by W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I keep thinking about the ongoing noise of industrialism, the blaring pipes and mufflers of the brand-conscious consumerists, and wondering why silence is associated with mourning. At what point does the battle to outdo each other in noise become so overwhelming that it takes on the persona of despair and silence becomes the song of joyfulness? On the other hand, silence is given out of respect, so is noise a means of taunting and disrespect?

One thing is still for certain, while silence is power and comes from control, noise comes from a lack of control.

BART started work on its tracks between El Cerrito and Richmond earlier this week in an effort to quiet a high-pitched squeal grinding on residents’ nerves, according to a spokesman for the transit agency.

A machine that fixes noisy tracks at a rate of one-tenth of a mile each day is scheduled to work the line from Albany to Richmond, spokesman Linton Johnson said.

The work started after complaints mounted the past year, he said. The machine smoothes tiny ripples that form on the track over time, causing the noise when trains roll by.

Smell is another matter entirely, although Benjamin Franklin apparently did his part to discuss the two and recommend solutions. But seriously, on a related note (pun not intended), I found an interesting study in Biology Letters about crickets who silenced themselves to survive:

On the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, more than 90% of male field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) shifted in less than 20 generations from a normal-wing morphology to a mutated wing that renders males unable to call (flatwing). Flatwing morphology protects male crickets from the parasitoid, which uses song to find hosts, but poses obstacles for mate attraction, since females also use the males’ song to locate mates. Field experiments support the hypothesis that flatwings overcome the difficulty of attracting females without song by acting as ‘satellites’ to the few remaining callers, showing enhanced phonotaxis to the calling song that increases female encounter rate. Thus, variation in behaviour facilitated establishment of an otherwise maladaptive morphological mutation.

Would humans have to adapt their mating behavior to compensate for a more quiet life? Imagine a night out that shuns loudness, but instead emphasizes silence, or even the delicacy of sound. Could muscle-car drivers, truckers and bikers survive without loud pipes? Will quality of sound ever supplant quantity at parties? No mourning, just joy at the beauty of quiet time. I predict that in the next ten years, quiet will become increasingly valued.