Why the Noise Everywhere?

Is it in our nature to abhor a vacuum of sound?

My dentist of 25 years just started broadcasting Baby Boomer E-Z listening throughout her offices as if an aggressive hygienist or a root canal were somehow insufficiently agonizing. When I inquire about this new feature in her den of pain, my dentist explains, "Oh, it's a service we subscribe to now. Don't you like it?"

I calendar a note to myself to take an iPod for my next dental appointment.

Later, on my way to the airport, I pull up to my local Shell station where I always seem to forget that the pumps have television screens. I insert my credit card and a cheery young face appears. "Welcome to Shell!" she says. "Did you know . . . ," she continues with her enthusiastic promotion of Shell services and products followed by commercials for television programs that apparently evoke uproarious laughter. I turn away from the screen, but I'm near the car, so I can't help but hear several manically upbeat solicitations of my consumer loyalty.

I get in the car where it's quiet. But if I want quiet so much, why did I turn on my radio before driving off? Or was I listening to music? And did I have my cell phone earpiece at the ready in anticipation of some call I might make?

And I admit that when I'm home, I usually have relatively quiet, instrumental music playing from a playlist I've created on iTunes.

Later, when I arrive at the long-term parking for the San Francisco Airport, the waiting area for the shuttle has music, the shuttle vehicle itself provides the same music piped in, areas of the airport, too, have their own Muzak, and the gates have inescapable, and inescapably loud television screens all dialed to CNN where some family is running around screaming during a competition of some sort.

The plane is quiet, except for the white noise of the engine, once we are in the air, but I'm happy with my iPod.

Dallas airport, same thing. Even at the baggage carousel. CNN and more screaming families, but this time it's one of those Judge Whoever small claims shows where we witness humanity at its most petty.

Why are we simply not allowed to indulge our own thoughts in quiet solitude.

This doesn't seem wholly new, but it does seem more widespread and is it just me or is it also louder? Or does it just seem louder because it seems more invasive?

A couple of years ago, I took a cab from LAX to a friend's home in Santa Monica. On the way, smooth jazz, a genre from which the blood has been drained, winds it oleaginous way into the back seat. Without warning, I found myself ensnared in the cab while being subjected to Billy Joel's "I Love You Just the Way You Are," a song I've heard maybe a thousand times, always involuntarily, always provoking a search for a means of escape.

But I was in the cab and there was no escape. To my chagrin, I realized I knew all the words to the song, but not only that. I also knew the ingratiating saxophone solo note for note. How? Because this shit is everywhere, that's how.

Could I have asked the cabbie to turn off the music? Sure, but then I may be denying him the music that makes his job more tolerable. And I'm also faced with knowing that he's thinking, "Who the hell doesn't like Billy Joel?"

Once, for few weeks during a year off from college, I was selling men's suits during the holiday season in a department store in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my folks lived at the time. It was a smallish department and I was usually there alone on my shift. I brought "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with me to keep my mind occupied. A good thing, too, because I needed it to help me tune out the insipid Xmas music piped in . . . piped into all of America.

Took my lunch into the employee's lounge one day and I'll be damned if it didn't seem like the music followed me in. And, of course, it was louder in that smallish, featureless, all white room.

But I was alone. And desperate. So I went back out onto the floor, found a pair of scissors, returned to the lounge of the damned, situated a small table beneath the speaker in the ceiling, climbed up, pushed the ceiling panel up high enough to reveal the pablum transmitting wire, and, yes, I cut it and jumped down triumphantly to a nice quiet read.

Breakin' the Law, Breakin' the Law. (A horrible song by Judas Priest.)

I frequented that lounge more happily from that day until the end of the shopping rush. A quiet oasis it was. Totally.

I might have really enjoyed an iPod then.



So here's a list of quiet songs you might look up on iTunes or on YouTube:

Trolleyvox -- Midvale
Kaki King -- Ahuvati and Neanderthal
Wayne Horvitz -- Tired
Larry Goldings -- Redwood Portrait
Johann Johannson -- Part 2/IBM 1403 Printer (yes, that's right)
Fink -- If Only
Hem -- Sailor
Philip Bimstein -- As Plain in My Mind as Yesterday
Andrew Bird -- Yawny at the Apocalypse
Keith Jarrett -- Someone to Watch Over Me
Jenny Schneider -- Buoy Song
Steve Tibbetts -- Climbing
Ralph Vaughan Williams -- The Lark Ascending
Lou Harrison -- Waltz for Evelyn Henrichson


And the band in the photo at the top? They walked the streets and plazas of San Sebastian, Spain, a few summers ago. Boisterous and magnificent!