Transcript for an On Being radio show. The following link contains a button to listen to the radio show.http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/transcript/4558
May 10, 2012
Krista Tippett, host: Gordon Hempton says that silence is an endangered species. He's an acoustic ecologist — a collector of sound all over the world. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. The Earth as Gordon Hempton knows it is a "solar-powered jukebox." Quiet is a "think tank of the soul." We take in the world through his ears.
Gordon Hempton: Not too long ago it was assumed that clean water's not important, that seeing the stars is not that important. But now it is. And now I think we're realizing quiet is important and we need silence. That silence is not a luxury, but it's essential.
Ms. Tippett: "The Last Quiet Places." I'm Krista Tippett. This is On Being — from APM, American Public Media. Gordon Hempton lives in Joyce, Washington, near Olympic National Park, a place he calls "the listener's Yosemite." He's recorded inside Sitka spruce logs in the Pacific Northwest, thunder in the Kalahari Desert, dawn breaking across six continents. His work appears in movies, soundtracks, videogames, and museums. And Gordon Hempton may have invented "silence activism" — the other animating passion of his life.
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Mr. Hempton: In other words, I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I really hadn't been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. It was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place. That changed my life. I had one question and that was how could I be 27 years old and have never truly listened before?
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Mr. Hempton: Sound is incredibly important. I'm always floored when I hear over and over again from our modern culture how important vision is. OK, sound is kind of important, but, boy, vision is just …
Ms. Tippett: We're very picture-centered, aren't we?
Mr. Hempton: Well, of course, we're picture-centered because there's so much noise pollution in our modern world today that we become auditory. But I want to go back for a moment and let's just forget about the modern world and let's just look at evolution. Some animal species are actually blind. The ability to see is not essential for survival. There are blind animal species in the back of the caves, in the bottom of the oceans and stuff like this, but sound is so important that every higher vertebrate species has the ability to hear.
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When you're in a quiet place, your listening horizon extends for miles in every direction. When you hear an elk call from miles away, it turns into a magic flute as the result of traveling through this place that has the same acoustics as a cathedral.
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Ms. Tippett: You have said that silence, and you mean that silence you just described, is an endangered species. I mean, is it right?
Mr. Hempton: Oh, boy! Silence is so endangered, we even need another word for it. Silence is on the verge of extinction. Places in nature that never have any noise pollution are already gone. The modern measure of silence is the noise-free interval. Now we might think the noise-free interval should be measured in hours for places that are very distant on the planet and even some places here that are isolated such as Olympic National Park off the northwest corner of Washington State. But if a place can have a noise-free interval of only 15 minutes or longer during daylight hours, it's added to the list that I've collected for 30 years called, The List of the Last Great Quiet Places. At last count, here in the United States, there were only 12. None of them are protected.
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Ms. Tippett: I remember having a conversation once with a rabbi who works with the spirituality of children. She was talking about really practical things parents can do to nurture their children's inner lives. One of them was, she said, just create silence.
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Mr. Hempton: Well, children of all ages and adults too make their choices based on their experience to a much less degree than what they're told. That's why it's more important than ever that we do take those backpacking trips into wilderness areas, that we do allow them to get to that — through that first one or two days of sheer boredom and then they make that adjustment. They feel their body coming into tune, that ringing of the ears ceases to exist. They meet in unexpected wildlife just right there on their shoulder practically, right?
They notice things at night. They overcome how there are no streetlights and things really do get dark and spooky at night and how they wake up safely and that there is a grander experience in nature, but most of all, their thoughts will empty out too and they'll have that in their experience.
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Mr. Hempton: Well, children of all ages and adults too make their choices based on their experience to a much less degree than what they're told. That's why it's more important than ever that we do take those backpacking trips into wilderness areas, that we do allow them to get to that — through that first one or two days of sheer boredom and then they make that adjustment. They feel their body coming into tune, that ringing of the ears ceases to exist. They meet in unexpected wildlife just right there on their shoulder practically, right?
They notice things at night. They overcome how there are no streetlights and things really do get dark and spooky at night and how they wake up safely and that there is a grander experience in nature, but most of all, their thoughts will empty out too and they'll have that in their experience. Mr. Hempton: Well, children of all ages and adults too make their choices based on their experience to a much less degree than what they're told. That's why it's more important than ever that we do take those backpacking trips into wilderness areas, that we do allow them to get to that — through that first one or two days of sheer boredom and then they make that adjustment. They feel their body coming into tune, that ringing of the ears ceases to exist. They meet in unexpected wildlife just right there on their shoulder practically, right?
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Ms. Tippett: You make some pretty stunning statements in your writing, just to take this a little bit farther, that research shows that in noisy areas people are less likely to help each other.
Mr. Hempton: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: And how do you explain that?
Mr. Hempton: The explanation really goes all the way to silence. When we can speak in silence, you can hear not just my words, but you can hear my tone, what I mean even beyond the words. In fact, it's really not the words that are important. It's the tone. It's the overall message, the context. When we're in a noisy place in urban environments, we become isolated and we exhibit antisocial behavior because we are cut off from a level of intimacy with each other and we're less in touch. We're busy not listening to this, not seeing that, not doing that. We aren't opening up and being where we are.
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Mr. Hempton: Well, when you really listen, when you really keep your mind open and listening to another person — and by the way, I highly recommend that if a person wants to increase their ability to understand another person that they start out listening to nature because you're totally uninvested in the outcome of nature. You can just take it all in, all the expressions. And isn't it wonderful that, when a bird sings, that we do hear it as music? The bird doesn't sing for our benefit. So there's a lot of joy in that listening, and when we become better listeners to nature, we also become better listeners to each other so that, when another person is speaking with you, you don't have to search for what you want them to say. You can, you know, dare to risk what they really are trying to say and, you know, ask them too: Is this really what you're saying? And feel your own emotional response as they talk about risky subjects like how it is being a parent in the world that it is today.
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Mr. Hempton: But you have brought up something really important to me and that is about our ancient past. When I go to a quiet place, I get to challenge assumptions. And one of the major assumptions is that the human ear is tuned to hear the human voice. If that were true, that's an assumption that audiologists, scientists who study human hearing, have believed for a long time, that our ears evolved to hear the human voice.
Ms. Tippett: Right.
Mr. Hempton: But if, if — yeah, I know. But if that were true, we'd be the first species on planet Earth, OK, to have evolved so separate and protected from the rest of nature.
So my natural curiosity was to look at the range of human hearing and these equal-loudness contours. And we have a very discreet bandwidth of supersensitive hearing and that's between 2.5 and 5 kilohertz in the resident frequencies of the auditory canal. Is there something in our ancestors' environment that matches our peak hearing human sensitivity? Because most of what I'm saying right now, except for the "s" sounds and the high-pitched sounds, falls well below that range. And, indeed, there's a perfect match: birdsong. Birdsong [laugh].
Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Hempton: Why would it have any benefit to our ancestors to be able to hear faint birdsong? Why would our ears possibly have evolved so that we could walk in the direction of faint birdsong? Birdsong is the primary indicator of habitats prosperous to humans.
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Ms. Tippett: Gordon Hempton is founder and vice president of The One Square Inch of Silence Foundation, based in Joyce, Washington. His books include, together with John Grossman, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet. He's also produced more than 60 albums of natural soundscapes. And he has dug into his personal archives and compiled a collection of sound for us: Hawaiian beach caves, wild elk, grass wind.
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