OPINION: It was the autumn meeting that made me realise we’re losing the battle. We live near the local racetrack, so we often see and hear tall quadrupeds with short humans tearing past. We like it. Or we did, until the autumn meeting, when six hours of races came with blaring loudspeaker music added, audible 600m away.
I’ve rung the racing club. I’ve left a short message of short words. But I know it’s useless. If you want quiet these days, you’re doomed. Intrusive noise doesn’t just rule; it assumes the right to rule.
I’m talking specifically about commercial assaults on silence, and all that they imply. There’s the cafes and restaurants where muzak mauls as soon as you step inside. The shopping plazas, movie foyers, supermarkets, gas station forecourts, doctors’ waiting rooms. And now racetracks. Add your own examples.
“To help people feel cheerful/welcome” is the usual justification. Really? Explain how a GP’s waiting room of the infirm and often elderly feels cheerful, etc, at Suzee and Benjee’s playlists on Radio Flatulent.
Indeed, you can ask for it to be turned down. Or even off, if you have a death wish. Most times I’ve done so, I’ve got an amiable, slightly surprised “No worries”, and the background blare has dwindled from injurious to inconvenient. Just once, we were told, “That’s my favourite album.”
Hail to my friend, who replied, “Well, you’re not our favourite place. We’ll go somewhere better.”
We shouldn’t have to ask, and to feel that asking will label us a killjoy, or a grumpy old fart. Yet the noise we didn’t ask for has become the norm and the quiet we have the right to expect has to be begged as a boon.
Such commercial cacophony is brainwashing lite, kneading our minds into a stupor. It’s invasive, insulting, and assumes we can’t sustain a social ambience by ourselves, that we need recorded background mooing in case the fearful phenomenon called quiet descends. We have to be, as poet and essayist TS Eliot sourly wrote, “distracted from distraction by distraction’'.
It erodes real contact. How often in cafes, etc, do you nod and smile without being able to hear what the person opposite is saying because of the ambient orchestrations?
The Romans, my ex-classics-teacher wife Beth tells me, had a phrase “horror vacui”. It meant fear of empty spaces, and was most apparent in art, where every corner had to be filled, in case viewers faced the terror of emptiness. Our century has warped this idea until we’re left alone and quiet less and less; we’re “saved” from the ordeal of silent places.
Does it matter? Hell, yes. A NZ Institute of Economic Research report estimates that hearing loss issues rose from 7.4% to 8.2% from 2018- 2022. Are you listening, cafe mall and racetrack managers? The report also notes that noise assaults and subsequent hearing loss mean increased risks of isolation, depression, dementia, physical danger while driving/cycling/walking, even falls.
Then there are the psychological effects. It’s getting harder to be private, to live quietly. Think how you used to sit waiting for a friend, while your mind and you muttered away to each other about plans for the day, scenarios you might face, coping strategies, that sifting process that helps you gain perspective and self-awareness, which neurologists tell us is so vital for mental health.
Such quiet times and spaces are getting fewer, and those who invade foyers, cafes, waiting rooms with sound have to take some of the blame. “The rest is silence,” says Hamlet. Nearly, sweet prince. In fact, the best is often silence, and these days we’re losing the fight for it.
David Hill is a Taranaki-based reviewer, fiction and children’s writer and playwright.
