Ouvir, escutar. No meio o rumor e o silencio, os dois extremos. Da para pensar.
POR NYTIMES.COM
Meditations on Noise
By DWIGHT GARNER
There is dignity in quiet things and quiet people, and gravity accrues to those activities we mostly perform in silence: reading, praying, looking at paintings, standing in the woods. We equate loud noise with violence. Without loudspeakers, Hitler observed, the Nazis never would have conquered Germany. It’s hard to imagine Gandhi astride a Harley.
We’d like to think, most of us, that we are essentially quiet; that is, considerate of our fellow human beings without being mousy and limp and blah. But let’s not rush to pat ourselves on the backs. We should be wary of drawing easy “moral analogies between noise and evil, quiet and good,” Garret Keizer writes in his shrewd new book, “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise” (PublicAffairs). After all, Adolf Eichmann and the serial killer Ted Bundy were quiet types, too. “No loud parties from the Tedster,” Mr. Keizer notes.
The cost of our silent moments is usually clamor in someone else’s ear. Trees are cut, paper pulped and printers run to make books and newspapers. To flick on a light is to add buzz, down the line, to the grid. To attend a meditation retreat, there’s a plane to catch. One person’s om is another’s ka-boom.
Our world is getting louder, a bone-crunching and I.Q.-lowering fact that is explored, in an uncanny convergence, in not one but three new books — Mr. Keizer’s as well as “Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence” (Scribner), by George Michelsen Foy; and “In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise” (Doubleday), by George Prochnik.
More planes crisscross the sky, and more cars hiss by on more roads, these writers observe. More BlackBerrys chirp. Coffee grinders and espresso machines scramble, in cafes, what’s left of our wits. We blot all this out with what may be the most damaging sound of all, the din that pulses from iPod ear buds. If our daily sonic playlist has a title, it’s “Let It Bleed.”
I read all these books with an awareness of why my own nerves are increasingly jangled, why I mostly write (and often read) while wearing a clunky set of ear protectors, of the sort a particularly unhip airport runway worker in 1961 might have had clasped to his head. Make the world go away, as Hank Cochran’s song put it. Let my kids snicker at me.
If these books deepened my awareness of noise, however, they also complicated it. As the effortlessly intelligent Mr. Keizer points out, noise is among the thorniest class issues of our time, and we tend to utterly ignore its meanings.
You can judge a person’s clout — his or her social and political standing — by witnessing how much racket he or she must regularly endure. Those who lack silence in their lives tend to be the politically weak, whether the poor (investment bankers don’t live near runways) or laborers or soldiers or prisoners or children. In creating noise that others must live with, we display our contempt for those weaker than ourselves. Hear us roar; eat our exhaust.
There’s no doubt how harmful this clatter is. Repeated studies show it leads not just to hearing loss but also to heart disease, high blood pressure, low birth weight and reduced life span. We crossed the line, many miles back, that divides having a blast from simply being blasted.
One thing that turns sound into its dark twin, noise, is a sense of imposed helplessness. “A sound that interrupts our sleep,” Mr. Keizer observes, “can feel like an attack on our status as adults.” It’s one sign of the increasing helplessness many feel that led Mr. Keizer, Mr. Foy and Mr. Prochnik to investigate what the out-of-kilter ratio of sound to signal in our lives might mean.
In their separate ways, these writers have fanned out across the globe and have undertaken some hard listening on our behalf. They have attended motorcycle rallies and space shuttle launchings; they have fired AK-47s and investigated “extreme subwoofer technology” in car stereos. (Playing these stereos softly is referred to as “bumping responsibly.”) They have sought to understand the modern, macho, heavily tattooed manifestations of Whitman’s barbaric yawp.
Screams led them to seek out whispers. They have interviewed astronauts and cochlear implant surgeons and neuroscientists. They have floated in sensory-deprivation tanks à la William Hurt in “Altered States” and gone into the Catacombs of Paris. They have been canaries in our sonic coal mines.
There are similarities in the ways Mr. Keizer, Mr. Foy and Mr. Prochnik approach their topic. They cite many of the same anecdotes, and credit the same historical noise warriors. All three worry about being seen as noise cranks, and viewed as sissified in their dislike of cacophony. But their differences are notable.
In “Zero Decibels” Mr. Foy goes in search of an impossible dream: absolute silence. His quest begins after he is assaulted by the screech of a subway’s brakes below the Upper West Side. His brains feel as if they were leaking from his skull. He buys a Kawa decibel meter and begins walking around New York (and eventually flying around the planet), taking sound readings.
Mr. Foy is an observant listener. He describes the constant roar of Manhattan as a kind of “monster-breath” that never ceases its wheezing. He notes, about the fluid in our ears, that our hearing system is “largely a way of duplicating inside us the sea we left behind.”
Mr. Foy’s book is quite personal. Some of the pounding in his cranium comes from bad times in his marriage and financial life. If he ultimately finds, in this somewhat perfunctory book, that true silence doesn’t exist, it’s not a surprise ending.
Mr. Prochnik’s “In Pursuit of Silence” puts forth an argument: that instead of trying to silence the din around us (a losing proposition, historically) we seek out more daily silence. He’s counterintuitive about what we all really want. It’s not silence at all. It’s the ability to hear as many different noises as possible, to have enough silence to take the good stuff in.
His search for information leads him to some odd places, including the “sonic abyss” of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Texas, where the aural subtext of the pounding music is, he is told by a sound expert: “Woohoo! I’m going out at night, and I’m not going home afterward!” Mr. Prochnik imparts good advice. Looking for relative silence? Visit museums of unpopular subjects.
Mr. Prochnik is a smart and amiable writer, perhaps too amiable. You might like some silence in life, but you also desire some intellectual noise on the page. “In Pursuit of Silence” is so polite it may lull you into an unplanned afternoon siesta.
The rowdiest and yet the most subtle of these three is Mr. Keizer’s book “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want.” It explores the social aspects of noise in our lives, and every page is packed with crackling observations. Mr. Keizer is not antinoise. Without it, the world would lack many beautiful things — not just the music of the Rolling Stones but also certain side benefits, he writes, like “Keith Richards’s incomparable smile.”
Yet the triumph of what Mr. Keizer calls “Loud America” troubles him. “Talk is cheap,” he writes, while Jet Skis are not. “Sleep is sort of cheap too — just about any ‘loser’ can do it.” Conspicuous consumption trumps quieter kinds of experience.
Mr. Keizer is savage about how “thrillcraft” and the noise they make “gives disproportionate power to those with the ability to make it.” Those who call for quiet are accused of being elitists by Jet Ski owners. Mr. Keizer responds by suggesting, snarkily, that “Tom Joad is riding a pretty expensive rig.”
He is amusing about Harley riders. “Go to a biker encampment on the morning after” a festival, he writes, “and bang some pots together to test the notion that ‘too loud’ exists only for the straitlaced bourgeoisie. And wear your running shoes.”
Mr. Keizer thinks it is condescending cant to assume that the poor are fundamentally noisier than the rich. And among his most interesting ideas is his linking of noise with later antisocial behavior.
“I’d love to see an auditory profile for the childhoods of our most ‘hardened’ criminals, along with complementary data for the attorneys, psychiatrists and judges who prosecuted, diagnosed and sentenced them,” he writes. And he adds, “What does ‘hardened’ mean, after all, but a calcifying of some human faculty, and what hardens sooner than a child’s ears?”
One program Mr. Keizer admires was undertaken in 1997 by the environmental protection agency of Japan. It sought to identify that country’s 100 best sounds. We should have something similar. Imagine if one of those sounds was in your neighborhood. You would be proud of it, he writes, and “likely to be zealous for its preservation.”
As I read these three books, the noises around me separated and became achingly distinct, both the great ones — my kids, the dogs and chickens, my wife going about her day — and those that knock me senseless: the pounding of a nearby construction crew, the motorcycles that sometimes race down my dirt road, low-flying helicopters on their way to West Point, a few miles away. True listening is like spinning a radio dial: it’s part static, part bliss.
Reading these books, too, I was reminded, without going anywhere, of that phenomenon that occurs when you’re driving and find yourself suddenly lost. To reorient yourself, you snap off the stereo. You find a way to become as silent as you can.
POR NYTIMES.COM
Meditations on Noise
By DWIGHT GARNER
There is dignity in quiet things and quiet people, and gravity accrues to those activities we mostly perform in silence: reading, praying, looking at paintings, standing in the woods. We equate loud noise with violence. Without loudspeakers, Hitler observed, the Nazis never would have conquered Germany. It’s hard to imagine Gandhi astride a Harley.
We’d like to think, most of us, that we are essentially quiet; that is, considerate of our fellow human beings without being mousy and limp and blah. But let’s not rush to pat ourselves on the backs. We should be wary of drawing easy “moral analogies between noise and evil, quiet and good,” Garret Keizer writes in his shrewd new book, “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise” (PublicAffairs). After all, Adolf Eichmann and the serial killer Ted Bundy were quiet types, too. “No loud parties from the Tedster,” Mr. Keizer notes.
The cost of our silent moments is usually clamor in someone else’s ear. Trees are cut, paper pulped and printers run to make books and newspapers. To flick on a light is to add buzz, down the line, to the grid. To attend a meditation retreat, there’s a plane to catch. One person’s om is another’s ka-boom.
Our world is getting louder, a bone-crunching and I.Q.-lowering fact that is explored, in an uncanny convergence, in not one but three new books — Mr. Keizer’s as well as “Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence” (Scribner), by George Michelsen Foy; and “In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise” (Doubleday), by George Prochnik.
More planes crisscross the sky, and more cars hiss by on more roads, these writers observe. More BlackBerrys chirp. Coffee grinders and espresso machines scramble, in cafes, what’s left of our wits. We blot all this out with what may be the most damaging sound of all, the din that pulses from iPod ear buds. If our daily sonic playlist has a title, it’s “Let It Bleed.”
I read all these books with an awareness of why my own nerves are increasingly jangled, why I mostly write (and often read) while wearing a clunky set of ear protectors, of the sort a particularly unhip airport runway worker in 1961 might have had clasped to his head. Make the world go away, as Hank Cochran’s song put it. Let my kids snicker at me.
If these books deepened my awareness of noise, however, they also complicated it. As the effortlessly intelligent Mr. Keizer points out, noise is among the thorniest class issues of our time, and we tend to utterly ignore its meanings.
You can judge a person’s clout — his or her social and political standing — by witnessing how much racket he or she must regularly endure. Those who lack silence in their lives tend to be the politically weak, whether the poor (investment bankers don’t live near runways) or laborers or soldiers or prisoners or children. In creating noise that others must live with, we display our contempt for those weaker than ourselves. Hear us roar; eat our exhaust.
There’s no doubt how harmful this clatter is. Repeated studies show it leads not just to hearing loss but also to heart disease, high blood pressure, low birth weight and reduced life span. We crossed the line, many miles back, that divides having a blast from simply being blasted.
One thing that turns sound into its dark twin, noise, is a sense of imposed helplessness. “A sound that interrupts our sleep,” Mr. Keizer observes, “can feel like an attack on our status as adults.” It’s one sign of the increasing helplessness many feel that led Mr. Keizer, Mr. Foy and Mr. Prochnik to investigate what the out-of-kilter ratio of sound to signal in our lives might mean.
In their separate ways, these writers have fanned out across the globe and have undertaken some hard listening on our behalf. They have attended motorcycle rallies and space shuttle launchings; they have fired AK-47s and investigated “extreme subwoofer technology” in car stereos. (Playing these stereos softly is referred to as “bumping responsibly.”) They have sought to understand the modern, macho, heavily tattooed manifestations of Whitman’s barbaric yawp.
Screams led them to seek out whispers. They have interviewed astronauts and cochlear implant surgeons and neuroscientists. They have floated in sensory-deprivation tanks à la William Hurt in “Altered States” and gone into the Catacombs of Paris. They have been canaries in our sonic coal mines.
There are similarities in the ways Mr. Keizer, Mr. Foy and Mr. Prochnik approach their topic. They cite many of the same anecdotes, and credit the same historical noise warriors. All three worry about being seen as noise cranks, and viewed as sissified in their dislike of cacophony. But their differences are notable.
In “Zero Decibels” Mr. Foy goes in search of an impossible dream: absolute silence. His quest begins after he is assaulted by the screech of a subway’s brakes below the Upper West Side. His brains feel as if they were leaking from his skull. He buys a Kawa decibel meter and begins walking around New York (and eventually flying around the planet), taking sound readings.
Mr. Foy is an observant listener. He describes the constant roar of Manhattan as a kind of “monster-breath” that never ceases its wheezing. He notes, about the fluid in our ears, that our hearing system is “largely a way of duplicating inside us the sea we left behind.”
Mr. Foy’s book is quite personal. Some of the pounding in his cranium comes from bad times in his marriage and financial life. If he ultimately finds, in this somewhat perfunctory book, that true silence doesn’t exist, it’s not a surprise ending.
Mr. Prochnik’s “In Pursuit of Silence” puts forth an argument: that instead of trying to silence the din around us (a losing proposition, historically) we seek out more daily silence. He’s counterintuitive about what we all really want. It’s not silence at all. It’s the ability to hear as many different noises as possible, to have enough silence to take the good stuff in.
His search for information leads him to some odd places, including the “sonic abyss” of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Texas, where the aural subtext of the pounding music is, he is told by a sound expert: “Woohoo! I’m going out at night, and I’m not going home afterward!” Mr. Prochnik imparts good advice. Looking for relative silence? Visit museums of unpopular subjects.
Mr. Prochnik is a smart and amiable writer, perhaps too amiable. You might like some silence in life, but you also desire some intellectual noise on the page. “In Pursuit of Silence” is so polite it may lull you into an unplanned afternoon siesta.
The rowdiest and yet the most subtle of these three is Mr. Keizer’s book “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want.” It explores the social aspects of noise in our lives, and every page is packed with crackling observations. Mr. Keizer is not antinoise. Without it, the world would lack many beautiful things — not just the music of the Rolling Stones but also certain side benefits, he writes, like “Keith Richards’s incomparable smile.”
Yet the triumph of what Mr. Keizer calls “Loud America” troubles him. “Talk is cheap,” he writes, while Jet Skis are not. “Sleep is sort of cheap too — just about any ‘loser’ can do it.” Conspicuous consumption trumps quieter kinds of experience.
Mr. Keizer is savage about how “thrillcraft” and the noise they make “gives disproportionate power to those with the ability to make it.” Those who call for quiet are accused of being elitists by Jet Ski owners. Mr. Keizer responds by suggesting, snarkily, that “Tom Joad is riding a pretty expensive rig.”
He is amusing about Harley riders. “Go to a biker encampment on the morning after” a festival, he writes, “and bang some pots together to test the notion that ‘too loud’ exists only for the straitlaced bourgeoisie. And wear your running shoes.”
Mr. Keizer thinks it is condescending cant to assume that the poor are fundamentally noisier than the rich. And among his most interesting ideas is his linking of noise with later antisocial behavior.
“I’d love to see an auditory profile for the childhoods of our most ‘hardened’ criminals, along with complementary data for the attorneys, psychiatrists and judges who prosecuted, diagnosed and sentenced them,” he writes. And he adds, “What does ‘hardened’ mean, after all, but a calcifying of some human faculty, and what hardens sooner than a child’s ears?”
One program Mr. Keizer admires was undertaken in 1997 by the environmental protection agency of Japan. It sought to identify that country’s 100 best sounds. We should have something similar. Imagine if one of those sounds was in your neighborhood. You would be proud of it, he writes, and “likely to be zealous for its preservation.”
As I read these three books, the noises around me separated and became achingly distinct, both the great ones — my kids, the dogs and chickens, my wife going about her day — and those that knock me senseless: the pounding of a nearby construction crew, the motorcycles that sometimes race down my dirt road, low-flying helicopters on their way to West Point, a few miles away. True listening is like spinning a radio dial: it’s part static, part bliss.
Reading these books, too, I was reminded, without going anywhere, of that phenomenon that occurs when you’re driving and find yourself suddenly lost. To reorient yourself, you snap off the stereo. You find a way to become as silent as you can.
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