194 earplugs, 96 weeks later (2020)
194 earplugs, 96 weeks later (2020)
Posts tagged silence
Silence
Hempton went on to make a vocation of listening. He discovered that the use of a microphone turned him into a better listener, because he learned to take his cue from that tool, which didn’t judge the relative value of the different sounds it was absorbing. Having always in the past striven to listen for the “important” sounds, Hempton stopped trying to prioritize based on his own limited perspective and discovered the majesty of the uncurated soundscape. In beginning to hear without privileging certain sounds over others, he found that every place on earth has a unique sonic character. But, intriguingly, Hempton defines his different experiences of geographically specific auditory signatures as experiences of silence, which he calls the “poetics of space.”
This Is Your Brain on Silence
Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.
http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence
I’m Thinking. Please. Be Quiet.
From the vantage point of our own auditory world, with its jets, jackhammers, HVAC systems, truck traffic, cellphones, horns, decibel-bloated restaurants and gyms on acoustical steroids, Schopenhauer’s mid-19th century complaints sound almost quaint. His biggest gripe of all was the “infernal cracking” of coachmen’s whips. (If you think a snapping line of rawhide’s a problem, buddy, try the Rumbler Siren.) But if noise did shatter thought in the past, has more noise in more places further diffused our cognitive activity?
‘A great silence is spreading over the natural world’
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/03/bernie-krause-natural-world-recordings