Silence and the sound of a computer keyboard

I usually glance at The New York Times supplement that arrives along with each week's Observer and rarely does anything catch my eye. But I'm glad that I did yesterday as there was a fabulous essay by Dwight Garner entitled Meaning of Silence in a Noisy World. He mentions three book which make interesting reading alongsidew my favourite covering the subject: Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence [Granta] which has the subtitle A journey in search of the pleasurs and power of silence.

Googling it to try and link to it proved difficult, so here's the eassy in full

Meaning of Silence In a Noisy World

There is dignity in quiet things and quiet people, and gravity accrues to those activities we mostly perform in silence: reading, praying, looking at paintings, standing in the woods.

We equate loud noise with violence. Without loudspeakers, Hitler observed, the Nazis never would have conquered Germany. It’s hard to imagine Gandhi astride a Harley.

We’d like to think, most of us, that we are essentially quiet; that is, considerate of our fellow human beings without being mousy and limp and uninteresting. But let’s not rush to congratulate ourselves. We should be wary of drawing easy “moral analogies between noise and evil, quiet and good,” Garret Keizer writes in his shrewd new book, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise [Public Affairs]. After all, Adolf Eichmann and the serial killer Ted Bundy were quiet types, too.

The cost of our silent moments is usually clamor in someone else’s ear. Trees are cut, paper pulped and printers run to make books and newspapers. To flick on a light is to add buzz, down the line, to the grid. To attend a meditation retreat, there’s a plane to catch. One person’s om is another’s ka-boom.

Our world is getting louder, a bone-crunching and I.Q.- lowering fact that is explored, in an uncanny convergence, in not one but THREE new books - Mr. Keizer’s as well as
Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence [Scribner], by George Michelsen Foy; and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise [Doubleday], by George Prochnik.

More planes crisscross the sky, and more cars hiss by on more roads, these writers observe. More BlackBerrys chirp. Coffee grinders and espresso machines scramble, in cafes, what’s left of our wits. We blot all this out with what may be the most damaging sound of all, the din that pulses from iPod ear buds.

I read all these books with an awareness of why my own nerves are increasingly jangled, why I mostly write (and often read) while wearing a clunky set of ear protectors, of the sort a particularly unhip airport runway worker in 1961 might have had clasped to his head. Make the world go away, as Hank Cochran’s song put it. Let my kids snicker at me.

If these books deepened my awareness of noise, however, they also complicated it. As the effortlessly intelligent Mr. Keizer points out, noise is among the thorniest class issues of our time, and we tend to utterly ignore its meanings.

You can judge a person’s clout - his or her social and political standing - by witnessing how much racket he or she must regularly endure. Those who lack silence in their lives tend to be the politically weak, whether the poor (investment bankers don’t live near runways) or laborers or soldiers or prisoners or children. In creating noise that others must live with, we display our contempt for those weaker than ourselves. Hear us roar; eat our exhaust.

There’s no doubt how harmful this clatter is. Repeated studies show it leads not just to hearing loss but also to heart disease, high blood pressure, low birth weight and reduced life span. We crossed the line, many kilometers back, that divides having a blast from simply being blasted.

As I read these three books, the noises around me separated and became achingly distinct, both the great ones - my kids, the dogs and chickens, my wife going about her day - and those that knock me senseless: the pounding of a nearby construction crew, the motorcycles that sometimes race down my dirt road, low-flying helicopters . True listening is like spinning a radio dial: it’s part static, part bliss.

Reading these books, too, I was reminded, without going anywhere, of that phenomenon that occurs when you’re driving and find yourself lost. To reorient yourself, you snap off the stereo. You find a way to become as silent as you can.

Copyleft

Danny Scott's article entitled Giving it all away in The Sunday Times talks about a new breed of on-line musicians making their tunes freely available to others to sample or remix. They don't want money, they're spreading the love.

He covers 2 organisations that I support: Freesound and Creative Commons.

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a "sounds-like" type of browsing and more up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license interact with fellow sound-artists!

They also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn't been a solution.

And Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

The Devil and his instrument

Now I make no secret that I consider the banjo as the devil's instrument - I've had too many bad instances of amplifying them, with feedback often an integral part of the sound.

But Tim Dowling's column in The Observer Magazine made even an old cynic like me smile.

The trainer at the gym is looking at my left shoulder. He presses a spot at the base of my neck with his thumb, causing a deep twinge that runs all the way down my left arm, and whistles in ironic admiration. People who work in physiotherapy are invariably impressed by how tense I am. I'm like a giant fist, permanently clenched in anxiety.

"It could be from the way you sit while you work," he says. "You probably lean forward when you type."

"Probably," I say.

"But it's odd it's only on one side."

I know exactly what it's from; I just don't want to tell him. It's from playing the banjo.

When I took up the banjo three years ago, I thought of it as a harmless pastime, or at least as a pastime that would harm only others. When I joined a band last year, I didn't imagine I was following a path that would inevitably lead to injury.

But being in a band means keeping up with other musicians, and I have some unfortunate history here. When I was in the City Youth orchestra, I had to teach myself the violin without making any noise, the bow hovering just above the strings, because any noise I made was the wrong noise. When I was in a band in college, I was always on the verge of being kicked out for my lack of application. When you hang out with students who drink beer, smoke pot and play guitars all day, establishing yourself as the lazy one is no mean feat, but I managed it.

This time I don't want to be left behind, and I have vowed to attack musicianship with as much dedication as I can muster without inviting unwanted sarcasm from my wife. As part of this new ambition, I have devised a banjo arrangement for a song that is both fiendishly complex and nakedly impressive.

Or it would be if I could play it, but I can't. I spend most of my time sitting at my desk, banjo on my knee, running over the same notes at half speed and staring at a blank computer screen. The ritual might be calming if progress were in any way perceptible. After a few hours of frustration, I go downstairs to the kitchen, where my wife is sitting.

"Working hard?" she says. "Plinkety plink."

"It helps me think," I say. At that moment I'm thinking: index, middle, thumb, middle, thumb, index, middle, thumb. "My neck hurts."

"I see," she says. "Anything else to report?"

"Next week's gig is cancelled," I say, looking out the window. "But the rehearsal is still on, because the studio was already booked."

"Oh, are we still talking about you?" she says. "How interesting."

So I have failed to master the banjo part, I have failed to evade my wife's sarcasm and I am now unable to look over my left shoulder. There has been some progress – I've learned to type with finger picks on my right hand – but I'm still worried about holding the band back.

The next evening my wife catches me in the hall as I'm preparing to leave with my banjo case.

"Where are you going?" she says.

"Acton," I say.

"What for?" she says.

"Rehearsal," I say. "It's Thursday."

"It's election night," she says.

"Yes," I say, "so it is. But, I mean, there's never really any news before midnight. I'll be back by then."

"We're having a party," she says. "Eight people are coming to dinner."

"Are they?" I say. "Well, in that case, um…" I stop, poised between two competing commitments, feeling obliged to weigh my next words carefully. I breathe out and think: index, middle, thumb, middle, thumb, index, middle, thumb

Paul Morley on Jarvis Cocker

Paul Morley on music: why Jarvis Cocker represents the future

The singer's field recordings for the National Trust are the most radical, forward-thinking music of the year

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Jarvis Cocker: his 'pause-for-thought souvenir of time and place suggests a ghostly hint of what comes next'. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

Rock and pop music, and assorted mutant sub-genres, is so everyday, so available, so not as special as it once was before it became so much a part of our surrounding world, it's interesting to wonder if there might be some sort of replacement as the 21st century develops for that kind of mind-shattering combination of sound, science, art, rhythm and image.

The release of yet another nicely made single or album by yet another solo act or group lined up for yet another award show or festival or item of gossip, yet another product given four stars and a spray of compliments, does not really set the blood racing, however pleasant or even surprising it might be. Pop has made its self-assertive point, very well, and it's taken over, but it's no longer the shock to the system it once was. It turns over, recycling, requoting, refining, reproducing, and all its delectable secrets have been more or less revealed. It's just one ingredient in a general cacophony where everything, even a sort of avant garde, is marketable and participants, effects, poses, beats, conceptual flourishes are all familiar.

Will something emerge that will be as unrecognisable to us now as, say, the Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix orCan would have been in 1910? Something that is more about the subversive, deliberately ambiguous ideas it carries with it, and not tired notions of coolness and hipness and career opportunities? The pop and rock era might yet be a part of the latest stage in a journey that means what happens musically in the next 100 years is even more exciting that what has just happened. But that means change that changes everything.

There were early clues to what was to emerge in the 60s and beyond – Duchamp, the blues, the idea of the edit, cubism, futurism andRossolo's Art of Noises, Rimbaud, Ravel, jazz, the microphone. To some extent, what happens next might still refer back to that particular narrative but from post-musique concrete, post-rock, post-computer, post-sampling, post-interactive positions which are generating new contexts where genuine radicalism can emerge.

Oddly, this brings me to Jarvis Cocker and the deadpan collection of field recordings he has produced on behalf of the National Trust (free to download at its website) – a bringing together of small sounds from everyday life, faithful recordings of birdsong, gravel paths, creaking stairs, lapping water and chiming clocks. It's not at the avant-garde edge of classical music (as represented by Cage, Schaeffer, Oliveros, Lucier or Varèse's "liberation of sound"), or at the pop edge of the avant garde (from Eno, Fripp and Czukay to glitch etc) – and it sounds quite quaint next to, say, Janek Schaefer's stimulating, sophisticated assemblies or ex-Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson'shallucinatory nature recordings.

But from a friendly, loved pop face, it constitutes a thoughtful proposal that this kind of contemplation of sound, involving the pure isolation of its surface, depth and mysterious presence, can be a discreet reminder of the experimentally achieved occult electro-sonic qualities that are a key part of pop's appeal. It's a polite reminder that music, however it is assembled, whatever it consists of, however it is classified, is about the mind and the imagination as much as it's about buying, swapping, listing and grading music and reminding you of your past.

Cocker's pause-for-thought souvenir of time, place and sensation suggests a ghostly hint of what musically comes next in what has become known, drearily, as sound art – which is sonic sculpturing, the transformative integration of music and art, a continuation of John Cage's challenging observation in 1937 that music was now "the organisation of sound". Cage rejected composition in the traditional sense in pursuit of an energising new music that combined randomness, found sound, recording, theory and manipulation with rigorous compositional perception.

As a judge on the PRS for Music Foundation's New Music award, which is giving £50,000 in September to fund the compositional construction of an innovative new work, I'll let you know during the next few months about the shortlist and further possible hints of the emergence of a post-recording-era hybrid unrecognisable to us now. As Cocker implies with his dreamy National Trust recordings, the future of music, its next progressive steps, might have more to do with Cage's patient, exploratory theories about thinking and hearing than with the busy, blatant success of pop in making its presence felt time and time again.

Show and Tell: Brian Eno

From today's Observer Magazine.

Show and Tell: Brian Eno
A week in the life of the musician, including a children's parade, mirror balls and Brighton rocks.

Each of the images can be seen individually here.

Brian Eno is guest artistic director of this year's Brighton Festival which runs until 23 May

Jarvis Cocker's album for The National Trust

The National Trust is famed for its care of some of the nation’s most visually stunning locations; from castles and gardens to great swathes of coast and countryside, which are often promoted as havens of tranquillity. But the release of their new album is the first time that the very sounds of these special places have been given their place in the spotlight.

Jarvis Cocker, best known as the former front-man for the band Pulp, has worked with NT to produce the album, entitled National Trust: The Album, comprising of British natural sounds including birdsong, crashing waves and wind breezing through a country garden.

Eleven special places across England, Northern Ireland and Wales feature on the album, so enjoy listening to the sounds of these places - to hear them for real, go along along for a visit.

You can download the sounds here

Albion Rose

A week or so ago I was working on Mike Westbrook's jazz arrangments to Wiiliam Blakes wonderous poetry - and avoiding Blake' greates hit, "Jerusalem". The suite was entitled "Glad Day' and was in the choral version.

I wasn't entirely sure of the relevance of the "Glad Day" reference until I saw today's Independent and Tom Lubbock's weekly column, "Great Works". This week he talks about Blake's The Dance of Albion - subtitled Albion Rose or Glad Day.

This is a hypothetical image for a hypothetical day. It's an affirmative vision for a moment that's very unlikely to be now. It was chosen in advance, of course. But whatever results are emerging this morning, William Blake's The Dance of Albion can only feel like a cruel irony or a bitter protest or an impossibly remote ideal. Even in its own day, it was highly optimistic.

Albion is England, a personification of this island. In this picture – also known as Albion Rose or Glad Day – he symbolises England's political awakening and liberty. A naked man stands on a rock in a sunrise, rising above the material world, welcoming the dawn. This elemental scene was coined at a time of revolution and repression, and Blake added captions to focus his meanings. Pictorially, there's nothing to set it in any specific age or place or politics.

All the same, Albion represents a uniquely utopian figure. His body itself speaks an abstract but articulate language. This nude is delivered from all bondage and all untruth. It is beyond conflict, beyond struggle and inner struggle, wholly realised. And yet this figure isn't stuck in final utopian lifelessness, as you might suspect. He holds an interplay between static pattern and dynamic tension.

Stasis first. The figure is a centrifuge. Its energy is fully released. It's the polar opposite to another static form, often used by Blake – a human body self-imprisoned, totally compacted into a ball or a block, its power pent up and contained. Albion goes all the other way. His body is flung outward. His limbs unbend and reach out as far as they can, and each limb is free of others. He is absolute liberation.

The figure is innocent. It has no sophisticated classical complexity, no graceful twisting of torso and stance. The naked body lies on a single plane, and it faces full frontal. Its arms are not raised in victory either, but level and opened to the world. The figure is at the point of maximal unfolding. There is no potential in this pose, no compression, implying something further. This stance is fully actualised. It has arrived, now!

This is the figure's utopian aspect: its uttermost unfolding, its extreme openness and unboundedness. And this simple pose is what gives it an archetypal power. The body is identified with a bold clear shape. But if that was all there was to it, this figure would only manifest a perfect and inert simplicity. You'd have a version of this image where the body was mapped onto a regular diagram, like a human starfish. It would lack any feeling of desire and spontaneity.

Albion eludes this strict diagram. His figure has dynamic elements. For example, his pose is centrifugal, but not altogether. You see strain in his gestures. His hands don't stretch right out, they are flexed right back. They indicate that Albion still wants more, more. He's trying to embrace the world, more than he can embrace – or trying to display his body, more than he can display. His reach exceeds his grasp.

Meanwhile, his legs break a stable symmetry. One stands upright and supporting on the rock; the other is on the wing, lightly and gracefully touching down. The body's weight is uneven. The foot begins to lift. The head is slightly turned. Action enters the figure. The Dance of Albion is in the middle of a dance step, and its level arms are keeping its balance. It might be on the point of a spin. So the utopian figure is saved from being fixed and rigid. It is still aspiring and still moving.

And then a pattern returns, and at another level. This image has a ruling design, a radiant structure, which incorporates the whole figure and all its limbs and everything. Arms and legs emerge like the spokes of a wheel, roughly centred on the diaphragm, but it's not merely a matter of the anatomy. The crucial device here, never used by Blake elsewhere (or by anyone else) so explicitly and so strongly, is the equation between the body and its background.

The outflung stance of Albion is picked up and drawn out by the radiating beams around him – his own shining aura, perhaps, or an entire sun-bursting sky, which is also a multi-coloured flame and a flowering and a butterfly wing. Likewise, the glowing substance of Albion's flesh is on the point of physically merging with this radiance, so that the body could be materialising out of light or dematerialising into it, and the energy of the body is at one with pure energy. His head explodes into a flare.

Albion is in glory. England is in union with the universe. All worldly politics is dazzled. Who could ever imagine this glad day on any morning, or dare to frame this image on any public poster? It could only be propaganda for a party of apocalypse.

About the artist

William Blake (1757-1827): painter, printmaker, visionary, myth-maker, religious and political revolutionary, aphorist, poet. But for all his multiple accomplishments you never find anyone calling him a "Renaissance man". He's not respectable enough for that title. The shadow of eccentricity still falls on his greatness. His visual work, for example, is an unresolvable blend of staggering originality and limitation. He trained and worked as an engraver and illustrator. He weirdly mixed the influences of Michelangelo and Gothic art - and mixes up text and image even more inextricably than a medieval manuscript. There's a sense in which he can't draw. His colour schemes are unheard of. His images are stuck in a sealed-off, home-made system. His human figures are always spiritual symbols – and in the process, his art becomes a comprehensive experiment with the human body whose only parallel is in Picasso.