In praise of quietness
May. 22nd, 2006 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus* The red headphones you can see me wearing in recent photos aren't connected to anything. No music flows through them. But they aren't merely cosmetic either. They're "portable peace". When I clap them over my ears, the world becomes a quieter place. And I like quietness.
* Peacefulness isn't merely the absence of sound, it's a way of being, a positive thing, a presence. Just as, in my Wired piece Hell is other people's music, I needed the concept of "roomtone" to show up pumped-in music as an intruder, so we need a concept of positive peacefulness. Low-level indigenous sound is not simply an absence, a blank slate. It's something present, something desireable, something you can hear.
* Last week's debates on the politics of texture raised the question: "How can you be celebrating peace when you're so violent and noisy?"
* I've always liked quiet people. My girlfriends have tended to be quiet, whispery, intimate. The sexiest people are!
* Japanese couples, as I understand it, don't feel the need to talk all the time. They can sit in silence for long periods without there being a sense that "something is wrong".
* Berlin is a very quiet city. I mean, if you want noise, you can find it. But there's a sobriety about Berlin, a tempered quality. In many streets, the loudest sound is birdsong.
* I love how, when it gets quiet, tiny sounds get "loud". That's my favourite landscape of sound.
* Last night I got home with John Talaga and nobody was in. The loft was so quiet! You could hear the wind, and roomtone, and the small sounds of the cat as it scampered about. I enhanced (or slightly spoiled) the poignant roomtone by playing Paul Lansky's "Alphabet Book", a very quiet record I bought in January in Tokyo, and one of my favourite finds this year.
* One day I will write about the vice of "Easy Power". The fact that it's easy to whip people up by cranking the sound up to 11.
* There's a video in the Chinese video art show at PS1 in which a performance artist films himself disturbing the peace on crowded Chinese streets. We see people filing calmly by, then the artist starts screaming and shouting, and people are momentarily alarmed, then continue about their business. It's interesting the first couple of times...
* At the soundcheck for my Tonic gig I asked the engineer to try to keep the levels down throughout our sets. The tendency at rock shows is for noise levels to creep up and up, but if you keep the sound down quite low, attention levels creep up instead. Of course, you miss the body-throbbing physical oomph of loud volume. But, increasingly, it's that sharp, focused, motivated, ultra-sensitive kind of attention I crave from audiences.
* Don't let the noisiest, least attentive person in the audience set the sound levels.
* I find myself slipping my red headphones on at films a lot too. Especially the trailers. The films I like tend to be quiet ones. The quietest film I ever saw was one about Bruce Goff. Goff in the Desert, it was called. It was a sequence of buildings by the visionary architect, accompanied by ambient sound from the buildings. No commentary, so the roomtone was foreground, not background. A kind of ambient film. I loved it, I found it exemplary and very... subversive, somehow. A "quiet revolution".
* Saturday night on the Lower East Side. We tried to find a bar for an after-party. Jesus, this area has got loud! Velvet ropes, security, bars where people simply bellow at each other and bad music clangs and hammers. We had to walk miles, down into Chinatown, to find a place where we could hear ourselves think. There's a range of frequencies and volumes people can communicate within, and once you go outside that everything becomes a bit of an ordeal, a bit uncomfortable.
* There's a whole school of "quiet music", like the The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto. And it's interesting how often noise artists turn, sooner or later, to quietness. Like Otomo Yoshihide and his music venue Off Site.
* I notice that people are listening to music on smaller and smaller speakers these days. A lot of people I know just listen to music on the built-in speakers in their laptops. It's a way of getting music quieter.
* There's no shame in being introverted.
* People who love quietness love life.
* Peacefulness isn't merely the absence of sound, it's a way of being, a positive thing, a presence. Just as, in my Wired piece Hell is other people's music, I needed the concept of "roomtone" to show up pumped-in music as an intruder, so we need a concept of positive peacefulness. Low-level indigenous sound is not simply an absence, a blank slate. It's something present, something desireable, something you can hear.
* Last week's debates on the politics of texture raised the question: "How can you be celebrating peace when you're so violent and noisy?"* I've always liked quiet people. My girlfriends have tended to be quiet, whispery, intimate. The sexiest people are!
* Japanese couples, as I understand it, don't feel the need to talk all the time. They can sit in silence for long periods without there being a sense that "something is wrong".
* Berlin is a very quiet city. I mean, if you want noise, you can find it. But there's a sobriety about Berlin, a tempered quality. In many streets, the loudest sound is birdsong.
* I love how, when it gets quiet, tiny sounds get "loud". That's my favourite landscape of sound.
* Last night I got home with John Talaga and nobody was in. The loft was so quiet! You could hear the wind, and roomtone, and the small sounds of the cat as it scampered about. I enhanced (or slightly spoiled) the poignant roomtone by playing Paul Lansky's "Alphabet Book", a very quiet record I bought in January in Tokyo, and one of my favourite finds this year.
* One day I will write about the vice of "Easy Power". The fact that it's easy to whip people up by cranking the sound up to 11.
* There's a video in the Chinese video art show at PS1 in which a performance artist films himself disturbing the peace on crowded Chinese streets. We see people filing calmly by, then the artist starts screaming and shouting, and people are momentarily alarmed, then continue about their business. It's interesting the first couple of times...
* At the soundcheck for my Tonic gig I asked the engineer to try to keep the levels down throughout our sets. The tendency at rock shows is for noise levels to creep up and up, but if you keep the sound down quite low, attention levels creep up instead. Of course, you miss the body-throbbing physical oomph of loud volume. But, increasingly, it's that sharp, focused, motivated, ultra-sensitive kind of attention I crave from audiences.
* Don't let the noisiest, least attentive person in the audience set the sound levels.
* I find myself slipping my red headphones on at films a lot too. Especially the trailers. The films I like tend to be quiet ones. The quietest film I ever saw was one about Bruce Goff. Goff in the Desert, it was called. It was a sequence of buildings by the visionary architect, accompanied by ambient sound from the buildings. No commentary, so the roomtone was foreground, not background. A kind of ambient film. I loved it, I found it exemplary and very... subversive, somehow. A "quiet revolution".
* Saturday night on the Lower East Side. We tried to find a bar for an after-party. Jesus, this area has got loud! Velvet ropes, security, bars where people simply bellow at each other and bad music clangs and hammers. We had to walk miles, down into Chinatown, to find a place where we could hear ourselves think. There's a range of frequencies and volumes people can communicate within, and once you go outside that everything becomes a bit of an ordeal, a bit uncomfortable.
* There's a whole school of "quiet music", like the The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto. And it's interesting how often noise artists turn, sooner or later, to quietness. Like Otomo Yoshihide and his music venue Off Site.* I notice that people are listening to music on smaller and smaller speakers these days. A lot of people I know just listen to music on the built-in speakers in their laptops. It's a way of getting music quieter.
* There's no shame in being introverted.
* People who love quietness love life.
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quiet composers
Date: 2006-05-22 07:10 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Murray_Schafer
If you're not familar, his theory of noise ecology is always interesting. He once calculated the least noise polluted place on earth. It was in Canada of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_ecology
The Tunning of the World I've never read.
I once wrote an incredibly horrible article about Schafer.
silence is never really there
Date: 2006-05-22 07:59 pm (UTC)The stillness makes the blowing of wind, which is a sometimes sudden event, even when light wind, turn towards this scraping sound of the evergreen foliage against the air. On a lake, in the middle of a wide open sky surrounded by mountains, a gentle rain shower in the middle of a sun-lit summer night, takes on its own thunder, without a thunder storm, or hard wind....
I'm pretty much a punk, but I found that after living with a bit of quiet, all the Americans cities, and the UK's London and Manchester were far too loud to even hear my mobil...
Noise has its place but so does silence... but sometimes the awareness of silence, stillness and inner peace let one open up to see that it IS ok to be "introverted" and that after the Loud singing Divas of Eurovision have sung their songs, that a quiet song can often be much more appealing and better for the nerves.. but on that "note" a huge louder than louder, harder than hard act won... would you like to try out for Eurvision with me and see if we can TRY something "different"? ;)
acoustic ecology
Date: 2006-05-22 08:49 pm (UTC)the right to quietness
it is also variously referred to as "acoustic/sound pollution/ecology" "music/musical pollution" and has social, medical, and legal implications as well as esthetic, cultural, and political aspects.
take a look at the pioneering work of MURRAY SCHAFER
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Murray_Schafer
he was one of the first researchers to raise the issue of acoustic ecology
we aren't born with earlids
Date: 2006-05-22 09:36 pm (UTC)music, said my colleague kant, is like smell: it fills up rooms and spaces and filters everywhere.
moreover, whereas you can block undesired images by just closing your eyes, humans aren't born with 'earlids' - they have to make do with artificial earlids - earphones...
too much music, played too loud, especially in public places, prevents you from thinking, and from communicating. therefore, in a time when music is imposed on you everywhere by public authorities - on buses, trains, in public offices, etc. or by private businesses - supermarkets, shops private offices - i think we should really start to analyze this phenomenon also in political terms.
but also listening to too much music alone in your room - 'overdoses of music' -, as i myself have experienced, can numb you, confuse your mind and decrease your ability to concentrate.
music in excess, just like web-surfing in excess, or tv in excess, etc. is one of these anti-social, mind-numbing drugs that keep you lonely and keep you away from reality.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-22 10:26 pm (UTC)Sonar pings, like whale song, can be heard for hundreds of miles, and travels about four times faster than it might in air. These powerful pings from naval submarines are often blamed for the deaths of whales.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-22 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-22 10:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-22 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 12:14 am (UTC)Good post
Date: 2006-05-23 12:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 01:20 am (UTC)also, are you at the whitney the rest of the week?
-quiet as a mouse
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 01:57 am (UTC)The Whitney is shut Monday and Tuesday, but I'll be there briefly on Wednesday and Thursday, probably 1-3pm.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 01:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:quiet
Date: 2006-05-23 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 02:20 am (UTC)Hell x2 is other people's distorted music played at 11khz through someone's mobile phone speaker at full crank.
I found that shure E3c in-ear headphones do a great job of cancelling out background noise rather well while listening to music, and also double as discreet earplugs while not.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 05:02 am (UTC)peace,
A
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 12:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:quiet
Date: 2006-05-23 08:06 am (UTC)juice
Date: 2006-05-23 08:42 am (UTC)let's squinting our ears
Date: 2006-05-23 09:43 am (UTC)We just finished mastering on the new Lullatone album. It is set at a level a lot lower than most other CDs (or even homemade CDRs) out these days for a lot of the same reasons people have been mentioning here. I also recorded all of the finished tracks to tape one time to (among many other reasons) add some tape hiss that would detour people from turning it up too much.
Also, I am glad to see that you got Yuichiro's new CD! He is one of our best friends here. I wish you could have seen his live set earlier this month in Shibuya with us and e*rock. It was brilliant!
I didn't feel like we were in brash busy Shibuya at all... sitting there squinting my ears to catch the few notes in between his pauses.
best,
Shawn
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 10:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 10:32 am (UTC)his quietest yet, i think...
Tonic Show on Saturday
Date: 2006-05-23 04:24 pm (UTC)I had a really good time at your show. The new songs from your upcoming album sounded wonderful. It is very sad to hear that you are going to Berlin to live. Hopefully you will come back to New York City soon.
Love,
Jimmy
PS. Thanks for signing my CD cover
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 05:12 pm (UTC)http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008543.php
at the very least it's tangential to this discussion. sound as graffiti.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-23 09:17 pm (UTC)ego
Date: 2006-05-23 09:53 pm (UTC)filtration abstinence ?
Date: 2006-05-26 10:37 pm (UTC)