphones and enjoy “God Save the Queen,” at whatever volume erases consciousness of the environment altogether. But while I make an exception for a good waterfall, especially ones that take advantage of  findings from soundscape experts regarding the benefits of  (for example) asymmetrical placements of irregular small stones to maximize desirable sound frequencies and the unpredictable patterns of descending water rivlets, I’m against the addition of yet another layer of electro-acoustical emissions as a way of reducing the impact of  noise. Listen to music to listen to music, not to not listen to something else; otherwise you just end up feeding the ecology of noise.

Anyway, according to Lerner the most effective technique of all in creating your little silence garden is to maximize the possibilities of soil configuration. “Establish a soil berm [earth mound] for your flora. Large mounds of soil, thickly planted as described above, enhance sound shielding. Make your berm as high as possible, at least eight feet tall and 20 feet wide, and at least as long as your property line.” Or, if you lack any property line, you can at least spend some time repeating the word “berm,” to yourself, softly, and enjoying the sound of it.

Still, I’m thinking about how to jerry-rig a version of this in big pots in my sunny, street-side windows.

The definitive study of the effect of Mozart on the brain has now been completed by two University of Vienna researchers. The findings indicate that listening to a very, very smart composer’s music somehow does not enable that intelligence to rub off on a listener’s own cognitive prowess. Mobs of moms who purchased Mozart-for-babies products are purported to be singing snatches of the Queen of the Night’s aria in the streets:

Hear, Gods of Revenge,
Hear a mother’s oath!

The trouble began with a famous 1993 study by Frances H. Rauscher published in Nature that purported to identify enhanced spatial task performance in college students who had been exposed to certain works by Mozart. In consequence, as Science Daily reports, Georgia governor Zell Miller passed a bill ensuring that every mother of a newborn would receuve a free complimentary classical music CD. This was the same era in which some mothers-to-be were purchasing audio belts to strap across their bellies and provide their fetuses with that special “bump” in pre-birth cognitive capacity by exposing them to classical music in utero . Unfortunately for these soon-to-be-newborns, it was subsequently shown that the only conceivable effect of this blast of noble music into the womb was permanent damage to the extraordinarily sensitive fetal auditory apparatus.

Anyway, having synthesized all published and unpublished studies of the effect of Mozart on cognitive ability, (In Italy, six hundred and forty; In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;
In Spain already one thousand and three), the Viennese researchers discovered that there was no Mozart effect.  Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart. Death and despair blaze around me. Time for a Mozart chocolate.

picture from BBC

Elaine McLuskey’s so-called “social spheres,” (also described as “speech bubbles”) are intended, the BBC reports, to facilitate conversations in environments where background noise impedes speech. They come in two styles, the one pictured here, and a total Get Smart-Knockoff stationary tabletop variety. There’s an element of humor in this project, obviously — sort of; but sort of not really, also. It’s difficult to tell how dry McLuskey is being , but her BBC interview suggests that unless she’s keeping her smirk pretty under wraps, the humor is, at the least, rather complex–and perhaps even a little ambiguous. In her words:

“My research found that in some cases a person’s environment can be more disabling than a hearing impairment and so, in some respects, we are all hearing impaired on a daily basis.

“The obvious example is that frustrating situation of trying to catch up with a friend in a busy bar. You want to hear their news and have a proper chat, but you have to shout over the din of music, chatter and clinking glasses.

“I hope the very noticeable and eccentric appearance starts people talking about hearing impairments.”

I don’t exactly see a meaningful conversation about hearing impairments proliferating across the UK on the basis of these porto-silence helmets, but her remark about how the environment leaves everyone hearing impaired makes me think back to the way that E.E. Free, well-known anti-noise engineer and pundit in New York City in the 1920s and 30s chose to measure noise. As I noted in an earlier post:

In 1926, E.E. Free described the corner of Sixth Avenue and 34th Street as the loudest spot in the whole of New York City.  (This was four years before the din generated by the building of the Empire State Building got added into the mix.)

Free traveled around the city with the “audiometer,” a device developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratory to gauge sound intensity, and in so doing created a chart of the city’s geographically shifting noise levels that he called a “noise map.” This may be the first use of a term that is now central to European antinoise efforts and is gaining currency in the States.

To work the audiometer, the noise mapper held a specially designed telephone receiver to one ear, and then slowly turned up a dial on the device to amplify the sound of a tone it produced. When the sound coming through the receiver matched the noise level that your free ear was exposed to by the surrounding city noise, you had your reading on the dial in a measurement called “sensation units.” The corner of Thirty-Fourth and Sixth was “fifty-five sensation units above quiet.” One thing I like about Free, however, is that he recognized the limited relevance of this numerical measure of sound intensity for the general public (a problem that remains very much present with the decibel unit–look around the web a little and you’ll soon see just how cavalierly decibel units are assigned to different sonic phenomena). To overcome this problem, he appended to the strict numerical reading, a more homely translation: 55 sensation units above quiet meant that “when you talk to a person at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street, you must shout as loudly as you do to a person who is more than half deaf.” At different points across the city he used this simpler yardstick–more than half deaf, less than half deaf, etc.– to indicate noise level.

The idea that we can tell how loud a place is because our ability to hear conversation is impaired in ways that can be plotted on a crude spectrum with the experiences of a person who is hard of hearing is worth thinking about. Even the vast majority of dim bars do not begin to approach a level of sight-impediment that could be scaled with that of a person who is, say, 50% blind. Hearing is the only sense that we routinely put through this kind of strange disability charade as a marker of just what a good time we’re having out on the town.

The meta, remixed aspect of McLuskey’s project is also worth thinking about. Maxwell Smart and “Chief” went into their Cone of Silence in the hope of holding a  top-secret conversation that no one else would be able to hear. In many restaurant/bar environments, we now need a Cone of Silence in order simply to hear each other at all, no matter how closely we’re sitting, and even if we don’t give a damn about other people overhearing our words. Sounds like KAOS won after all.

A fascinating new poll from Adweek Media/Harris looks at our responses to the volume of television commercials. 86% of U.S. adults feel that commercials are louder than the programmed shows they’re coupled to. 93% of those who believe that commercials are louder say that the noisiness bothers them, and 62% of those who are bothered by the loudness say that it bothers them a lot. Though the responses are predictably skewed along age lines so that older adults are bothered more by the loudness of commercial than younger adults, only 7% of the 2,194 adults surveyed said that the loudness did not bother them at all.

Let’s think about these numbers for a minute. Less than 10% of adults are NOT bothered by the noisiness of commercials today. I had a conversation a few nights ago on the subject of loud restaurants with someone who made the point, “If people didn’t want the restaurants to be so loud, they wouldn’t be so noisy — right? It wouldn’t work.” Well here, according to Adweek Media/Harris we have a situation in which 93% of the 86% of the adults who feel that commercials are too loud are bothered by that loudness, yet they’re still noisy. We should not assume that just because we don’t like the way a given commercial establishment sounds we must be in a minority  since it’s in the interest of good business to follow the will of the people. As I’ve argued before, noise is real energy–constituted of physical waves that impact us powerfully in ways that we might not necessarily like, but which still pump us up with acoustical steroids and keep us responding to novel stimuli along lines that channel for aggression and ultimately serve many commercial interests. A television commercial, like a restaurant doesn’t have to make us happy so long as it whips us up to where we just continue pushing the buttons (buying the advertised or nonvirtual drinks). There’s a lot of gain by just keeping us stoked and craving further stimulation. You don’t have to like a given beat to fall into step with it. One of the most interesting studies I came across in my research looked at the way that music with a strong beat (such as march music) didn’t only encourage synchronous behavior, it also nurtured compliance with the collective will. The collective will is always going to gravitate where the energy is pooling, and energy pools at the source of noise. The TV ad exploding in your face might disturb the hell you, especially if you’re queried about it head-on and forced to reflect, but what do you when you get inside the store and you’ve got that bomb burst of sonic energy still sh0ckwaving through your head? Maybe you remember the buzz not the irritation. And after all, the store is there pounding it’s sonically branded madeleine down your gullet to reconjure the hyped emotions of your hours at the screen.

I think back and back on the slogan from turn-of-the-century anti-noise activist Theodor Lessing’s society: “Quiet is Distinguished.” Noise, the noise of TV commercials and loud restaurants, is all about losing distinction between things, blurring into the mass, the muddle, the nondiscriminating super-sized sell-all, swig-swill scandal-swizzled sensorium.

But what are you going to do? To click or not to click, that is the question.

(Thanks to Marc Weidenbaum for calling my attention to this survey.)

All of Dickinson’s poetry, suffused with moments of breaking off, stuttering — of hesitation, incompletion and outright absence made visible — speaks from somewhere grafted with and pruned by silence. Indeed, silence has a horticultural function in her lines tied to the sense she expresses in one poem that Nature, “the gentlest mother,” “with infinite affection/and infiniter care/her golden finger on her lips/wills silence everywhere.’

What does it mean to say that nature will silence everywhere? Whatever else, the affection and care crosses over to a form of tending that encompasses the grave.

Indeed, it’s in some of her darkest poems that the twinning of the poet’s voice with silence is most powerfully rendered. In the lines below, the poet and silence form “a strange Race” apart. As though the sap of quiet in the veins actually engendered an ethnicity. And in truth of course, those who have a certain kind of extreme instinctive valuation of silence often do feel that they are walking — or falling — through the world as aliens equipped with the wrong sensory apparatus for this particular acoustical biosphere.

In one of Dickinson’s most majestic, haunting graphs of consciousness colliding with exterior reality she puts it like this:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to fill,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

Dickinson’s editors rewrote the poem because the radical idea of chopping into quiet at that juncture was beyond them. But the silence after “then” in the original remains.

A nice little intro to the idea and potential of Sound Art from The Guardian – presented in the context of the current abundance of high caliber sound art installations “on listen” around London, as well as the inclusion of Susan Philipsz’s name in the Turner prize shortlist. Philipsz often explores the ways that sound and architectural space reciprocally define each other. This BBC story has a link that samples her most recent work, a 16th Century Scottish lament recorded under bridges in her native Glasgow.

What I like about the Guardian piece is that it emphasizes that much of the best sound art has as much to do with cultivating a certain kind of attentive listening as it does with the spectrum of sounds making up a given composition.

John Kieffer writes, “Many of us now live in a world of visual and auditory overload. We happily make do with a pixelated version of music on our MP3 players, and end up hearing things we do not want to. We tolerate buildings and public spaces that look OK, but sound terrible. We eat and shop in places where music and noise are calibrated just short of inducing hysteria.” Sound art, he suggests is one route back to making us care again about what the larger world sounds like–not just whatever site-specific work an artist might have created. As I suggest in my book, a broader societal reengagement with our sonic reality is not going to come about just by saying that such a reengagement would be a good idea. We need concrete, real-world gateways to the pursuit of silence — ones that speak in languages with contemporary cultural resonance. The proliferation of sound art presents many such promising openings.

(The piece I’ve linked to above is a series of floating bowls colliding with each other that was created by Celeste-Boursier Mougenot, who also has the marvelous zebra finch installation at the Barbican.)