In Pursuit of Silence (16 page)

The new noise is all about trying to demodulate and defy any larger pattern of environmental sound. Usually this translates
into being loud, but not always. Designers are now dedicating themselves to provoking moods and emotional connection from sounds of every dimension made by individual products themselves. Sonic branding is fast becoming a major business. More and more product noises are now manipulated to punch up the consumer’s desire to purchase. The purr or roar of an automobile engine. The sound of a golf ball. The click of a camera. The crunching of foods. The sound of the lipstick-container top popping off and the lipstick sliding up. Already these sounds are being analyzed and enhanced. Everything we buy is going to join the acoustical menagerie endlessly bleating out its sonic identity to every passerby.

Going back to Dr. White, I would propose a definition of noise as sound that you can’t get distance on—sound that gets inside your head and won’t go away. Hypersonic sound, a relatively new technology that dispenses with the loudspeaker altogether by shooting a super-focused ray of sound directly at its target, is only an extreme version of what most of the new noise is trying to do. When the acoustical laser beam of hypersonic sound hits the ears, it feels as though a projected voice is speaking inside the “listener’s” skull. I got beamed by one playing party dance music in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. As the person holding the flat-black tablet-style speaker pans the beam across you, you hear the sound pass from ear to ear
through your head
. Big wow factor. There are numerous online diaries and pleas from people who may or may not be paranoid schizophrenics discussing hypersonic sound as one more proof of a conspiracy involving a huge time and energy commitment
by extremely scary forces to take over their brains and drive them to suicide.

For all of us, the effect of sound we can’t get away from can be literally dizzying. When it is loud enough it can disturb the vestibular system in the inner ear on which our sense of equilibrium depends. Even when not actually inducing vertigo, there’s a loss of psychological balance that comes from being taken over by a sound; our aural back and forth with the world is gone and we are shaken into the larger vibrations.

One afternoon at rush hour I went to Grand Central Station. I stood in the middle of the terminal, beneath the great vaulted ceiling with its twinkling stars, listening.

At midnight on January 2, 1950,
a series of extraordinary
, spontaneous protests brought to an end a 13-week program in which canned music, along with 240 commercials per 17-hour period, were broadcast through 82 loudspeakers positioned throughout the terminal. The program had been a profitable public-private partnership: the New York Central Railroad was making $1,800 a week (almost $15,000 in today’s terms) from leasing the soundscape of Grand Central Station to Muzak and the advertisers who worked with it. But the commuters rose up, insisting on their inalienable right not to be exploited as “captive audiences,” demanding their “right not to listen.” They made dire prophecies that if this practice were tolerated, the trains themselves would be next. They enlisted psychiatrists to argue that the constant sound was deleterious to the nervous system,
and advertisers who testified that the initiative would besmirch the integrity of the business of advertising. They refused to be silenced and began preparing legal briefs.

And suddenly, amazingly, the railroad backed down and abandoned the program. “We just threw in the towel,” one unnamed railroad spokesperson declared. The manager of the terminal concluded his announcement of the termination of the public-address system broadcast by thanking “all our passengers for giving us the benefit of their sincere opinions on the subject, pro and con, for it is only after a thorough airing of the issues that such matters can be decided.”

I stood a few moments, letting the great reverberating waves of sound wash over me. I heard the rolling wheels of suitcases; the unfolding crinkles of maps; the scuffs and squeaks of shoes on the big, polished light tiles; the chink of an umbrella onto the stone; a broken sentence, “Anyway—
here you are
”; an impossibly low, faint bellowing of some train announcement. Above all, I heard the different frequencies of thousands of melding voices floating up to the great blue-green barrel vault dancing with golden stars and the silent bestiary of the zodiac, swelling and ebbing in one great sublime roar. I stood there and shut my eyes. As I listened, I knew I could only have been in this one place in all the world.

After my visit to Grand Central, I knew we couldn’t blame all noise today on evil anonymous retailers, restaurateurs, and the
corporations who supply them. How did we ever get to the point of giving the acoustical shock troops such a wide field of opportunity? What is the nature of our complicity? As the commuters in Grand Central once demonstrated,
life doesn’t have to sound this way
.

To get a better handle on why we let things come to such a pass, I still had to travel to the extremes of loud; to people who choose not just to pound with sound but to pulverize—to turn themselves and others inside out with noise. For if I now understood some of the motivations for amping up the volume, I had yet to grasp the rationale behind the pursuit of noise for noise’s sake. I suspected that this principle underlay a great deal of the day-to-day sound of today. Noise has become our way of “just saying no” to many, many things. I wanted to zero in on the cultural and technological developments that have driven us to make sonic punishment a badge of freedom.

First, however, I needed a break. I felt as though I’d been on an exhausting tour to some not very nice places. Come to think of it, I had. Now, like any other weary traveler, I wanted to put down my guidebook and take off my shoes. I needed refreshment: an out-of-the-way café shaded with umbrellas, serving lemon ices; an inviting spring shadowed by a willow tree; a hidden garden graced with old gray statues and lichen-ambered stone benches. I craved a little quiet time.

Silent Interlude

Having neither time nor money for a holiday flight, I decided to go on a tour of oases of silence near my midtown office. As a matter of principle, pursuing silence should be pleasurable, like hunting for prize wild mushrooms or bathing in mild seas, not painful, like striving to flatten one’s stomach or to maintain a stern budget.

Wherever you live there are ways of finding silence—it’s just that these ways are often not as pleasant as they should be. Silence is still around, but often it’s been marginalized to the point where it conveys the prospect of eternal silence a little too vividly. Abandoned, broken-glass-strewn lots behind barbed wire, vacant buildings, and mortuaries might be quiet, but at what cost?

That said, the basic strategy for locating the remaining sites of silence in your hometown is to envision it as the Costa del Sol. The beach is out of the question. All the places people are naturally drawn to for work, recreation, and shopping are going to be
impossibly loud. But a short distance inland cuts the crowds down to a dribble of locals and suddenly one finds oneself in an authentically foreign place. So ask yourself: What is the interior of the place I live? Where do surf and sand stop? What’s the road no one bothers to drive? The bench where no one sits?

In many cities, the land underneath the yawning arches where old bridges sink their foundations is a place of refuge, as are the tops of undistinguished skyscrapers. In smaller towns, historical societies and libraries with inadequate Internet connections are almost invariably deserted. Museums of unfashionable subjects are a good bet anywhere (you can almost always hear a pin drop in collections attached to schools of medicine). Cemeteries on weekdays, wherever you live, are an obvious but reliable refuge. Just remember to keep asking, Where’s the culture pulling everyone? Now turn around and walk the other way. Keep walking.

Manhattan might not seem like the most promising foraging ground for a couple of hours of silence, but I’m in an especially fortunate area for hunters of that aural truffle. My own circuit is small and more effortless than it might be in many ostensibly quieter communities.

Within a ten-minute walk of where I work there are two marvelous and one better-than-nothing example of the pocket park. Pocket parks—also known as miniparks and vest-pocket parks—are small patches of landscaped nature generally built on vacant building lots or scraps of urban land that fall between the cracks of real estate interests.

I began my morning’s pursuit of moderate silence at Paley Park on East Fifty-third Street, just across Fifth Avenue from the Museum of Modern Art. Opened in the spring of 1967, it is one of the oldest pocket parks in the United States. It is named for William Paley, the former chairman of CBS, who financed and oversaw the park’s design on the site of
the old Stork Club
. When he announced his plans to create the park, Paley described it as a “resting place” and a “new experiment for the enjoyment of the out-of-doors in the heart of the city.” It proved an enormous hit from the moment it opened, and has remained popular ever since. The
New York Times
called it
“a corner of quiet delights
amid city’s bustle.” Early visitors waxed enthusiastic about the relief it provided from the din of the streets, and the
“acoustic perfume”
of the park’s waterfall.

To enter Paley Park, you ascend a few steps from Fifty-third Street into a narrow gap between tall buildings, flanked by ivy-covered walls. (The park’s landscape designer, Robert Zion, described them as “vertical lawns.”) Almost instantly, the waterfall at the far end of the park—twenty feet high and running with some 1,800 gallons of water per minute—entirely drowns out the street noise. The morning I visited, the park’s tall, scraggly honey locusts were still bare, but the gray pots scattered around the park were bright with clumps of yellow tulips. From the entrance, the rectangular sheet of brown stone at the far end of the park over which the white water flows resembles a movie screen, but as you come closer you realize that the backdrop is in fact composed of countless small brown-and-gray irregular stones that sometimes slow and highlight the pattern of falling water. It’s beautiful. Like the other two pocket parks in my neighborhood,
there’s no real quiet. Water masks the grinding city sounds. It works: the effect on the spirit is one of silence.