The silence of the woods is full of noise

The woods are many things: peaceful, calming, multi-hued, and (in my memory) often silent. But that mental shorthand is a mistake. That forested silence only addresses the pleasurable absence of the sound-detritus of modern life. There are no car horns, no rumble of heating or cooling systems, no yakety yakety yak yak of too many people in too close proximity, no clacking keys, inspired or otherwise. In other words, the woods create the illusion of silence by taking away irritants.

Truth to tell, the thing my brain likes to encode as “silence” is anything but. There is, in the woods, a continuous burble of a stream. The crickets offer up a track of chirping, that sawing stridulation that calls to mates and forms the backdrop of dreamland.

Other night-noises abound as well. There’s the scream and then hoot of an owl noting its territory; the rustle of a mammalian something-or-other searching for a snack amidst the leaf-litter of the forest floor; the wit wit wit of a first bird at morning light. I listen to these noises, and translate them from the unexpected “what?” into the identified “oh, that.” These sounds bring the satisfaction of discovery, and yet they are quiet, ever so quiet, and in their quiet regularity they soothe.

What we (or at least I) think of as forest silence, then, is the absence of urban noise. It is also bound up in anticipatory listening. Was that the rumbling croak of frogs? The intermittent drops of dew from the treetops? The tap tap tap of water dribbling over an end-of-season waterfall?

Silence here is a coded word, speaking to peace as measured in slowed breathing -- the rise and fall of the backpacker at ease, sleeping perhaps more deeply than home bed and familiar surroundings allow. It is a word reflective of paced regularity, of less-familiar noises often repeated, assessed, and held in the translated understanding of thing-as-sound. By grappling with what a noise represents, we become comfortable with it, often to the point that it no longer registers.

What I recall, in my fecklessness, as silence, is instead the susuration of leaves, the murmers of small animals, the steady quiet systematic vamp-til-ready steady state of forest hum. It is, in other words, a low-level background that caresses and comforts my ears, accustomed as they are to the more penetrating sounds of urban existence.

Silence as golden? Not exactly. But forest as restorative, a living quiet that listens back? Absolutely!

Listening to the Birds

Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle

In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?

Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice. 

To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:

I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:

I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)

In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice. 

And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.

Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.