Design for Life: The Sound of Silence
Silence is so important for us and our surroundings.
January/February 2006
By Carol Venolia
“I try to listen to the still, small voice within but I can’t hear it above the din.”
—Eliza Ward, from Little Audrey’ s Story
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I've been thinking about quiet lately. I'm looking for a home to buy, and the search makes it clear that quiet has become the domain of the well-to-do. A driving tour of affordable homes in my area (if anything in California can be called that) soon has me singing the old Jackson Browne tune “I’m gonna rent myself a house in the shade of the freeway”—or on a busy street, or with a baseball field or gymnasium over the back fence. You want a quiet neighborhood? Tack on a few hundred thousand dollars.
Why do people build houses next to freeways—and freeways next to houses? Is nothing sacred? Do we not understand how deeply noise harms us? We’re a visually dominant culture, and by ignoring our soundscape we give it tremendous power over us. What would happen if we listened to our acoustic ecosystems more often?
Nature’s symphony
“Rivers, rocks, and trees have always been talking to us, but weve forgotten how to listen.”
—Michael Roads, Talking with Nature (Kramer, 1987)
When we long for quiet, what we seek isn’t really an absence of sound. In truth, our primal bodies yearn for a rich, varying texture of sounds—the surroundings we recall from our ancestral wildlands.
Through decades of careful listening, recording, and analysis, bio-acoustic specialist Bernard L. Krause, Ph.D., has observed intricate sonic relationships among insects, birds, mammals, and amphibians in the wild. He writes that their interwoven sounds create a complex vital beauty...that the best of sonic artists in Western culture have yet to achieve. He also notes that every intact natural habitat has its own unique voice; each area can be identified by its sounds.
Krause writes that in the wild, each creature occupies its own sonic niche. Rarely does one animal or species block the calls of another, yet if one creature stops vocalizing, another immediately joins the chorus to keep that audio bio-spectrum intact. Over time, the acoustic richness and range of vocalizations appears to increase. He writes that we’ll soon be able to use acoustic analysis to determine the age and biological health of certain habitats.
As human settlements and sounds take over wild areas, many acoustic ecologists fear that species will die off because they can’t hear each other’s mating calls or claim their sonic territory. We may think that the earth still has vast areas of wilderness, but the soundscape is now imprinted by human technologies virtually everywhere on the globe. Professional nature sound recorders find it increasingly difficult to record for more than a few minutes without interruption by noise from airplanes, logging equipment, motorboats, or vehicles.
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