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.