Maya Khankhoje is a Montrealer who carries a set of earplugs in her purse.
The Hopi nation of Southern United States have a single word to describe a life out of balance: koyaanisqatsi, made known to film buffs by Francis Ford Coppola's eponymous film. This concept could also be called dystopia, except that dystopia, like utopia, is an imaginary place, whereas our imbalanced way of life, with noise as its leitmotiv, is very much here and appears to want to stay.
The Oxford dictionary defines noise as a sound, especially a loud, harsh, disagreeable, disturbing or intrusive sound. Scientists define it as a sound emission louder than 80 decibels, which is what an alarm clock emits to wake up a tired commuter. Noise is the etymological grandchild of the Latin word nausea and a younger cousin to the archaic English word for strife, contention and quarrelling, a not surprising fact, since noise can lead to conflict and even litigation. Noise has also been implicated in the onset of hypertension, increased cholesterol levels and frequent migraines. Noise can "drive people crazy" as evidenced by the young people who have turned to violence to get the adrenalin rush that noise got them addicted to.
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Hearing loss as an occupational hazard is, of course, the most obvious deleterious effect of noise, and workers have every right to demand that their employers and the state protect them from it. But the premature ageing of aural acuity in young people is the most disturbing consequence of voluntary exposure to gut-wrenching, ear drum-tearing so-called music. This is especially true of techno music, which erodes the boundary between noise and music. This is a matter of fact, not of taste. Kath Peck would be the first to agree. She is a rock musician who turned deaf for three years following a 1984 rock concert. She has now recovered 60% of her hearing thanks to hearing aids and became the founder of HEAR -Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers-, a not for profit organization that aims to prevent hearing loss and provide assistance to the hearing impaired. She is one of more than 23 million Americans with hearing deficits.
Why is noise so prevalent and why is so little done about it? The answer lies in attitudes. As long as noise is considered merely a nuisance and not a health hazard, legislation will continue to be patchy and inadequate. There is also the technical problem involved in measuring noise since the decibel scale is logarithmic and not arithmetic. Canada and the United States have no blanket legislation to protect people against noise, simply because people can’t see, or should we say, can’t hear the problem. With the exception, of course, of people living in the vicinity of airports, where noise can not only be heard but actually seen in rattling windows and shaking vases. The United Kingdom, the land of children who should be seen and not heard, takes noise more seriously. UK legislation permits cops to break into a car with an activated burglar alarm to disable it and makes noise sources impoundable. Victims are even allowed to pull the plug.
Take the case of today’s cineplexes that mainly cater to the pop-corn chomping, soda-drinking, video-game addicted youth of today. Sit in one of those overpriced plush seats and watch the trailers depicting rubber-like action heroes whose bodies seem to grow towards you and then pop with a loud sound. Feel your body explode in a frenzy of anxiety and anticipation only to relax once the vibrations stop. Then become indignant at the management’s announcement reminding you that silence is golden and enjoining you not to whisper to your neighbour, for you might disturb the feature film’s progress! If your heart has not stopped pounding by then, get up and ask the management for your money back, and they will give it to you within the first thirty minutes of the show. I’ve done that twice and did it feel good! Why do Cineplexes, ostensibly in the business of relaxing their patrons rather than shattering their nerves, turn the volume so high? They claim that the audio part of a film is set at filming time and if they turn down the volume the dialogue will not be heard. This sounds like a plausible explanation, and is certainly true about ads, which as any TV viewer knows, are set considerably louder than the featured soap.
Noise is so aggressive, in fact, that Amnesty International officially recognizes it as a form of torture. After all, George Bush senior’s officers pumped David Bowie music in Panama to besiege General Noriega. Today it would have been enough to ring all cell phone users at the same time! Unfortunately noise as deliberate torture is not confined to acts of war. The prison system uses noise to lower the morale of its inmates. In some jails heavy metal or rap is piped into cells from reveille to lights off at such a volume that normal conversation is impossible and guards have to bellow to be heard. A detention guard once stated that she craves silence so much than when she gets home she cannot stand the TV or radio and has trained herself to wake up at 5 in the morning, when silence is most sweet.
Silence is indeed sweet. Different cultures have extolled its virtues. Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th Century Sufi poet and mystic, wondered:
Why are you so afraid of silence,
silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void
a hundred voices will thunder messages
you long to hear.
How can we recover the lost silence that is our birthright? Certainly not by making a noise against those who are appropriating our space, but by doing just the opposite: by giving silence the place it deserves. By not buying into the culture of noise, by not patronizing noisy establishments, by not allowing others into our bubble of peace and most importantly, by not contributing to the total output of noise ourselves.
Let us be silent , said Ralph Waldo Emerson, so we may hear the whisper of the Gods.