I was listening to a report on BBC World Service the other day about the sounds made by forests.
The gist of the report was that forests can be quite noisy places, but that each forest has its own distinctive sound. People who have lived in the vicinity for some time can recognise that sound when played out of context.
Hmm, it got me thinking. Could the same reasoning be applied to cities? Does London sound different to Paris, or New York? Does Manama sound different to Riyadh? And how do these sounds affect the people who live in them?
In the last few years I have lived in towns, villages, cities, and the deepest, darkest countryside, and they all have very distinctive sounds.
Cities like Manama are on the go all night. When you settle down to sleep, it is not quiet: cars, trucks, horns, sirens, and worst of all, the midnight crew on small two-stroke motorbikes revving the guts out of them all night. Recently, of course, we had missiles and drones to add into the mix.
Smaller towns and villages are a lot quieter, but there is still some traffic noise, and the village youths kicking a can around in the wee small hours.
In the deep, dark countryside you have no streetlights, and so at night it is truly dark, with only the moon and stars to guide you. But you still get a bit of noise: the wind whistling through the trees, and the odd fox raiding a henhouse – and if he misses, the cockerel crowing at around 4am.
When I went back to the UK in 2021 to renovate a house in Dorset, it was in a small hamlet in the middle of a field. When I went to bed and switched off the light, it was dark and silent. It was very disconcerting; having lived for the previous 30 years in cities, I was not ready for the lack of background noise.
So, I put the light back on and picked up my Kindle, reading until I woke in the morning with it on my chest and the light still on. Eventually, though, I got used to it. It was rather lovely and quite peaceful. However, I did have to come back to Bahrain every six to eight weeks to get back to reality.
Sounds are constantly all around us. The hustle and bustle of daily life is forever in the background, and our brains are conditioned to filter it out. You could be sitting on a park bench in Central Park or Hyde Park and enjoy a moment of quiet contemplation, despite there being 100 decibels of hullabaloo all around you. You can go to sleep every night despite the drone of the air conditioner, and you can play Candy Crush on your phone on a packed commuter train.
We need sound. Scientists once put people into an anechoic chamber – a room designed to have no sound at all – and the result was that most people felt very uncomfortable, with some even becoming ill.
So sound is good. If you’re hearing sound, you’re still alive.
But now and then, it is good to go somewhere quiet enough to hear your own heartbeat. The sound of silence. If I find such a place, then I’m not telling you.
jackie@jbeedie.com
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