As a test of courage, we kids once went out on a nearby frozen lake. It was already melting and from the ice sheet intimidating whiplash fractures and crackling sounds emanated. I was scared and fascinated at the same time. I could feel the vibrations of the ice sheet through my shoes. The eerie and somehow otherworldly noises sounded like electrical flashes. I think that was the first time I somehow experienced that natural processes can have a musical quality.

I wish I could claim that I’m an always open-minded and receptive listener. I’m not. All good listening needs the right time. This is also a question of the mindset I’m in: some days I might be bored of the music and sounds surrounding me, then the other day I’m carried away by a moment of pure bliss, be it a note on the piano or the accidental occurrence of an unexpected sound in the backyard.

 

There seems to be a little control freak in my ears that likes to take command of what I’m listening to and how my emotions are directed by that. We all do this possibly by managing our emotional states with choosing the right music for the right occasion on our iPods and stereos. I try to steer against that tendency as often as possible to let the unexpected in, to preserve a feeling of surprise that we can easily loose if we only listen to our little control freaks in the ears.

I remember that I first encountered absolute silence in the Namib desert of Namibia (if we can speak of such a thing as absolute silence). Most places there have a strong wind blowing almost all the time, but at this one accommodation hidden between some mountains at the rim of the desert, there was nothing else to break the silence. After one day the hearing slowly attuned to the new situation and even tiny noises like a passing fly got very loud. I wish I could have stayed there longer.

This is a social and political question and also addresses the freedom to acoustically express oneself and the constraints we find in public spaces where many individual sound sources may come into conflict with each other. We can even expand the question into the area of public attention that everybody seeks through digital means in form of tweets, status updates and blog posts. The “din” of our global conversation has a self-amplifying effect: in order to get heard we have to speak, perhaps even speak louder than everybody else.

 

There is nothing bad in this. As the babble of voices in a crowded pub suddenly drops in loudness after an accidental moment of mutual silence, we will eventually get aware of our own screaming-at-each-other. The moments of silence then can be the best ways to improve our lives: to be able to hear what we haven’t heard before (as an inward direction) and to enable others to be heard (as an outward direction, to give someone else the space to speak up).

The sound of tiny bells tied to the ankles of women walking up the mountains to the paddy fields passing by my bamboo hut in the morning. (Well, I stole this notion from a friend who experienced this for a week or so somewhere in Asia and told me that he still counts this as the most beautiful sound he ever heard…).