> I don't wish to overanalyse, but I'd be intrigued in a wider sharing
> of experiences of such quiet places to see if there's any
> commonality, or if our experience's differ widely.
Tony,
I promised myself I wouldn't get involved in this "Silence Debate",
but yes, I have many memories of silent and quiet locations and was
very glad to move out of West London to a quiet Devon location.
I now have slight tinnitus above about 13KHz where my hearing fades,
but I remember many silent locations in my youth. One was in India in
open empty moorland where I heard the thermal sound of the air. With
keen youthful hearing, it is just possible to hear this but many
experts will not believe me. There was the roaring sound of my
breathing, my heart thumping away noisily, noise in head muscles, ear
noise, blood passing in capillaries, but faintly in the background
was a clear high pitched hiss which could only be thermal noise.
As with letting your eyes adjust to the dark (I won't have any outside
lights here apart from the Milky Way). Ears settle down in an hour or
so after a car ride etc. and reveal many sounds most people are not
aware of.
How you reproduce this with a sound recording is another matter as
most listeners' noise backgrounds are higher than the "quiet" sounds
of nature. The volume control is at hand and the listener will use
this to destroy the effect we try to create.
Shortly after I moved here, a delivery man looked around and said:
"'Tis nice and quiet yer" but as he said it, two military jets passed
overhead at 500 feet and it came out as: "'TIS NICE AND QUIET YER!".
Shows how silence can be relative. :-)
David
David Brinicombe
North Devon, UK
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - Ambrose Bierce
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