In Pursuit of Silence (2 page)

I got it into my head that it was vital I speak with an astronaut. Astronauts, I imagined, were exposed to the most spectacular juxtaposition of noise and silence conceivable. What could be louder than a rocket launch? And what could be quieter than the depths of space? It seemed to me that the contrast between
these two experiences, appearing as it did in so short a span of time, would give astronauts a unique insight into the essence of silence.

After weeks of back and forth with Houston, I got the welcome news that astronaut Suni Williams would grant me a fifteen-minute interview. I read her NASA biography. She had logged more than 2,770 hours in space on 30 different aircraft, and had clocked a spacewalking world record. In addition to serving on helicopter combat squadrons and U.S. Navy diving details, and helping to develop the International Space Station Robotic Arm, she listed her hobbies as including “running, swimming, biking, triathlons, windsurfing, snowboarding and bow hunting.” Whatever Williams said about anything was not to be taken lightly.

Quickly and unassumingly Williams shot down 90 percent of my suppositions. The noise of takeoff these days was nothing really to speak of—hardly louder than what you’d hear being on an airplane. In fact, for years NASA had been involved in some of the most advanced noise-abatement work on the planet, and the sleeping area of the space station was now one of the quietest places you could ever hope to find. Ventilation systems had been redesigned. New kinds of formfitting earplugs had been perfected. “Tonal measures” had been built into the walls and doors.

Just as the launch wasn’t all that loud, Williams explained, walking in space wasn’t all that quiet. Ground control was in constant contact—
“and when you have
people from the ground telling you ‘do this, don’t do that’ all the time, you don’t feel the silence of space so much.”

Of course, I thought, the sound from their support team on
Earth was pumped directly into the astronauts’ ears, making sure they weren’t drifting away or otherwise deviating from the mission assigned them. I felt embarrassed at my ignorance and ready to truncate our interview. But then, after a short pause, Williams began to speak again.

“Reflecting back, there was one time I remember feeling quiet in space. We were out on a spacewalk and were asked to wait for the night pass to go through.” (
The night pass is
the forty-five minutes of its ninety-minute orbit when the spacecraft is on the dark side of the planet.) While they were waiting, the chatter from Houston died down, then cut out altogether. “So we were just hanging out there, quiet, just hearing ourselves breathe out there at the end of the station,” Williams continued. “And it was like putting on a pair of glasses … Everything, all at once so clear, like after a wonderful rainstorm … You could see the stars really bright. You could see the depth of space.”

In that brief spell of silence, Williams faced the brilliant, untethered magnitude of our universe.

Henry David Thoreau writes in his account of a voyage he took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that all sounds are, ultimately, servants and purveyors of silence. As he rows through the quiet of night, the splash and trickle from his oars lead his gaze upward:
“the valleys echoed the sound
to the stars.” Sounds, he declares, are but a “faint utterance” of silence, “and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when they contrast themselves with and relieve the former.”

This idea of a nourishing contrast works two ways. Just as
certain sounds can throw the silence enfolding us into high relief, silences mold sound. In another expedition I made near the outset of my journey, this time to a laboratory, I saw how the current of silence flowing beneath our utterances enables us to segment what we hear into meaningful speech.

Dr. Mario Svirsky is a professor of hearing science in the Department of Otolaryngology at New York University Langone Medical Center. Given his profession, it’s impossible not to notice the handsome Svirsky’s enormous Vulcan ears, which he’s chosen to highlight by piercing their lobes with gleaming hoops that shine like rings of Saturn. I had asked Svirsky to explain the process of sound filtering. I wanted to understand how we are able to pick out the voice we want to listen to in a room crowded with other speakers.

He turned to his computer screen.
“Here, I can show you
,” he said. “Let’s make a sound.” He spoke into a microphone attached to the computer. “Hello. Hello. Hello.” As he spoke, multicolored jagged lines, representing all the different frequencies and temporal modulations of his speech, danced out across the screen.

“You see how there are lots of little peaks—clusters of activity—and then there are long, almost flat lines,” he continued. “Those long lines are the areas where sound has windows—spaces of relative silence; spaces of lower energy. It’s when the windows line up that we’re able to pick out a single voice if more than one person is speaking.”

I stared for a long time at the image of Svirsky’s analyzed speech wave. The idea that even when we’re talking there is silence embedded in our words seemed marvelous to me. When
we make sounds, it’s often the silent falls built into those sounds that enable them to function as signals of communication rather than noise. Or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen. Svirsky indicated one of the bright clumps of sharp points on his screen and resumed talking. “At the places where the energy peaks overlap, it will obviously be hardest to make out what any voice is saying.” He shrugged. “It’s the windows of silence in our speech that may be in danger today with the rise of ambient noise.”

The roots of our English term
“silence” sink down through the language in multiple directions. Among the word’s antecedents is the Gothic verb
anasilan
, a word that denotes the wind dying down, and the Latin
dēsinere
, a word meaning “stop.” Both of these etymologies suggest the way that silence is bound up with the idea of interrupted action. The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. Not only is it about standing still; with rare exceptions, the pursuit of silence seems initially to involve a step backward from the tussle of life. The different stories that first drove home to me what the engagement with silence could bring were centered on a kind of listening that only occurs after a break in the circuit of busyness. But it’s as though, as a culture, we’ve learned to “mind the gaps” so well that they’ve all but disappeared. We live in an age of incessancy, under the banner of the already heard and forgotten.

Part of what makes snowfall in a city magical is the way that muted sound and the sight of buildings and cars draped in
whiteness go together. If we’re not too worried about missing appointments, we feel the excitement of moving into a new place where none of the old clutter and racket of our lives has yet arrived. We might think of sound, by way of contrast, as a force that stitches us in time and space. We twist when we hear the sound of our name. We wake to the alarm, the baby’s cry, the whiny grind of a garbage truck. Bells, gongs, whistles, drums, horns, and guns are “sounded” to announce the hour of the day and to launch significant events. A painter friend of mine once told me that he thought of sound as an usher for the here and now. When he was a small child, Adam suffered an illness that left him profoundly deaf for several months. His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he saw could be woven together with much greater freedom and originality than he’d ever known. The experience was powerful enough that it helped steer him toward his lifelong immersion in the visual arts.
“Sound imposes a narrative
on you,” he said, “and it’s always someone else’s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct.”

While the extremity of Adam’s experience might appeal to only the most dedicated pursuers of silence, the larger idea of silence as a break, a rest, a road to reflection, renewal, and personal growth is one that resonates with many people. And beyond the many individual stories I heard that testified to this potential of silence, there are increasing hints from the world of neuroscience that support the notion of silence as a fertile pause.
Recent studies using fMRI
technology have shown that the brains of people who practice silent meditation appear to
work more efficiently than the brains of people who do not. This may have something to do with ways in which silence enhances our powers of attention, subtracting auditory distractions that dissipate our mental energy.
Neuroscientists at Stanford
University have demonstrated that when we listen to music it is the silent intervals in what we hear that trigger the most intense, positive brain activity. In part, this reflects the way our brains are always searching for closure. When we confront silence, the mind reaches outward.

Other intriguing possibilities for how silence might benefit us on a systemic level suggest
affinities between certain stages
of sleep and silence. With all the lingering mysteries surrounding sleep, we now have abundant clinical evidence that the suspension of our conscious activity brought about by sleep is essential for our health. Silence, which interrupts the general noise of our day-to-day lives, may carry some of the replenishing power we take from the full rest of sleep. If we can’t find a place to lie down in the midst of our working days, we may still reap some of sleep’s benefits by finding a relatively quiet space in which to take a sound break.

There are numerous personal stories and considerable scientific evidence suggesting that silence can exert a positive influence on our individual lives and our relationship to the world. Nearly everyone I raised the subject with went into rhapsodies about how much they loved quiet, while lamenting the fact they did not have more of it to recharge their minds, bodies, and spirits. But if everyone values silence so highly, why is there so little of it? Why,
I wondered, does there appear to be a growing consensus about the benefits of silence at the same time as the world seems, on so many fronts, to be getting noisier?

Many people feel victimized by the loud noises besieging them from all sides. Traffic noise—road, air, and marine—undoubtedly represents a problem that extends beyond individual control. The same could be said about construction noise, heavy industry, and the sound of power generators. The stress of these forms of noise can be deadly, especially in the developing world, where loud generators are everywhere, and where some experts now suggest that
45,000 fatal heart attacks
per year may be attributable to noise-related cardiovascular strain. But while much more can and must be done to reduce the impact of these macroscale sound offenders, they are not the whole story. Indeed, the biggest, most obnoxious noisemakers may actually be blocking a subtler, perhaps even deeper noise problem than that presented by our perpetually jammed highways.