Keeping quiet
Silence may become a protected resource in the future — if we can stand it.
In the far northwestern corner of Washington State, In the depths of Hoh Rainforest, amid trees densely padded with moss, far from any road, a red pebble marks what is allegedly the highest concentration in the US of a vanishing resource—silence.
One Square Inch of Silence is a symbolic project intended to name that resource, signal its value, and sound a (quiet) alarm about its growing rarity. It isn't the complete absence of sound but the absence of human-made sounds—traffic, voices, leafblowers, construction, trains, the hum of air conditioning units, text tones, music, advertising—that marks this place. Because of its location in the far corner of the lower 48, on the way to mostly nowhere, even planes are mostly absent overhead.
As urbanization and technology continue to encroach on natural environments, a movement to "save quiet" has emerged, including a global roster of quiet parks that either naturally or intentionally strive for the conservation of silence. If development trends continue, the ability to find respite from human noise, even temporarily, is likely to enter our cultural conversation in the near future.
You can probably hear the sound of cars as you read this. A 2016 study published in Science found that 93% of Earth's terrestrial surface, excluding Greenland and Antarctica, lies within 1 km (about 3,200 feet) of a road. Given that the Sahara, Siberia, and the Australian interior are still included, most of you are probably reading this while sitting on a highway median.
A study published this year in Nature found that chronic noise elevates the risk of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, while relief from noise leads to better cognitive function, lower stress, and better sleep. The World Health Organization identified noise pollution as an environmental stressor second only to air pollution for negative health impacts.
Some of the encroachment on silence has been an unintentional byproduct of modern life. But I'm not mostly going to bang on about that. The stranger thing about our relationship to this supposedly treasured resource is our very intentional collective determination to banish it.
The patron saint of that effort is one Major General George Owen Squier.
The (incessant) sound of music
General Squier (pronounced, for some reason, square) was a scientist and inventor at the turn of the 20th century. He held a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, not a common thing in the military at the time. He invented cameras and radio technology. In 1908 he became the first military passenger in an airplane, with the Wright Brothers, and made the first purchase of planes for the military. Authored books on radio and electricity. Chief Signal Officer in World War One. Founded the precursor of the US Air Force.
Then in 1922 Squier founded Wired Radio Inc. to provide music to subscribers in their homes. Radio was still young and required expensive equipment that most people didn’t have. Wired Radio brought music into their living spaces through the existing electrical lines.
In 1934, just weeks before his death, General Squier changed the name of the company. Inspired by the made-up name Kodak, he changed the name to Muzak.
As radio technology caught up and the price came down, broadcast radio eclipsed the home market, and the company shifted focus to businesses, hotels, restaurants, and retailers. All those public spaces. You’d walk into the Waldorf Astoria and hear the Xavier Cugat Orchestra coming out of a potted palm:
Filling the silence of a terrifying machine
This is also the era of the first skyscrapers, and by the 1940s, the one place in the Chrysler Building and the Empire State and Tribune Tower in Chicago you were most likely to hear Muzak was in the elevators.
There’s a story there. Until the Second World War, elevators never had music, but they almost always had elevator operators. They’d open and close the doors, control the direction and speed of the elevator car, ease it into a graceful stop on each floor, take floor requests from passengers, and announce what businesses or departments were on each floor. As buildings got taller through the 20s and 30s and 40s, from ten stories to more than 100, the elevator became more and more essential.
But elevator operators between the wars were badly underpaid, with 12-hour workdays, no lunch break and no days off. In April 1920, 17,000 elevator operators went on strike in New York City alone. To get to the upper floors, building tenants started running the elevators themselves. A New York Times article that same month notes that several people had been killed while these untrained operators were at the controls.
These periodic elevator strikes continued to paralyze cities every few years, all the way through the second world war and a few years after. And then, in the early 1950s, the Otis Elevator Company began designing and field-testing automatic elevators in skyscrapers in New York and Chicago.
And everybody was terrified of them. Everyone remembered the stories of people mangled by elevators during the strikes with untrained people at the controls. But get on an elevator with nobody at the controls and go shooting up into the sky? You might as well get into a driverless car!
So Otis teamed up with Muzak to pipe soothing, bland orchestral music into elevators to calm the nerves of passengers. And the term “elevator music” was born.
Why are we so petrified of silence?
Driven by the telling slogan “Muzak fills the deadly silences,” Muzak was now on a quest to push its soundtracks into every monetizable human environment. In the late 1940s, someone at Muzak discovered an uninvaded country: the workplace. Encouraged by research that showed music having a physiological influence on behavior, Muzak invented the Stimulus Progression: 15-minute stretches of music, played in a careful sequence meant to boost office and factory workers’ productivity by gradually changing tempo and energy.
“When the employee arrives in the morning," said Muzak exec David O’Neill, "he is generally in a good mood, and the music will be calm. Toward ten thirty, he begins to feel a little tired and tense, so we give him a lift with the appropriate music. Toward the middle of the afternoon, he is probably feeling tired again: we wake him up again with a rhythmic tune, often faster than the morning’s.”
Despite having no real science behind it, the stimulus progression continued for decades as management tried to squeeze more and more productivity out of workers. Here’s a dip and dive sample of a stimulus progression track from 1976, moving through the day from 9 to 5 at roughly 90-min intervals:
When "marketing science" found an alleged effect on buying habits, Muzak quickly found its way into every retail environment. This is the chillingly exact sound of the mall from my childhood:
There's something insidious, and probably not coincidental, about the juxtaposition of what was going on in the wider world in the 1970s — Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, surging crime, racial tensions, ecological disasters — and this bath of happy-time auditory denialism we were always swimming in.
In 1990, Dr. Gary Gumpert, a communications professor at Queens College, called Muzak “a kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us; it never startles us, it is never too loud, it is never too silent; it’s always there.”
Here in the 2020s, there is music playing while I get my teeth cleaned, when I buy groceries, when I am boarding or deboarding a plane. And I'm surrounded at all times by people with earpods pumping music into their heads. When I hike in the forests of north Georgia, I can hear the muffled thump of music in the headphones of hikers all around me.
Far from preserving moments of silence, we seem determined to annihilate it.
There are many reasons to dislike the intrusion of music into every corner of our lives. One is that, as the French writer Pascal Quignard puts it in a book called The Hatred of Music, “Ears have no eyelids.” You can close your eyes to visual overstimulation, but sound gets in. It’s the reason you don’t care if an ugly car drives by at 3 in the morning, but you’re furious if a loud one does.
Defending silence
There has been some pushback over the years against the uninvited intrusion of music into daily life. In the 1950s when Muzak was briefly piped into buses and trains in Washington DC, a lawsuit was filed claiming that too little was known about the subliminal effects. In 1992, a campaign called Pipedown was launched in the UK against playing background music in public establishments. Thirty-three years later they are still at it, arguing that forced public music is not only an intrusion on us, but that using music as a marketing tool or as acoustic wallpaper “debases music itself,” turning one of life’s great pleasures into the opposite.
When I taught college music history courses, nearly every student would take off headphones as they entered the room. Music was a more consuming part of their lives than it ever was for me at that age. I always thought that was a good thing.
A letter to the editor of Harper's magazine from a music instructor at the University of Utah offered a more dispiriting possibility. "During one class discussion," he said, "a student confessed that the main reason he listens to music is that he is afraid to be alone with his own thoughts. When I asked who else agreed, the vast majority raised their hands." It was not music for its own sake, but a relief from the terror of introspection.
So maybe we're not exactly looking for silence. If in the future silence does become a valued rarity, and we find ways and places to capture and experience it — what will rush in to fill the void?
