In Pursuit of Silence (12 page)

Gaydos agrees. “Remember, the Earth spins at a particular frequency, even though we don’t hear that frequency as sound,” he told me. “There are correlations between the earthly vibrations that we have adapted to as part of our evolutionary process.” As he spoke, Gaydos began manipulating sound waves on Pro Tools, the software program that is now used to edit most film scores and other music, creating different, color-coded harmonic configurations and dissonances in celadon, pink, scarlet, and black patterns evoking the image of our planet as a great vibrational quilting bee.

Recently a few researchers
at medical schools in the United Kingdom began looking at what happens in the brain when we
listen to unpleasant sounds, like chalk on blackboards. Different bands of acoustical energy imprint themselves on different parts of the auditory cortex. By analyzing where the brain maps sounds that the study participants said they disliked, the researchers hoped to identify the spectrum of auditory representations that rub us the wrong way.

The study, which was published in the
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
in December 2008, measured the effects of seventy-five different sounds, rating them from most to least unpleasant. The two top offenders were sounds that fortunately are rarely heard outside of certain last-ditch drinking establishments: “scraping a sharp knife along the surface of a ridged metal bottle” and “scraping a fork along glass.” But female screams and baby cries also ranked alarmingly near the top of the list. (Baby laughter was rated as the least unpleasant sound, followed by “water flow,” “small waterfall,” “bubbling water,” and “running water.”) The researchers found that energy in the frequency range of two to five kilohertz will almost invariably be perceived as obnoxious—roughly the same range that Niemiec singled out in his work on aggressive responses to infant cries.

The U.K. researchers suggest that the explanation for our response may have to do with points of sensitivity in our auditory system. We might hear certain sounds as unpleasant because “they contain strong concentrations of energy in a range … to which the auditory system is maximally sensitive.” In other words, the sounds that drive us crazy may be ones that we hear as loud at almost any level. Our auditory cortex seems set up to favor sounds consistent with the pursuit of silence.

The pitch of an infant’s cry may have been biologically
selected because it’s so hard to ignore. We may just be faced with two diametrically opposed interests on the part of the screamer and the screamed at. The helpless baby has to hit the most vulnerable point in our auditory cortex to make sure we take away the pain; the screamed-at party, on the other hand, has to smother the noise since it puts them at risk of being localized, then lunged upon by a savage beast or by someone like Jason Everman. Loud sounds—especially in certain frequencies—mean something bad is coming at us or placing us at risk. They have to be silenced as quickly as possible.

Except, that is, when aggression is the aim of the noise.

Once again, as Niemiec reminded me, it’s not the frequency per se that’s at issue. Aggression arises in response to certain changes in harmonics. A sense that some fundamental frequency is being stressed the wrong way elicits rage. And this returns us to the “228 vibrations” of Hitler’s voice. Niemiec pointed out that to the extent Dr. Steer was correct in his measurements, it might mean Hitler sounded like Mickey Mouse. (Not usually a bloodlust-inducing frequency, though parents exposed to repeated viewings of Disney DVDs might think so.) Or, Niemiec added, it might sound like a woman’s scream. But then I read another account of Hitler’s voice that suggested the secret of his vocal powers might lie squarely in the domain of Niemiec’s harmonic studies. This description reported how
“at all of his public
meetings Hitler begins in a rasping tone; decidedly he is off key. Then he modulates his voice and it becomes a pleasant baritone.” Later on, the higher pitch returns. Then the lower. And so on. Perhaps, then, the power to incite aggression in his audiences arose not from the 228 vibrations on their own but from the
repeated shift in harmonics, where Hitler stressed his “pleasant baritone” up to the level of a female scream. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker, wrote in her memoir that the instant she first heard Hitler’s voice she had an
“almost apocalyptic vision.”
All at once, she recounted, the surface of the earth spread out before her “like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt paralyzed.” Perhaps Hitler’s voice really did create a kind of noise that suggested disruption in the cosmos.

Among the most intriguing explorations of the cosmic roots of noise is a study done in 2005 by Mark Whittle, an astronomy professor at the University of Virginia. Whittle undertook to analyze the sound of the big bang itself. His analysis revealed that the sound would not, in fact, have been an explosion at all.

Creation itself, it seems, was completely silent. Because the initial expansion consisted of a perfectly balanced, radial release of energy with, in Whittle’s words,
“no part catching up
with any other part—there were no compression waves, no sound, just quiet brilliant live expansion.” However, variations in density in the pre-creation universe had carved what Whittle describes as gravitational valleys and hills. As the gases of the big bang fell into these “cavities” and ricocheted around, sound waves were created. With the passage of time, more gas fell into deeper caves, making for more long, deep sound waves. Over the first tens of thousands of years, as gravity released the longer pressure waves into the spectrum, the pitch dropped. Gravity, in Whittle’s universe, plays the part of a pianist at the keyboard of the primordial landscape. He characterizes the overall noise of
the big bang as “a moment of silence, followed by a rapidly descending scream which builds to a deep roar and ends in a deafening hiss.”

Perhaps our revulsion for certain harmonic changes has its origin in the birth pangs of the universe.

There are two main ways that sound can have a negative impact upon us. One relates to specific associations we bring to a noise. The second, which is only just beginning to be explored, has to do with the inherent acoustical properties of certain sounds. In many but not all cases, the two species of disagreeable sound overlap. But whether the issue with a particular sound is associative or intrinsic to the noise, or both, the problem is that—at least if it’s loud enough—time does not diminish its sting. A thundering growl is as much a signal to us that we better hide as it was to our ancestors. Lidia Glodzik-Sobanska of the New York University Center for Brain Health told me that the problem with alarming sounds is that while we are quite good at psychologically adjusting, if we hear them often enough, our physiologies
never
habituate. No matter how thoroughly our conscious minds might know that a loud siren rushing by is not coming for us, our blood pressure still spikes, our pupils still dilate, and our hair cells still flatten and twist.

There are two phenomena that trigger a baby’s startle reflex: a sense of falling and a loud noise. In both cases, a baby responds by arching its back, flailing out with arms and legs, and grabbing out with its thumb and first finger. In other words, noise, exactly like being dropped, makes a baby feel it has lost its anchor in
space and is plunging down. No wonder the word “noise” derives from
nausea
—specifically seasickness and the sense of dizzy disorientation it implies.

There is plenty of evidence for the negative consequences of noise. But the more I understood about these, the more I wondered why we would make so much of it intentionally. To get a handle on this conundrum, I went to visit a few contemporary environments in which people were relentlessly jacking up the volume.

Retail: The Soundtrack

Dateline August 11, 2008, Barton Creek Square

From the dark opening in a black wall stamped with gray shutters came a pounding bass throb. I thought of the words of Michael Morrison, a professor of marketing I’d recently spoken with.
“It’s so difficult getting
a ‘wow’ from customers entering a retail space today,” Morrison had lamented. “The challenge of producing the ‘wow factor’ is placing a whole new amazing focus on the acoustical element in store design!” I stepped closer to the entrance and felt the waves of noise taking control of my body; it was as though a muscular DJ had just slammed down inside my chest and grabbed hold of my entire cardiovascular system.

“Wow,” I said out loud.

“Right?” Leanne Flask
, a blond sound designer with many clients at the Barton Creek Square mall in Austin, Texas, nodded. “Let’s go.” She waved me forward. We passed a pair of pubescent girls twitching in place in the spotlit darkness, and entered the sonic abyss of Abercrombie & Fitch.

Their flagship store is planted on Fifth Avenue a few blocks from my office, and from time to time in the months prior to my visit to Texas, I would wander by the entrance and take in the
thump, thump, thump
that emanates all day long from inside. The store often has a velvet rope set up outside, guarded by towering, chiseled men who eye the line of shoppers with cool menace. Many days the line wraps all the way around Fifty-sixth Street, filled with tourists from all over the world, mostly young but sometimes old, patiently awaiting their turn to get inside and buy some mass-produced clothes. Okay, I get it: it’s hot, it’s exciting, it’s sexy. But I didn’t
really
grasp why so many people of all different backgrounds would be drawn to shop in an environment where the sound was kept at a truly punishing level. I couldn’t fathom why it was that, as Professor Morrison gushed, “People
love
that space everywhere they go!”