Soundtrack to Sanity

When transitioning from island isolation to metropolitan madness the most striking immediate impression is NOISE. It’s everywhere.

I realise that I live with a sort of electronic tinnitus, everything in modern life seems to emit a constant stream of bleeps, dings and tones warning of an incoming email, a text message, a defrosted lamb chop, an unbuckled seatbelt, a door open, a kids’ toy in play, a phone ringing, a doorbell chiming, a computer reboot …. And then there are the mechanical culprits – planes, or ‘aviation events’ as the authorities style them along with, at the moment, my neighbours multiple jackhammer renovations.

The worst of them is the persistent beeping my German washing machine emits when it’s finished a load of washing.

With typical Teutonic efficiency it doesn’t let up until the machine is switched off, meanwhile no amount of profanity hurled in its direction does anything to ameliorate the annoyance and anxiety this thing induces. I just have to do as commanded, get up from wherever I may be in the house and hit the bloody thing with a hammer – or in my calmer moments turn the knob to off.

Mostly those are noises that follow you around the world, all appliances beep in the same language as do cars although while I am used to the seatbelt warning boing boing, it’s when I’m on the move and something beeps that I have real concerns, was that the tyre low pressure warning or the stop immediately your engine is about to turn to shrapnel notification?

The other anxiety-inducing warning noises are those associated with the reversing camera and parking sensors. These proximity monitors go berserk at the sight of a tree on the other side of the road or pedestrians queuing for a coffee on the next corner, I’m in a constant state of fear of reversing over a family playing in the park half a block away. The only obstacles they are oblivious to are bollards below eye level in parking stations; their little ultrasonic brains haven’t been programmed to see these collisions waiting to happen.

The Bluetooth Battalion

The most pervasive noises in the big city are often much more generic, there’s just a background hum which is not easily decoded, it’s probably a mix of the throb of traffic punctuated by the occasional blast of unmuffled exhaust pipes or screaming tyres, or compression braking trucks accompanied by power tools, blower brooms, computer fans, fridge motors and all those things that go silent when the power goes down.

It’s also the seeming need for some form of sound to be pumped out of every public space, from the mournful reverberating music heard in cavernous car parks to the ubiquitous TV monitors mounted in every waiting room, pub bar and airport lounge which are tuned to mindless daytime soapies or a smorgasbord of sport which no one can keep up with but simply provide an unnecessary annoying distraction when sharing a space with strangers most of whom are inspecting their smart phones, or listening through those strange little white protuberances sticking out of their ears, these belong to the BYO noise generation, the ‘always on’ Bluetooth battalion.

I really don’t mind if people want to turn their ears into aerials but they are missing out on one of life’s great joys – silence. Or at least just the sounds of nature. It’s weirdly ironic that in an age of the mindful pursuit of peace and relaxation that it takes a phone app to find your inner tranquillity. I’m not deriding the Deepak Chopra approach to life, I like a bit of mindful meditation as much as the next devotee of Zen rumination, it’s just that there are places where zoning out is part of the landscape – an island for instance.

Mostly I find my quietude in Vanuatu but I’ve also experienced it in Fiji, The Solomons, Bali (in the mountains, not in Seminyak or Kuta), in a Norwegian fiord, on a Greek beach, on a New Zealand lake, in a Japanese ryokan in a wooden tub of steaming water and most notably on Ratua Island off the coast of Espiritu Santo. There the silence really was deafening, the absence of noise was almost cloying, it left me consciously straining to hear, as if I’d gone deaf and was panicking about not being aware of sound. I soon got used to that sensation and discovered the pleasure of, well, nothing.

Of course there are some sounds which are absolutely soothing, and I don’t mean just the shakuhachi or whales communing but the sound of birds on the bougainvillea in the morning, a breeze in the palm fronds but the best background music of all for me is the sound of waves breaking over the reef, sometimes as a gentle ripple others a great roar. The rhythm of the sea is ever changing and reassuringly constant, as it has been for millennia. That’s the noise I miss most when I’m not in my island home