Anthropogenic Global Din

But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy. —Patrick Kavanagh, “Wet Evening in April”

“Interior and exterior silence are necessary in order to hear the Word,” Pope Benedict told the massed pilgrims in St Peter’s Square on March 7, 2012, on the last of his catacheses on the personal prayer of Jesus, specifically on Christ’s silence on the cross. He hardly had to point the lesson—“our age does not, in fact, favour reflection and contemplation”. In a civilisation attended by constant noise, the Pope had to tell his audience not be afraid of silence, for when they feel “a sense of abandonment” in the stillness of a prayer, they should be confident that “this silence, as happened to Jesus, does not signify absence”.

Of course, it isn’t just the divine Word which you can’t make out in such Golgotha moments. It can be difficult enough to hear somebody talking right next to you. Ambient noise may leave you on edge, if not on the edge. Sometimes you can’t even hear yourself thinking, as the phrase goes.

Having spent quite a bit of time recently in some of the globe’s larger cities, which can be exceedingly noisy (and most of the noise comes from the reverb of thousands of Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha scooters stealing in between the hundreds of pick-ups and minibuses), I’ve had occasion even behind the double-glazing of air-conditioned rooms (which I don’t like, even though they’re vital if you want to sleep at all) to meditate on noise. But how do you meditate on something that is out to obliterate you? When I think back on it, most of my nightmare moments as a traveller have been associated with sound: I recall a particularly tense night when after travelling all day to reach Madras (as Chennai was still called) I opted to bunk down in the nearest hotel room: what I didn’t realise was that it was directly above the regional bus station for Tamil Nadu. I hadn’t anticipated what might be happening underneath at 4 a.m. It is reported that the night-time noise level in Mumbai, a city of over 20 million, is 63 decibels, climbing to 78 during the day (and the decibel scale is a base-ten logarithm, so the difference in sound intensity is far greater than it might seem).

I also recall moments of deep pleasure in those travels, when I stepped into a sonic bubble and it was possible to experience the world turning: a year in the Australian outback with my wife and our young son in 1990–91 provided not only nightly displays of the Milky Way in high definition, free of the urban light smog that makes it impossible to see it in our northern cities, but also the ripples of quietness of inner Australia. All those Australians who crowd along the littoral simply don’t know what they’re missing.

Noise seems so much a product of modernity—the unwanted sound generated by our seemingly insatiable need for mobility and communications—that it’s hard to believe ancient civilisations could suffer from noise intolerance. The story of the Flood as told in Genesis is well known, and God’s reason for wanting to put an end to humankind. The P version: “The earth was exceedingly corrupt and filled with violence.” The J version: “Now when the Lord saw how great the evil of humans was … he was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and he was pained in his heart.” He vows to wipe them out, and it is in one of those odd and inexplicable moments of divine tender-heartedness that Noah gets a reprieve in order to start building and caulking his zoo-raft. Tablet III of the Atrahasis Epic, a 4000-year-old Akkadian flood story taken up in the much better-known Gilgamesh epic, offers another explanation for the flood. Enlil, the god of breath, tells the council of the other great gods: “The noise of humans has become too loud, their constant uproar is keeping me awake.”

There was no distance between Enlil and the plenum: the ambient noise level was all presence. He was suffering from a kind of hyperacusis—the modern discovery that noise and thought are incompatible.

Perhaps the noise that disturbed Enlil was the cellular noise of burgeoning life itself. Everything in the universe gives off noise: it is the random background conversation of atoms. There is even a phenomenon called thermal noise, which is generated by electronic devices. Infrasound is registered by barometric instruments when a volcano explodes, well before we hear the audible explosion. Many other natural phenomena can generate infrasound, such as calving icebergs, lightning and avalanches; and it is thought that animals were able to detect the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami through their susceptibility to infrasound long before the event became apparent to humans. At the other end of the scale, ultrasound—which we associate with diagnostic techniques and echo-locating bats—is also generated by the winds of ionised plasma that rise up in the atmosphere with the northern lights.

Everything, as the poet Edwin Morgan testified, is giving off messages. A man he admired, the composer John Cage, wrote scores that recruited universal sounds, and made listeners acutely—and sometimes uncomfortably—aware of their origins in silence. Noise is the “parasite” that limits the minimum signal level to which a radio receiver can respond: that is why radio telescopes, which scour the expanding universe for the whisper of the stars, have to use low-noise amplifiers cooled by liquid nitrogen. Or perhaps it was the disquieting fact (for the Mesopotamian gods) that humans, if the ancient tablets are anything to go by, had discovered self-consciousness: where their minds had been quiet, now they were filled with an unceasing inner gossip, or what Meister Eckhart would call “the storm of inward thought”. Silence is only ever a seeming.

And really, Enlil hadn’t heard anything yet in terms of anthropogenic noise. John Ruskin interrupts his Letter 20 in Fors Clavigera at several points to bemoan the shrieking and din of the ships docking close to his hotel. “My friends,” he opens his letter, “you probably thought I had lost my temper and written inconsiderately, when I called the whistling of the Lido steamer ‘accursed’.” He abandons his letter to go and see whether a large new steamer is coming in from the Adriatic, but it turns out to be “a little screw steamer … not yet twelve yards long, yet the beating of her screw has been so loud across the lagoon for the last five minutes”. He rhapsodises to a passage in Isaiah, and breaks off with a parenthesis: “Steam-whistle interrupts me from the Capo d’Istria, which is lying in front of my window with her black nose pointed at the red nose of another steamer at the next pier.” The roaring and whistling of various ships goes on for some time (and Ruskin too) and is so deafening he thinks it would be impossible to “make any one hear me speak in this room without an effort”. The high-pressure blasts continue—four, five, six, seven—and he stops counting, but not before observing that all these noises go through his head “like a knife”. Henry David Thoreau had a similar reaction to the locomotive whistle he heard at Walden Pond in 1853.

Noise had yet to be recognised as part of that modern syndrome we call stress, and it is only recently that governments have recognised noise as an environmental health problem and not just as a nuisance. Occupational health experts have published many studies which show increased levels of morbidity and mortality in high-noise settings. Noise and pain have one thing in common: they shut you solipsistically into your self, like bad dentistry, and the body becomes their sounding board.

Ruskin would have known that the Great War was evil simply by the fearsome whistling shrieking thundering noise it made, day and night, without a pause. Robert Musil, writing his long novel The Man without Qualities during that war, elected to describe the Vienna of 1913, then one of the great metropolises of the world, in terms of the juggernaut sounds that were transforming it into the support line of the trenches being dug all over Europe:

Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating.

In that same 1913, Luigi Russolo, one of the Futurists, wrote a famous manifesto—L’Arte dei Rumori—advocating a new kind of industrialised music in which the actual tones and timbres of the performance would be the rhythms and configurations of urban-industrial life: he believed, apparently in all sincerity, that modern humans had evolved a greater capacity for more complex sounds. The first concert of Futurist music took place in April 1914, and incorporated his “Convegno d’aeroplani e d’automobili” (Meetings of aeroplanes and automobiles); it caused a riot. Though Russolo couldn’t record anything in those days, noise would go on to find its place in the repertoire. He had discovered that individuals could display their sense of being modern by converting the pain of impersonal aural torture into the fiction of personal power. The electro­acoustics of musique concrète would follow. And modern rock music would go on to discover psychoacoustics. It turned out to be a less cerebral kind of Futurism with lots of feedback. By combining noise with rhythm it is possible to empty bodies out into a communal celebration where participants quite happily surrender their individuality to the audio gods of integrism.

Robert Musil hadn’t heard anything yet either, come to think of it. I was rudely reminded of Enlil’s conjuration and Musil’s frighteningly spiky sound-shape in a supposedly soundproofed hotel in one of the great Asiatic cities of our contemporary Babel. There was no refuge even with a pillow over my head. The very substance of the hotel seemed to be reverberating, as though I were bunked on a cargo ship. I could recognise the subterranean echoes of one of the six categories of sounds as classified by Russolo: “roars, thunderings, explosions, hissing roars, bangs, booms”. I had let myself in for it though: my head was still ringing from the blare of the basement bar, with its galactic lighting and voluptuous shamhats. Karaoke’s decibel heroes, it seemed, had been let loose there and were still torturing me, four storeys above.

Noise, I decided, must be the real god of global exchange: it forces us into a state of total material sympathy, where the thinking self has no choice but to follow the body. And some people even celebrate it by dancing.

Silence is a more mysterious quality. It speaks only if you know how to enter it in the right way. Michel Foucault suggested that the Romans cultivated silence as a cultural ethos. John Cage’s cele­brated pieces took away the formal structures of music, its emotional contrasts and developments and atmosphere, and asked listeners not to absorb whatever they thought the exterior might be saying but to create their own wide spaces and connections. Wittgenstein once said that he liked the idea of a silent religion. I wonder what he (and John Cage for that matter) would make of the doings of the American musician and biophonist Bernie Krause, who has spent forty years archiving sounds from the natural world. More than half of the 4000 hours of his field recordings are all that remains of those original habitats, whose silence grows even as our din expands.