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MANIFESTO: for More Silence and Better Sound

Enough Bang Enough!
Death to the noise, Death to the bad sound! Bang!

I cannot take it any more!
Recently, I went to a concert with a much expectation: a musician who I appreciate greatly, an adequate acoustic space, an instrument, a Bösendorfer I anticipated extraordinary.
As soon as the concert started, I could not believe my ears. Not only had the piano had been amplified, an arguable option since a room for 500 people had been filled with only around 100 listeners, but also the sound of the amplification was so bad that it prevented, at least in my case, any kind of enjoyment of the concert. The volume was impossibly loud, sometimes reaching the threshold of pain so that any low passage sounded mushy and indistinguishable. In soft passages, the hum from the speakers was as loud as the sound of the piano; the Bösendorfer was sounding, to be generous,
like a bad digital piano from 15 years ago.
I felt cheated, robbed, sullied. I had paid to listen to a musician who I admire for the subtleness and refinement of his musical speech and instead I was pounded by decibels, tormented by two loudspeakers controlled by a sound
technician who was either deaf, or hated music.

But it wasn't just this experience that made me shout "enough!". I'm tired of a world where one is always surrounded by unnecessary sounds: I don't like music in the metro, I don't like music in a bar at the seaside, I don't like music on the beach, I don't like music in a waiting room, I don't like music at the supermarket, I don't like music while I hold a telephone call, I don't like music in the elevator, I don't like music accompanying the TV news.
Nevertheless, contrary to what you might think, I like music. I love music! And it's precisely because I love music that I prefer it in its innate environment: Silence.

Today's world has a silence-phobia. Not only is the noise level of our daily life such that we seldom have moments of relative silence, but we also are educated to be afraid of it. We have become used to waking up to the sound of music, to study or execute our domestic tasks with music in the background, to the carrying of walkmans and ipods, to love to the rhythm of a song. Life becomes pointless without a soundtrack; our sonorous world is everyday more omnipresent and deafening.
I don't like this world! I like the silence, the space it allows, the reflection it imposes, the seclusion it brings. Our world is creating a generation of the deaf! To heightened daily noise levels, the response is more volume, damaging our hearing and forcing us to increase the sound level even more. Today it is impossible to find a cinema where the volume does not make our ears hum, let alone discotheques and bars. 'More sound' becomes a synonym of 'better sound', which starts to have its price and is already a public health problem.
I love sounds that appeal by their quality, not intensity!

An ancient Latin proverb proposes: "Be quiet, should speaking be no better than silence". The moment at which music is made; assuming only good music is music; is one of the situations where the silence is worth breaking. There is something of magical, mystical, about the instant when music occurs. That occurrence is, however, trivialised today. We are so overwhelmed with noise and music, we forget that the moment when music happens is unique and cannot be heard anew. There was a time, before the invention of recording, when one could only listen to music while performing it or by being present during a performance. How many pieces would have been performed only once? Today we may buy hundreds of versions of a piece and at a concert, we do not think any longer that we are witnessing a unique moment. Listening to music has became a banal activity, mostly accompanying the activities of our everyday life. How many people buy a cd and then sit tolisten to it in silence?
We must remove from our everyday life, all dispensable noises. It is urgent to recreate moments and spaces for silence, to recover the sacred momentswhen music happens. As listeners and musical agents, we have the duty to build sanctuaries where one can witness with dignity to the miracle of music. It is our obligation to protest and refuse situations which disturb what should be the rite of listening: a noisy audience, an inadequate acoustic, a bad amplification, a
bad instrument, or whatever! Not do so is to contribute to the annihilation of an art, to promote a world where 'making concerts' is less and less synonymous with 'making music'.

Aut tacere aut loquere meliora silentio.

 

I would like to thank Adrian Brown for the corrections in the english version.

 

 

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© Pedro Sousa Silva 2007
Last Update 08/07/2007
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