The sound of silence

I would like to ask you a question: How often in your day are you surrounded by noise? I don’t mean sounds or music: but noise. Here are some definitions by Cambridge Dictionary:

sound: something that you can hear or that can be heard

noise: a sound or sounds, especially when it is unwanted, unpleasant, or loud

music: a pattern of sounds made by musical instruments, voices, or computers, or a combination of these, intended to give pleasure to people listening to it.

It is hard to escape noise completely when you live amongst human beings. In an urban soundscape, a day in the life of noise could start like this: A shrilling alarm clock wakes you up (unless you selected some upbeat music for the morning start), you open the window where early day traffic is already fully on its way, you listen to the radio whilst eating breakfast, you take the train to work where the person next to you has earphones with music that can be heard within the radius of 5 metres, your workplace plays loud music to attract customers, after work you stop by the supermarket where loudspeaker announcements with commercials follow you, on the train back you stand next to a group of people who almost shout while talking, at home you talk to your friend on Skype, use the vacuum cleaner, watch a film on stereo speakers and then play some relaxing music to help you put to sleep.

An alien visiting Earth or an animal living underground might view the whole day as a cacophony of noises: unpleasant and dangerous to health. According to the WHO (World Health Organisation), noise is the second largest environmental cause of health problems, just after the impact of air quality.

Noise is not only confined to urban soundscapes. If you thought about escaping to the rural idyllic, even the countryside is not immune to noise: a lot of farmers report having hearing problems due to exposure to loud equipment.

Scientists have divided the acoustic world into ‘geophony’, sounds produced from natural processes, like rain, wind, movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, and ‘biophony’, sounds produced by living organisms. There is now also a category called ‘anthropophony’, sounds produced by human beings. In many landscapes, anthropophony drives and drowns out the sounds produced by nature. Human activity is accelerating the change of Earth’s natural soundscapes.

Our natural spaces are now polluted with human-made noises. As we change forests into farms and drive species to extinction, we are fundamentally changing how our world sounds.

Within the past four decades, humans have built noisier technological devices that are not subject to any regulations. Nowadays, entertainment and distractions seem to form a part of everyday life for many people.

According to a recent EU publication, 20% of the population in Europe is exposed to level exceeding 65 dB during the day, and more than 30% is exposed to levels exceeding 55 dB at night.

Here are some noise levels for comparison:

10 dB - Breathing (almost not audible)
30 dB - Quiet rural area
40 dB - Library, bird calls (44 dbl), lowest limit of ambient urban sound
50 dB - Quiet suburb, conversation at home.
60 dB - Conversation in restaurant, office, background music
70 dB - Living room music (76 dB), radio or TV-audio, vaccuum cleaner, passenger car

A recent documentary film called ‘In pursuit of silence’ (or ‘Zeit fuer Stille’) explores the relationship of human beings and silence over time and in different places. Shot across the whole world, the viewer was shown not only the absurdity and extremity of noise in some urban environments, but also the poetic and philosophical sides of silence linked to primal senses and instinct, solitude and the ‘truth of one’s self’. The film also focused the dramatic changes of our view on silence since the technological revolution. There were many beautiful sentences spoken by different people, from Zen monks to environmental scientists, to John Cage who wrote 4’ 33’’, a music piece of silence, to a young guy who took a vow of silence for a year while walking across the United States. After the year, he posted a video on Vimeo which has now gone private, so only a quote is publicly available:

"It's about patience through thirst; it's about solitude through desert; it's about endurance through stillness; it's about being pardoned by pavement," Greg Hindy explains, his voice cracking and charged with emotion. "It's about being humbled by rain; it's about being sheltered by meditation; it's about moving through space – the human body – and time to think. It's about seeking by wandering and it's about speaking through silence, unspoken thoughts like vapor.”

One left the cinema, with ears sensitised and wide open, thinking: Why is there so much noise in this world? Do we need put on loud music and create noise all the time? With New Year’s Eve coming up, is there a need to create so much noise and use firecrackers which scare off our fellow beings and put immense stress on every body and every sense that is alive? Perhaps we can start into the new year in complete silence, as one saying goes: Silence speaks louder than words.
 

Sources:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161110-the-world-now-sounds-different-to-how-it-did-a-century-ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253729/
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/noise/health_effects_en.htm
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-mccolman/in-pursuit-of-silence-a-q_1_b_9396596.html
http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/environment-and-health/noise/data-and-statistics
http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/136466/e94888.pdf?ua=1
http://www.industrialnoisecontrol.com/comparative-noise-examples.htm
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/One-Year-Later-Yale-Grad-Makes-it-Coast-to-Coast-266887231.html