"Noise-cancelling headphones feature a miniature microphone in the ear piece that picks up ambient external noise. Electronics in the ear piece create a noise-cancelling wave that is 180 degrees out of phase with the ambient noise. this wave acts like a noise eraser. It cancels out the annoying sounds that surround you without diminishing the audio you want to hear. The result, a peaceful enclave to enjoy the music or movies of your choice."
Until I looked it up, I considered "ambient sound" to be pleasant. By a sound engineering definition, ambient noise is any background noise that is different than what you want to hear. But still, if you search "ambient music" on Spotify, you will find music that is pleasing to the ear and to the senses. It's pleasing to mine anyway.
John Cage (1912-1992) was famous, or infamous by some opinions, for making noise and calling it music. For that matter, he once said, "If it makes a sound, it's music." By that definition I would think that dragging your fingernails down a chalkboard creates music. For me, and I think for most of us, that noise sends chills up my spine and I just want the noise to stop. One of Cages's most famous and controversial pieces was the work he titled 4'33. The title means that the piece lasts four minutes and thirty-three seconds. His first performance consisted of three movements of thirty-three seconds, two minutes and forty seconds, and one minute and twenty seconds, respectively. The piece can be performed with any instrument or combination of instruments including a full orchestra.. It is usually performed on a piano. In that case, the pianist walks to the piano, sits down, opens the cover, folds her hands back in her lap and remains in perfect silence. Each musical movement is separated by some physical movement of the performer. Several versions of this work is available on YouTube if you care to look. John Cage was interviewed about this piece many times over the course of his career and his most common answer to the question of what it means was "Silence does not exist." Find a place to sit that is relatively quiet. Set a timer for 4'33 and remain perfectly still. Make a mental note of all the things you hear. All of a sudden, the ambient sounds that you had not noticed become the primary sounds and you can't notice anything else. In the case of any performance of 4'33, the audience creates much noise, so each performance is unique, And Cage would argue that all those sounds were music.
New York City is one of the noisiest cities in the world. If you've been there then there is no need for me to describe it. If you haven't, I'm still not going to describe it. Just use your imagination regarding a city of traffic and noise that never sleeps. The Guggenheim Museum, in the center of the city, has created a quiet space. The artist Doug Wheeler has engineered a space of sound absorbent materials that claims to be one of the quiet spaces in the world--"a profoundly empty soundscape." . The museum only allows five visitors at a time. So far the longest people can endure being in there is about forty minutes. After that they say that they start hallucinating.
Back to that chalkboard. In the book, Annoying, the Science of What Bugs Us, Joe Palca and Flora Lichman present research that suggests that we inherited this reaction from our cave-dwelling ancestors and that the maddening irritation is tied to noises that then warned of life-threatening situations. I doubt the noise is going to kill us, but most of us certainly want it to stop.
Then in her book How Emotions are Made, based on groundbreaking research in her lab, Lisa Feldman Barrett postulates that human beings do not come pre-loaded with any emotional mapping. Based on what she calls "constructed emotion" she says that the entire brain creates every emotion we feel on the fly as it happens. "There is no 'fear center', for example, in the amygdala with accompanying neurotransmitters." "There are no emotional maps lying dormant just waiting to be triggered. We 'construct' those emotions in each new situation". I corresponded with her with a few emails. In the first two I congratulated her on her groundbreaking research and that exchange went really well. But then I asked her if I could ask her a question and she said that I could. I asked, "Then if we construct every emotion on the fly, then in the case of grief, for example, if we don't want to keep hurting so badly, why can't we just choose to stop constructing that emotion? Why can't we just choose to feel something else?" She never replied. But all that to say, she would not agree with the authors of Annoying that our reaction to fingernails on a chalkboard is embedded deep in our brains. So which is true? That's the yin/yang of scientific discovery that makes it interesting. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, he set the science of biology on its head. But in spite of the book's impact and importance, to this day thousands of noted biologists and theologians do not accept his research as valid. Many say that science still struggles with the question, "Am I my keeper's brother?"
I went to my gym this morning to walk and to stress a few muscles that haven't been stressed in a while. It's main attribute is that it's near our house. One reason I don't go more often than I do is the horrible music they pipe throughout the gym. Another reason is because it's a gym. I find the music to be both pervasive and annoying, When I'm there, I can't escape it. I enjoy listening to many kinds of music including "heavy metal." But this music and the crappy speakers they play it through is more like heavy torture, This morning I swallowed a little vanity and instead of taking my ear buds, I took my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. With my ear buds the sound of the gym "music" bleeds over the music I want to hear. Even with my headphones, I could hear their music. Annoying. However with the combined magic of the noise-cancelling technology and of the human brain, within a few minutes all I could hear was my Spotify playlist. I enjoyed Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast as much as I would have enjoyed it here at home. Maybe more since I was "taking a little exercise."
Another way of saying "Silence doesn't exist" is "noise is inevitable." However, if I could get to the place with John Cage that "if it makes a sound, it's music", I would live in a world of constant splendor. I just Googled synonyms of "noise". None of them are pleasant. If John Cage enjoyed music as much as I do, and if to him all noise was music, then John Cage must have been the most gratified man in the world.
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