Does silence have a sound?
I always loved Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. It’s melancholy and matches the mood of a rainy day or one of those days when it rains even when the sun shines and the sky is clear blue. But I got to thinking about silence today and the song popped into my head. I love the lyrics but especially:
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
While my thoughts run in a different direction, it does come to a point of a sort. People are always saying: “I couldn’t live out where you do, it’s too quiet”. Well yes, it doesn’t have all the city noises, but trucks go by about a half mile away on the main road. Neighbors do mow their fields with rather loud tractors. Grackles chirp and yell at each other in clouds off and on throughout the day. The squirrels chitter and scamper through the leaves. The winds blows through the trees with a sort of soft shushing sounds, unless of course it’s a storm and then it’s with a loud sort of howling thrum. So it’s not quiet here — there are just different sounds from a city.
Friends were visiting one day and we were sitting with lemonade and talking. The screen door was all that was between us and the outside when our male friend said, “Don’t you have some music or something, this quiet is weird?” The woman said, “Don’t you hear the chimes and the birds — that’s a sort of music?”
I seldom have the radio on. It’s on the upper floor and I have to have it really loud to hear it on the second floor. Playing a CD slows the laptop so I don’t do that either most of the time either. Moving the radio down to the floor I’m on (it does play CDs) is just more trouble than it’s worth most days. So, I work with the sounds of silence or to be more exact, the sounds of nature all around me. I hear the birds, the bees, the hawks, the cars along the distant roads, the thundering crash of a tree limb falling in the woods occasionally for spice, and the gentle sounds of wind and rippling leaves. That’s a music that many people not only don’t hear, but when they are so used to sound/noise/distractions in their environments, they actually find the sounds of silence unnerving.
When I’m out and about I see all the people on their cell phones, talking, listening to iPods and, because they are so awash in sound, they miss the smaller things. Rain on concrete. Doves cooing. And in some places, the screech of gulls fighting over food. There is so much sound everywhere — it’s just what you choose to listen too — or, unfortunately, what you’re often forced to hear.
There are some sounds that raise blood pressure and some that can help lower it. There are sounds that assist learning and others that inhibit learning. There are sounds that can make us irritable and others that can sooth. As our environments at work, on the streets, and at home become filled with sounds, we don’t have much choice or control except over the sounds at home.
What sounds do you prefer when you can control the volume and type? There are times I love loud Techno Rock and others when Jazz or Classical music fits the mood. But most of the time it’s the just the sounds that come through my screen door.