Quiet Sounds

We who are quiet admire a quiet world.  That's not to say a silent world -- although some silence is a balm -- but a quiet one.

Pacific Grove is a pretty low-key town as towns go in California, but truly natural peaceful quiet is hard to come by even so.  I've just listened to a Newsweek online magazine piece

http://www.newsweek.com/id/40211#?t=61743767001&l=1825927394

about a man named Gordon Hempton, a sound ecologist who listens with more than his ears, measuring the nature of quiet, especially in natural places, by recording it in stereo.  He states, to my sadness, that he has found only 12 places in the country where there is truly an absence of human noise.  I was thinking about my trip on the Rogue River last summer and how I listened for those few days almost solely to the sounds of nature woven through with the fabric of river noises.  It was a peaceful interlude of four days.

Four days.

In an entire year of 365 days, I had four to listen to a world without jets, cars, trains, buses, scooters, jackhammers, sirens, TV and car stereos.  Most wonderful of all, I heard no Harleys ramming my ears.  But, even with acoustic evidence of our motorized and mechanized occupation of the planet being absent, there were still human voices all around. 

Living in a quiet environment -- wherever it might be -- can be unnerving for some folks, although I have no idea why.  I don't even want to venture a guess.  Physiologically, tolerating incessant unnatural noise is, actually, sickening.  Some carefully designed studies have shown that our bodies show chronic signs of stress if we are exposed to loud noise over long periods of time.  We are more aware of sounds than we believe we are; all sound is perceived by our ears, but our brains pay attention to only certain ones consciously.  We have to work to tune out all the rest. That intrusive-sound-filtering work is stressful, even if to a small degree.  Ever wonder why you can't sleep at night or why you feel irritable "for no good reason"?  My hunch is that the noise level is so different at night compared to what you've been enduring all day that your nerves are jangling. 

The stress changes us over time.  In addition, because we are drowning out natural sounds, we are losing awareness of them and what they could be telling us.

There is a question:  If a tree falls in a forest and we are not there to hear it, did it make a sound?  To that, I say:  We seem to be at a point where we barely hear it even if we actually are there, so inured to natural sound are we by the blasting cacophony of daily life. 

Another study I read today says that a majority of adults over the age of 65 don't believe that global warming is affecting the earth.  I'd like those elders to ask their grandchildren or any small child if they have ever heard a cricket or a frog at night - common sounds years ago when those elders were kids themselves.  I'd guess that most kids here in PG -- definitely in large cities -- have no idea what a cricket sounds like because they've never heard one.  Both crickets and frogs are our favorite folk songsters.  Walt Disney became a wealthy man based on the simple charms of crickets and mice.  While we gaze at a night sky splashed with a zillion stars and sense infinity there, what night voices still sing?  Go listen. 

In the entire time I've taken to write this post, I have not had one second of natural quiet, and I won't if I stay at home for the rest of the afternoon.  I find that impossibly sad.

Winter Sound

I was thinking about a demonstration of sound editing in films I saw once.  A man wearing a trench coat, a fedora and wingtip shoes was walking along a wet sidewalk.  Leaves lay in loose piles in the gutters, and the colors were of muted tones. The man was looking straight ahead as he walked, and he was moving steadily without deviating to right or left.  His hands were in his pockets.  There was a total absence of sound.

Then, the scene was shown again, but a lilting, sweet song was playing. The mood changed. Here, you thought, was a happy man, perhaps in love, certainly content with life.  It seemed delightful, light and inviting.

The scene played one more time, but this time the sound track was a low, minor-key chord played on cellos and basses with a rising anxious intensity.  Perhaps the man was being followed by a killer or he was angry and violent.  He seemed in imminent danger and dreadfully vulnerable to unseen forces.


I thought about sound today because the day was so gray and color so subdued.  The absence of visual interest shifted my attention to my ears and what they were telling me.  I decided to be "blind" while I walked and thought of the famous ability of people like Ray Charles, Andrea Bocelli and Stevie Wonder to mitigate the loss of vision with wonderfully increased auditory acuity. 

I walked only for a few hundred feet (glancing up to keep my bearings and laughing at my clumsiness) in a rain-soaked environment. Water noises were everywhere.  I thought about the way our minds monitor what we hear, "filing," in a way, the ordinariness of most of them, but still alert for subtle clues that might signal an important change that could be dangerous or interesting to us.  The variety of sounds that indicated the movement of water in the world around me was infinite and virtually indescribable except by a few adjectives we always turn to:  Swish, splash, gurgle, drip, plink, and roar.  Most of the sounds today were tiny and subtle, notable in their infinite variety and exquisite detail, all very surely the sounds made by large and small portions of liquid, moving or being moved. 

I thought about what babies hear in the womb and how the voices and sounds outside, in the room, give them a preliminary introduction to the world to come.  It has been shown that the sound of a beating heart played to a fussy infant will quiet them very quickly.

I listened to the sounds around the pool as I swam later, and knew that visual clues were serving to edit the sounds in my mind.  My arms moving through the water made a very similar sound to that of oar blades pulling through a still lake surface.  If I had been able to focus on listening only to the sound - played in a darkened room for instance - I would probably have been unable to tell what thing was making the gurgling sound.

I remembered the sound of the storm-swept ocean last week and the way the waves sounded as they steamed across the bay:  A variable swishing crescendo that culminated in a booming rumble and then the clatter and crash of rocks rolling up and down the slumped cliff rubble.  The swish was the same as you hear when very fast swimmers race in a pool.  Slower swimmers and slower waves create a different quality of sound, so by just listening to the quality of the noise, you can tell the quality of the swimmer.

I've thought about what perfect pitch might be like for those gifted with it.  I think the cacophony of sounds that are off key must be annoying.  Some musicians have been known to be so intolerant of a poorly tuned piano, or guitar, that they were simply unable to use it.  I don't have perfect pitch, but I have enjoyed good hearing and being able to listen to beautiful sounds; being able to do so has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. 

Today is a visually unlovely one, but the brilliant shadings of noise, even in their tiniest dimension, are everywhere to be heard and appreciated.  At this time of year when the light is low and air cold, tune up your hearing a bit and notice what you're surrounded by.  It's a refreshing alternative that can be very uplifting when sunshine has gone missing for so long.