Jen Grier's Multiblog

Revisit: Working in Silence

Not long ago, I was as soldering lackey at ITP for a semester.  Talk about a fight for silence!

Today, by comparison, will be spent in a rural stretch of land where my apartment is.  Occasionally, I will hear a car pass by on the road.  One of my neighbors told me that the traffic on the road was “ghastly and loud,” that living near it was nearly “unbearable.”  I had to pause, because this place has been one of the most peaceful places I have ever lived.  We are a few hundred feet from one another, I’d wager.

There are times when I miss Japan for reasons like these.  The kind of respect that people would have for strangers – for each other – was so high.  It was communicated daily in those morning commutes, even when the A/C didn’t work in the subway cars.  Regardless, you needed to respect those around you by moving little and making no sound or unnecessary gestures so everyone would keep cool in a difficult situation.  That is humanity, to me, or maybe the essence of human collectives.  Feeling that conformity for the greater good was both sublimating and fascinating.

October 22nd, 2007 in “Silence Theory”:

An intriguing topic came up in my Digital Audio Processing class at NYU: by listening to music while you study, it forces what you are reviewing to enter a different part of your memory.  What you learn can be recalled easily, but you cannot interact with it deeply because of the multiprocessing of learning and, in a sense, ignoring the music around you.Interesting.

I tried doing 60 pages or so of reading yesterday for classes that needed to be internalized more than memorized.   I did this in silence. By the time I finished, I found myself desperately craving sound, music, and change.   However, I can definitely say that what I read is well inside my brain.

The key is balance, I believe.  If you force yourself to encounter too many sensations at once, consciousness dictates that some information will be absorbed and the rest will have to subside. By trying to read deeply, you desensitize yourself to the background music…

The other day, I was working in the NYU: ITP fabrication shop on a midterm project. During the course of the evening, the hum of the shop and clatter of people created nearly unworkable conditions.  I put in strong earplugs and, to my surprise, found them entirely ineffective.   The speech of people was too impulsive – too much articulation – and that could not be numbed enough by my devices.   I gave up the moment and left until less intrusive conditions resumed.

The respect of space, in such confined arenas, seems totally lost.   When I traveled by train and subway in Japan, the unspoken law of quiet and spatial respect nearly deafened my preexisting Western cultural norms.  I was instantly subdued to the group acceptance of these two rules by the sheer encompass of them.   Somehow, we do not communicate the same understanding or observation of strong, positive social suggestions by ourselves: we need libraries or other declared quiet spaces for that purpose.  The struggle of one soldering student, it seems, does not even tip a balance to the casual many.

Are we hardwiring ourselves to be ignorant of undesired sound scapes?

Are we losing sensitivity to the natural consciousness of our sound environment?

Would a good teaspoon of silence each day regain an awareness of what we are forced to miss?

I’m glad to resuscitate these older thoughts from a grave in a PHP database.  It just didn’t seem right to copy/paste them into the Multiblog without some background and reflection.