It is getting more difficult to hear silence

Mar 18, 2012 10:36 pm
Kim Tingley asks "Is Silence Going Extinct?" in a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. At Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve Tingley walks deep into the tundra, almost inside the Artic Circle. "Our destination was a ridge above Hines Creek, where [Davyd, the park’s physical-science technician] Betchkal planned to assemble a station to collect a month’s worth of continuous acoustic data documenting an intangible, invisible and — increasingly — endangered resource: natural sound. Our mission was not only to trap the ephemeral but also to experience it ourselves, which at the moment was impossible for three reasons: 1) the chafing of our nylon outfits; 2) the chunking of our military-issue Bunny Boots on ice; and 3) planes. 'If you’re on foot and you choose to focus on the natural quality of the landscape, you’re completely immersed in nature; nothing else exists,' Betchkal said. 'Then a jet will go over, and it kind of breaks that flow of consciousness, that ecstatic moment.' Then Tingley traces a history of noise:
"In his influential 1977 work, “The Tuning of the World,” the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer charts man’s relationship with noise. As long ago as 3000 B.C., he notes, the Epic of Gilgamesh discussed 'the uproar of mankind,' which aggravated the god Enlil. 'Sleep is no longer possible,' he complains to the other gods. In the second century A.D., wagon traffic 'sufficient to wake the dead' ruined the Roman poet Juvenal’s ability to rest between Satires. Many English towns were sequestering their blacksmiths by the 13th century, and Bern, Switzerland, passed its first law 'against singing and shouting in streets or houses on festival days' in 1628. Over the next 300 years, it also legislated against 'barking dogs,' 'singing at Christmas and New Year’s parties,' 'carpet-beating' and 'noisy children.' In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared noise a pollutant."
Read the full story in The New York Times Magazine.