The Silence of the Sounds

Some days back in Bangalore, around midnight I was shaken off my sleep by an ear-piercing unfamiliar sound. It was the typical sound of a piece of a heavy metal hammer hitting another large metal body at rhythmic regularity. Why would someone in a residential colony hit a metal body with another hammer continuously for hours so late at night? I started analyzing what could the situation be and drew a big blank.

I could not associate this sound with the industrial situations I had experienced so far. I remained clueless.

Only the next day morning, I could know that the sound was that of a heavy mechanical pile driver and was coming from the ongoing Metro track construction site nearby. The pile driver sound was new to me earlier and now I can recognize it or its close relatives if I am in a different context. The sound file was appended to my database of observations, memories, and experiences.

Our brains, like a computer, are programmed to take a sensory input (smell, sight, touch, taste, and hearing) and scan it through the stored database as big as the length of our lives to find a match. Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. However, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. The bigger the database because of our varied experiences and the deeper our observations of the subtle sensory inputs, the higher will be the possibilities of finding a perfect match.

We predicted danger, and the good news we were expecting and associated the inputs in combination with many joyous and sad memories of the past.

In the olden days, the wise old men were the predictive and computational assets of their communities. They could predict future rain, drought, disease, or impending dangers by processing their datasets of sensory experiences with a high degree of accuracy. Many of our relatives had that intuitive intelligence and could guess situations. They could guess things like what might have happened and who would have done what without being there. They observed people’s behaviours and understood their intentions well.

Their opinions mattered a lot as they were not far from being correct invariably.

Our grandmothers could know from the sound coming from the kitchen if the cat dropped a utensil from the shelf or pushed a ladle off the cauldron. The watchman’s eyes would pop open the moment the distant sound of a fallen ripe mango or a palm would break his summer afternoon sleep. The tiptoe walk of a lurking jackal would alert the homeowners because he recognizes how it sounds when the jackal walks on dead leaves. Farmers could guess if it would rain or not from the smell and nip in the air.

Men of our generation could recognize the difference between a petrol car and a diesel one from their engine sound. A Boeing and an Airbus when it took off. The birds from their chirps and hoots. Earlier we did much such guesswork by default because our sensory channels were always in a heightened state of alertness. Now our dogs only know if the gate is opened by the one, they know or by an intruder; earlier we could know it. He manages to do it still because we have not given him a smart gadget yet.

Now the role of data acquisition from the surrounding and processing has been handed over to high-capacity computers and smartphones. They are doing it 24x7 without our overt permission. For getting long-range weather forecasts to short-range data like the temperature, possibility of rain, road direction, traffic jam, air quality, visibility, sunrise, sunset, heart rate, and distance covered since morning we must have a smartphone with half a dozen apps, and WiFi coverage. The predictions are getting more pinpointed and more accurate.

This accuracy has lowered the need for humans to sharpen their intuitive and analytical faculties for even predicting a small thing next to them. And those who have it still are considered to have redundant skills. The AI engines are getting smarter while our intuitions are getting duller. The need to be observant of our surroundings by using the fullest capacities of our sensory organs is getting less pressured because of the commonly available gadgets and computational powers.

With the changed lifestyle and obsolescence of so many products and equipment, the sounds associated with them are completely unknown to many of us especially the kids of this generation.

In our generation we stopped hearing the typical ‘Cloup’ sound of falling water droplets from a thatched roof in a puddle long after the raid had stopped, the howls of a pack of jackals in the evening, the noisy orchestra of thousands of crickets behind the dead most silence, midnight hooting of owls, the sound of dead leaves being blown away in a summer breeze. The rhythmic sound of a Dhenki and the sound of the beetle nut being cut into thin slices. Many of us didn’t know how a teleprinter sounded.

Can this generation recognize the sound of a Rotary Dial Telephone, how the typical ‘Chuk-Chuk’ tempo increased in a steam engine, the hum and orchestra of mosquitoes around our ears during a power cut, the typical flapping sound a wet Bata slipper created when we walked, the sound of AIR and DD when they opened transmission, the advertisement jingles, the credit jingles of serials, or the now obsolete Fax or a TCP/IP Dialler modem? So many sounds that were ubiquitous and recognizable have been silenced forever with the evolution of society and changed lifestyles.

Though that is not going to materially affect their life in any form, thanks to the internet and massive-sized digital archives of such obsolete sounds being built somewhere, the current generation for academic purposes at least can access the said sounds.

Our modern conveniences which are our own lifestyle choices are nothing but private bubbles detaching our senses of the surrounding temperature, light, humidity, sound, and sight. Now we have glass panes that fend off light and sound, our indoor air quality and temperature are artificially managed, our car cabins are acoustically studio-grade, and we wear noise-cancelling headphones on the road and do everything possible to stay disconnected from our surroundings and people. What reduces our sensory inputs also dulls our ability to process them. 

Disconnected Privacy is the new lifestyle choice. That lifestyle choice silently has disconnected individuals leaving them in private silos and the emotional disconnect between them is what is called Sounds of Silence.

Garfunkel, introducing the song at a live performance with Simon in Harlem, in June 1966, summed up the iconic song's meaning as "the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other."

Sounds of Silence in the background of Silenced Sound is what we are currently left to deal with.