Posts Tagged → silence
Revisit: Personal Silence
As I enjoy the happy silence of an early Sunday morning, I love to think about how the silence is, itself, not so bad. There can be lots of love within silence, for example.
January 4th, 2008 in “Silence Theory”:
This Esquire article got me thinking [again] about the power of personal silence. There’s a gap between what people understand by what you say and what you don’t, especially whether you say anything or not.
In high school, I was a fairly depressed teenager. Typical small-town, too-smart kid with the right classes and the wrong people. I reached a point of bubbling anger that effervesced through the day, preps and jocks in wise avoidance after a few months. I was aggressive in indoor gym, especially with soccer and badminton. If that wasn’t enough to strike fear in the hearts of classmates, my silence usually did it. Nothing can communicate unfriendliness like a refusal to answer a question with a glare that could cut iron. The mystery, though… you felt the mystery of yourself after doing this for some time as what you didn’t say left all the more to your assailant’s imagination. I frightened myself a bit, after some time, as I realized that I didn’t have anything to fill in those empty spaces, either.
On the other hand, you can have the deepest, sweetest communications with those you love without an utterance passing. A total 360 to the same space!
What do you say when you speak? Are you chatty, covering up social discomfort, or filling a space that would otherwise seem too awkward to live within? Do you use silence to strengthen the words you do say? It’s kind of like keeping your word by not upholding promises to it unless it is of dire importance… people will know your actions or words mean business.
Revisit: A Thought
I felt this when I lived in Jersey City. I felt this especially as a student at a big university in Manhattan… silence was truly running for its life.
November 9th, 2007 in “Silence Theory”:
“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation… Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”
- Jean Arp
Trippin’ Down Memories
If you’ve been reading, thanks for putting up with my trips down memory lane. I really didn’t want to see my old, interesting posts from a less thoughtful journey into BlogLand get sucked up into the black void of the Internets. I’m hoping to return to new thoughts on technology, silence, music, interactivity, and everything else I could possible hope for, but really, I should catch my breath first. I think the silence posts, in particular, will be wild to post on – now that I live in South Carolina, silence is kind of easy to take for granted. Now, I welcome the interruption of a car, etc. More to come on that when I have a less hectic day ahead of me!
I’ve got lots of exciting projects in the cooker, but nothing to show for it yet! It’s a pain, I know! I’m hoping to at least finish my Theremin project soon, but there’s no guarantee. Also, if you have any tips for wading through boxes of memorabilia, please pass them along. It looks like I may be moving in the direction of Greenville when my lease is up, but I don’t want to do that without owning much less, you know? Moving is such a pain, and I hope to be the smartest I’ve ever been about the process this time.
Oh, and a certain lovely boyfriend recently surprised me with WarioWare D.I.Y.! I hope to make a few little games that don’t stink. I’ll be sure to share them when they’re born. 
Before I forget: my time was monopolize by a crazy accident on 85 South, coming from Spartanburg to Greenville. It took me ages to get out of it! Just terrible!
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.
Revisit: The First Step Into Silence
One of my more interesting writing experiments, Silence Theory, began shortly after I moved to Jersey City, then for an affordable life while attending school in the Village. This was the first post, written about 2.5 years ago. It seems so long ago, but I feel like I still have so much to think about in this area.
October 7th, 2007 in “Silence Theory”:
I’ve begun this blog in an effort to explore a phenomenon. Perhaps this is more personal than universal. If you’ve found me, I hope you find interest here.
This began with a load of laundry.
Laundromats, as you may be aware, are generally mechanism-filled spaces of suds and socks. The audible pangs of the washer to the creaks of every drier can make the visit a session in audio pollution very, very quickly.
What I did to change that was wear a set of earplugs for the session – a serendipitous find in my bag – and took note of the immediate calm I found myself in. The machines became more of a distant, indiscernible cloud… my tactile sense kicked up with the rumbles of rotation. I enjoyed the distance between myself and the conversations in the room, which were beyond my business, you know?
Entranced by this effect, I tried it again on the LightRail, traveling from my downtown apartment in Jersey City to Hoboken. A nearby toddler began to voice his upset with Thomas the Tank Engine when the plugs went in, and I was blissfully in my own, yet shared space. Again, there was the lack of machinery (moving trains tend to squeal and gurgle) and a deadening of all frequencies, making the space seem less aggravated, less uninvitational.
On the PATH, there was a similar feeling of disconnect. In a more dense space, there was less sense of selfness, but I was even more grateful for the separation between my ears and the metal grinding of the PATH. (If you’ve been, you know the shrieks of the track, high-pitched and obtrusive.)
These were all instances of silence and my own stillness, however. As I walked from the PATH station to school, I found that the earplugs themselves increased my sense of “inner sounds”, such as my breath and footstep reverberations. I could also feel my pulse within my head, which was alarming until I realized that it was, really, just my own, and it’s been happening without my notice for many years now. Initially, I had reservations about wearing the plugs in the city – would be too unaware of my surroundings that my safety would be forfeit? Somehow, that was not the case. Over the day, I had adjusted to my senses of touch and sight to accommodate for the “loss” of outer hearing, and I feel that I was acceptably attenuated to the new perception recipe I was stirring. The other aspect of ear plugs is that, although many high frequencies feel rolled-off, the impacts of normal and loud sounds generally do make it through. If I am in the city and a car approaches, for example, I can hear it and be aware, but it is a softer, round sound when it gets to me. I have the suddenness without the aggression.
I am interested in a less invasive sound experience while in the city and elsewhere. Perhaps further study will awaken the truths behind what we hear, our choices, and the outcome of our daily experiences.
*Disclaimer: I don’t recommend wearing earplugs for long amounts of time unless they are manufactured for that purpose. It can, in the least, be uncomfortable, but poor plugs inserted improperly run the risk of hurting your ears. Be safe, check things out on the packaging or look them up on the Web before delving into your own sound space experiments.
