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Thinking about listening for silence, for shades of quiet, the same way we might focus on specific sounds
Literal silence is, of course, nearly impossible to find. But we still try to find it, or the closest thing to it, from time to time. If we can’t get silence, then at least we might discover some quiet.
The New York Times recently published a short video about a “sound walk” through the city. The reporter was led by Jacek Smolicki, an artist and sound expert, who brought along specialized microphones and other equipment. This gear allows us to zero in on specific sounds — a hot dog cart’s generator, a steam stack on Fifth Avenue, a tiny waterfall in Central Park. But what it really does, if you think about it, is silence competing sounds.
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called “The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence”*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn’t sound) identical:
The pregnant pause; the companionable silence between friends or partners; the awkward silence you might share with a stranger; the menacing silence punctuating an interrogation; the reverent silence we involuntarily adopt in a museum or place of worship.
The core idea here — varieties of silence — got me thinking about listening for silence, for sounds that are missing, for shades of quiet, the same way we might focus on specific sounds. The silence of one physical space might be relaxing; another might feel sinister. A fresh silence can mark the end of something — not hearing the summertime ice cream truck, or the chatter of a former neighbor. It could mean a baby that stops crying, a car that won’t start, an alarm that’s been deemed false, or the dog down the street mysteriously choosing not to bark at you this time. And so on.
These might be hard to map, but such silences are easily discovered, if you choose to be attentive to them. What sound absences — what varieties of silence — have you noticed?
* A note: I downloaded the referenced essay to Instapaper and originally read it there when it came out in February, But it has since disappeared from the 3 Quarks site. For this post I revisited the Internet Archive version via the Wayback Machine, but even that version appears not to be working anymore. I couldn’t find contact info for the author, and my email to an address on the 3 Quarks site has gone unanswered. Dunno what the deal is! Sorry!
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All this by Rob Walker (unless otherwise noted) PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032.
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