Sound versus Noise
For many years I lived in an apartment in a small rural compound, inhabited by traditional families. With my own son meanwhile grown up, I used to muse over the small children playing, mostly peaceably with each other in convivial harmony. It fostered a feeling of durability in our society and peace on earth. Then, very early one Sunday morning, a cataclysmic noise right outside my bedroom window catapulted me out of a deep slumber, into an astonishing hullabaloo of shattering force. It transpired that a group of parents living further away from me, had erected a large trampoline, right under my bedroom window. Our once placid little treasures were swarming onto the object with unabated glee, beckoning to other unknown little souls to join them. It seemed that the little people were exercising their undeveloped lungs at full pitch while charging around the contraption with hitherto unbeknown vitality on steroids. Upon asking the parents why they had placed this ‘attraction’ right under my window (unannounced), they replied that it was the children’s right to play further away from their own homes, thus avoiding their parents’ intrusive surveillance. In the fullness of time, the parents were ‘persuaded’ to relocate their new acquisition to their own area, where strict rules were abruptly applied, to limit their little snowflakes’ spells of unrelenting merriment. This was a vibrant transition from playful joy to coma-inducing noise. It strengthens the old saying ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’. A mother’s love of her brood’s utterances is a neighbour’s nemesis of noise.
We adult humans have navigated our increasingly stressful lives to a great degree by trying to discover pockets of tranquillity to help us recharge our batteries. We have become both sensitive and allergic to what we deem ‘overbearing’ noise. Trains have sectioned off ‘quiet’ compartments for commuters who need to collect themselves, before and after their working day. There is an inexplicable trend of people who move from the city to the country and then make formal complaints about church bells or cow bells or any other rural emissions for that matter. They often assume that the noise level in the countryside is reduced to a muted buzz of busy bees.sy bees.
However, noise is increasing with every generation. I remember having to creep around my grammar school corridors, single file and in total silence in the 1960’s. This rule generated a regular appointment for me in detention after school, as a punishment for breaking the ‘silence rule’. But when I recently went into a school between lessons, the resounding tumult was deafening, and the chaos unmitigated, probably attributed these days to kids’ human rights!
Some folk harbour a robust dislike of traffic noise, but with the birth of the e-mobile, they complain that these vehicles don’t produce any engine sounds, and are therefore dangerous because you can’t hear them approaching you. The result launched suggestions to create synthetic noise, in order to herald each advancing e-mobile. Growing up in a Baptist Church, the solemn silence before the service while the congregation assembled was sacrosanct, and allowed each individual to reflect sacredly upon the impending spiritual ceremony. These days, the place of worship seems to have decanted into market-place conditions as neighbours greet each other with wholesome fervour, producing the equivalent hullabaloo
Yes, there is sometimes a fine line between sound and noise. While admiring a chuckling little cherub in his pram recently, he unexpectedly took umbrage at something (maybe me) and transitioned into a shrieking bundle of unforgiving passion. He made his point and I retreated thankfully and hastily.
As all our European countries become more and more congested, we older mortals tend to ruminate on days gone by, and the apparent peace we enjoyed. I remember the miserably colourless days of my youth, devoid of diversion from the tedium. In the meantime, we have enough technology on hand to keep us entertained and/or educated, accompanied by abundant proof of human life around us. While mediocre politicians try to fill our ears with ingenious soundbites, we can choose to accept whatever input we want. As you walk through the streets in the city, you notice that more and more people resort to their own personal filter of the noise surrounding them. They plug into their headset, block out unsolicited noise and retreat into their own little sanctuary of diversion. It’s called ‘selective reality’, for, what pacifies the one soul, can engulf the next
