In Pursuit of Silence Page #4

WOMAN:
The planes start

at 6:
03 in the morning.

They usually stop

at midnight,

but sometimes they go

to 2:
00 or 3:00 in the morning.

I did not sign up

for this kind of noise.

Nobody did.

They are making these

precision lanes in the sky.

Right now that lane

is over my house.

Five years from now

it's going to be over your house

because those lanes

are going to be multiplied

by 10 fold, 20 fold, 50 fold.

STEPHEN STANSFELD:

Recent research

is building on the foundation

of really now

almost 50 years of research

that suggested that

there are more serious

health effects related to noise.

Hypertension of

high blood pressure,

and even more recently

there is a very

convincing effect

of particularly transport noise,

road traffic noise, on the risk

of cardiovascular disease,

of heart attacks,

myocardial infarction,

and even death from noise.

Noise kills. And that's right,

this is what we have shown,

that noise causes heart disease.

People don't die

from one day to another

because they visit a noisy area.

If the noise stress

becomes chronic,

if it's persistent

over many years,

all of a sudden

you may have a heart attack,

due to the chronic stress.

You don't get used to it.

You cope with it.

TREASURE:
Something in

your brain is having to go,

"I'm not listening to that.

I'm still not listening to that.

"I'm definitely not

listening to that."

And it takes effort.

Somewhere there's mental effort

going on to screen it out.

That's 102 decibels going out.

(TRAIN RUMBLING)

(READING)

(BRAKES SQUEALING)

I guess the question

that is on everyone's mind

is why I'm doing this.

I could say that it's, you know,

merely a response

to something like a culture

that's more concerned about

material things and leisure

and less with reflection

and introspection.

I could say that

it has something to do

with some inner turmoil

of my own,

that it's me

trying to figure out my life.

Honestly, nothing quite

seems to do it for me.

I'm not really sure

why I feel I need to do it.

I have this feeling

that it has a lot of potential

to be something

really meaningful for me,

and hopefully for other people.

LEES:
Silence returns us

to what is real.

This is how I see it.

IYER:
Silence is a journey

into the wilderness

and into the dark.

You can't be sure what you're

going to encounter there,

and I think many people

are rightly wary of silence

because we use noise

as a distraction and an evasion.

Silence is a journey right into

the heart of your being.

LEES:
If you allow

silence to circulate,

particularly among people,

what you're going to discover

is that your mind

becomes aware

of what the truth is.

And sometimes truth

is not that sugar-coated.

Sometimes you have to

face the truth

that things are not going the

way that you might want

and that you're losing

or you're failing,

or they are.

You might feel out of control

because when silence circulates,

it makes you aware that you're

not that in control

of anything, really.

So it puts people

against a wall and says,

"This is you and you're human

and you're existing right now

"and this is your reality.

Do you like it?"

And often people say "No."

PROCHNIK:
I guess that

I would argue in defense

of pursuing

the experience regardless.

That we have such a deficit

of that kind of encounter

in our lives right now.

We have so little that is

opening out onto

something larger.

ORFIELD:

We tend to have substituted

human experience with

technological experience.

ROSS:
We think all this noise

and artifice is human,

but it's not.

It takes us away

from what is human.

There's nothing wrong with it,

but we tend to live

via our ingenuity

instead of

being our own truth.

So much in the ways

that we exist,

particularly our forms

of digital connectivity,

take us out of ourselves

all the time, all the time.

And that's a different

kind of desert,

and ultimately to me,

it's a much more

frightening desert.

Because that's a desert

in which our individual self

is just obliterated

in a circuit of constant

very, very surface-level

communication with others.

IYER:
The information revolution

came without a manual,

and I think we are all

noticing that machines

can give us

pretty much everything

except a sense of how to make

discerning use of machines,

and that at some level,

we have to go offline

to collect ourselves

to begin to know how to navigate

the ever more complicated

and accelerating online world.

In the 21st century,

I think the need for silence is

more urgent than it's ever been.

There tends to be a big

technological discussion

about computers

and whether they're good

or they're bad,

and I think that's

sort of a silly discussion.

But there should be a discussion

about how much time

you spend in the real world

and how much time you withdraw.

And I think that's going to be

a very significant predictor

of the earlier onset of dementia

and other declines in aging

than has ever happened before.

(HOZUMI SPEAKING JAPANESE)

As we say...

Modern people don't feel moved

or impressed just by living.

In order to do so,

we need to keep the silence

and examine ourselves.

PROCHNIK:
We have less silence,

and by that I mean

that the fabric of noise

is more constant and pervasive.

This shift to

a constant envelopment

within a band of noise

that's too much,

I think is what's

really driving us crazy.

TREASURE We just build these

cities willy-nilly. Tire noise,

diesel sound, that kind of stuff

is all around us all the time.

ORFIELD:

Architecture to a large degree

is about the

visual impact of things.

So, it's about the

visual impact of the faade.

It's about the visual impact

of the big public spaces.

It's really not about

the user's experience.

It's really not

about perceptual comfort.

It's really not about

the user preference.

You know, in the UK

architects train for five years

and they spend one day

on sound in five years.

It's no wonder

they're entirely ocular.

You ask an architect

what he's working on,

he'll show you a picture.

People speak

at somewhere between

55 and 65 decibels usually,

and often the heating and

cooling system in the building

is louder than that.

This is absolutely

not an argument

for everywhere being quiet

or everywhere being the same

or that there's some sort of

panacea magic soundscape

or that we want to

manipulate citizens

into a Nineteen Eighty-four

zombie state

or anything like that.

If we all start taking on

designing with sound

we will have a huge profusion

of amazing sound to enjoy.

Just like we have a huge

profusion of furniture to enjoy.

And just in the same way,

I think we'll have a million

different soundscapes

that you'll be able to buy

or download or stream.

(WHIRRING)

POPPY SZKILER:
Quiet Mark

is the new award program

from the UK's

Noise Abatement Society

that awards the quietest,

high-performance,

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