The Sounds of Silence

With my penchant for paradox, I’ve always loved the title of the Simon and Garfunkle song and album, “The Sounds of Silence” (along with the brilliant lyrics and the haunting melody).

How could silence have a sound? Yet I’ve always felt it does. When I turn off abrasive music on the radio or mute the blaring commercials on tv, it feels like the ensuing quiet is a positive force, like water running over rocks or oxygen flowing into a room. I experience silence not as the absence of sound but as something tangible and positive.

And I need a lot of it. My environment is usually quiet. I’m always surprised when I stay at other people’s houses by how often the music is on. Sometimes it’s on very softly, which I find especially distracting, as it forces me to listen hard to hear anything.  If it’s not music, it’s podcasts, which invariably go on for too long. Give me the fifteen-minute podcast, or, better yet, the transcript! But, no, people run on and on for over an hour. When I’ve been a guest on a podcast, after twenty minutes or so I want to say, “I think that about sums it up.” But no. On we drivel.

When I had a real job in a real office, with cubicles, I used to fantasize about working at home, listening to music. Baroque in the morning, rock in the afternoon, jazz in the early evening. But once I began working at home, I never listened to music at all, because I found I couldn’t even check email while listening to Bach. I could only focus on the screen by turning off the sound. It turns out I’m a mono-tasker.

I know that artists paint pictures and surgeons cut bodies to music but I personally can’t write or read when I hear a bass line or an oratorio.

Faint natural sounds are another matter. I can write to the rhythm of the waves: their splash and hiss put me into something like a trance. Nor does the wind through the branches interrupt my train of thought. Even the mechanical sawing of the cicadas doesn’t bother me, though visiting Europeans are astonished and appalled that mere insects can make such a big sound.

Man-made sounds are a lot more intrusive. Fire-sirens, garbage trucks, cars honking: you expect to hear these noises when you live in a New York City apartment. When my mother moved to the suburbs, however, some fifty years ago, she was appalled by the loud whine of gas-powered leaf-blowers, which poisoned the peace most of the year. If there was one dry leaf on a lawn, out would come a leaf-blower to power it away. So she and some neighbors got together and organized to ban leaf-blowers until September 15 every year, and Larchmont became the first village in the USA to have a gardening noise ordinance.

People can be extreme in their search for silence. Recording specialist Gordon Hampton decided to find the quietest place in the USA and wrote a book, One Square Inch of Silence, about his project. He identified the place, at Olympic National Park, and placed a small red stone there. According to one commercial pilot, some airlines have voluntarily rerouted flights to avoid noise pollution in the area.

I wonder if in a silent space like that you can hear your own heartbeat.

Perhaps I can, and should, experience silence more locally. Perhaps what I really need is an isolation tank. A sensory deprivation tank, in which you float in 96-degree water in a dark, quiet   room, is thought to alleviate anxiety and stress. A float tank provides Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST), and after this presidential election, that is what I will crave.

Illustration by DALL.E