In Pursuit of Silence Read online

  Everman has a certain sparkle in his light eyes and a beard that flows in great scrolls, making him appear rather like a better-groomed version of Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were given to dying his hair ginger-gold and wearing exotic finger rings. He is listed as second guitarist on Bleach, Nirvana’s debut album. (Kurt Cobain later said that Everman didn’t actually play on the album but was credited as a thank-you gesture for having paid the $606.17 recording-session fee.) While he was in high school, Everman read Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, and resolved to make a project of developing the artist, warrior, and philosopher facets of his personality, in accordance with the Renaissance ideal. Having completed a stint as a grunge guitarist and service with the U.S. Airborne Rangers, he is now studying philosophy at Columbia University. Everman is not to be monkeyed with. When he met me at a dim SoHo wine bar, the slowness of his movements made me anxious. It was as though a big-game animal had wandered into a petting farm and might accelerate from zero to a throat-ripping sixty at a heartbeat.

  Silence, Everman told me, was at the crux of all his work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of his special-operations activities involved long walks, since news about the liftoff and progress of helicopters, and even of their reconfigured Toyotas, would often be relayed via cell phone from village to village, far in advance of their movements. Engine noise eliminated the possibility of surprise. And for the same reason that they avoided vehicular transport, he and his unit almost always moved at night. Even with their night-vision goggles, hearing was the primary sense they employed as they closed in on a target. “In an assault on a compound, everyone would be listening as hard as they could—and straining to be as quiet as possible. Without silence, the teeter-totter of success will tilt in the bad guy’s favor.”

  Soldiers are taught the acronym SLLS, which stands for stop, look, listen, smell. But since operations are normally done at night, Everman continued, “the vision part is impaired. And I think the smell part really comes from Vietnam days, you know—the smell of rice cooking. It wasn’t too applicable to my experience. But you’re definitely listening. And you’re definitely being quiet.”

  Even when you’re being as quiet as you can, Everman said, you still make sounds. He and his team would try to fasten down any loose gear with rubber bands to prevent rattling. But even if they succeeded, their own motion would often be loud enough to mask important warnings. And on top of these “regular sounds,” he went on, “you’re moving at night, over rough terrain. Everyone’s going to fall down. It’s not like in the movies. I’ve taken a lot of diggers.” After someone falls, they all freeze, listen, make sure there aren’t any new sounds indicating they’ve been heard.

  The other element Everman’s unit had to contend with was also an acoustical threat: barking dogs. “That’s why nomadic, pastoralist cultures keep dogs,” he noted. “They’re a good early-warning system. But dogs bark so much,” Everman added. “It’s like sirens here in New York. Especially in a village, when one dog barks all the other dogs start barking …”

  There was one aspect of Everman’s experience that I figured would ignore silence: the actual assault on a compound; the deafening volleys of bullets released when they took out “the bad guys.” But here a mysterious combination of psychology and physiology kicked in to counter my expectations.

  Everman reduces the essence of combat to two principles: stress management and problem solving. At their core is yet another dimension of silence. “When a gunfight kicks off, it’s fucking loud,” he told me. “But every time, the real cracks are over in the first few seconds. Then it’s just”—Everman lifted his hands up by the sides of his head and then suctioned them violently into his ears—“whooosh. It’s like that scene at the opening of Saving Private Ryan. The first thing that goes is your hearing—partly because you’re blasting your eardrum or whatever, but there’s something else happening as well. The way it goes silent allows me to focus on solving the problem. You’re not going to be able to solve any problems if you’re not managing stress, and aural exclusion is a key part of stress management. It puts you in a Zen state. I’ve never been more in the moment than I have in combat situations.”

  The mind, it seems, can create silence where actual silence is least present. For Everman, the switch to silence, entering what he described as a Zen state, meant the changeover from listening to seeing. “Once the gunfire starts, I’m always cued into muzzle flashes rather than sound,” he said.

  At the end of our conversation, I asked Everman what his most powerful “sound memory” was of his time as a soldier. At first, he spoke of how, in Afghanistan, if you took away the AK-47s and the cell phones, the noise of the place was “completely biblical. What you heard were goats, donkeys, livestock.” But then he told me there was one thing that did stand out above everything. He was stationed for a time in Kandahar, next to a mosque where someone kept pigeons and attached tiny bells to the birds’ feet. “Once in a while, they’d take the flocks out, and you’d just hear hundreds of bells up in the sky.” It was, Everman said, one of the most transfixing sounds he’d ever heard.

  My conversation with Everman underscored the centrality of silence to life in a biosystem based on predation. His experience approaching a gunfight neatly diagrammed two primary effects of silence: enabling us to gather critical information about our environment (where threats and targets are positioned in space) and placing us in a state of calm that maximizes our ability to respond appropriately to the environment. But if the natural world was all about trying to be as quiet as possible, why did it become necessary to evolve the middle-ear noise-abatement function? I called Heffner again.

  She sounded testy. I asked whether this was an alright time for her to talk.

  “If you want to learn something about sound-pressure levels and evolutionary psychology, you should have been at my house last night,” she said. “They’re doing repairs on the train tracks.” I made a clicking sound with my lips. “But it wasn’t the actual work on the tracks that was the problem.”

  “No?”

  “No! It was the guys driving the railroad construction vehicles. They have air horns. They don’t get to blow them very often I guess, because they were making a symphony. It’s not directional at all. They’ll blow their horns as they approach, and sometimes when they’re 200 yards past. Do they really need to keep that up at 2 AM?”

  After a sympathetic pause, I ventured my question. “Dr. Heffner, since the evolution of hearing seems to be concerned mostly with trying to hear as much as possible as clearly as possible, why did we ever develop the ear shutter in the first place?”

  “Because of the loudness of an animal’s own voice,” Heffner shot back. As an animal gets ready to vocalize, the middle-ear reflex will often kick in to provide protection from the noise made by the beast itself. No wonder the initial theological notion of silence involved closing one’s own trap.

  There’s a suggestive symmetry in the idea that our built-in hearing protection exists to block the noise we expel from our own lips. In evolutionary terms, our middle ears and our mouths share a lot of history. Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, recently led an expedition into the Yan Mountains some three thousand kilometers outside Beijing on which he made a remarkable discovery: the intact skull of a Yanoconodon—a hitherto unknown feisty little five-inch-long mammal from the Mesozoic era. The fossil provides a snapshot of a key step in the evolution of hearing.

  “What was most revealing for me here,” said Luo, “was that the middle-ear bone was still attached to the jawbone, but its shape was already quite similar to that of the modern platypus.”

  Some people believe that after Beethoven went completely deaf he hacked the legs off his piano so that it rested directly on the floor, then placed his ear against the lid so that he could feel the vibrations of the notes. Thomas Edison, who lost his hearing as a child, enjoyed chomping into the wooden box of his gramophone as a way of listening to music. “
I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard, then I get it good and strong,” he declared, and even went so far as to claim that his ability to hear “splendidly” through skull and teeth gave him an advantage because the sound waves then traveled “almost direct to my brain,” protected by deafness itself “from the millions of noises that dim the hearing of ears that hear everything.” Both Beethoven and Edison were resorting to forms of auditory perception that predate the evolution of a middle ear by some 125 million years. The amphibians and reptiles that crawled out of the watery deep with their heads flush to the earth, and the early mammals as well, heard the world largely through their bones.

  Luo described for me a process which went something like this: When bone conduction was the primary mode of sound perception, Yanoconodon’s ancestors were among those who made much use of the lower jaw in picking up vibrations. Unlike humans today, the bottom jaw of the primitive mammal was itself divided into two parts, the dentary (where the teeth were) and the post-dentary (the back, toothless part of the jaw). Around 250 million years ago, the protomammals had some ability to register sound waves in the back of the jaw, along with limited innovation in the inner ear. If we could see a fast-motion film clip of the next 125 million years, we’d see the post-dentary bone shrinking and becoming more sensitive as its role in feeding diminished and its utility as a hearing apparatus became more pronounced. At the same time, the dentary bone expanded to establish a new, powerful hinge connecting it with the rest of the jaw. Exempted from chewing, the post-dentary bone gets even smaller and more sensitive until, not long before Yanoconodon enters the stage, the bone performs an astonishing grand jeté—splitting off from the lower jaw and rising up into the cranium. With Yanoconodon, although the bone has soared almost all the way up into the skull to find its place among the auditory ensemble in the ear, the attachment to the lower jaw is still visible. But soon after Yanoconodon leaves the stage, the bone will sever its last ties to the mouth and hover suspended in the cranium where we find the middle ear today.

  When I asked Luo what message the latest discoveries about the evolution of mammalian hearing suggested to him, he said, “All that hearing mechanism took 200 million years to build up! You better take care of it!” He laughed. “Don’t listen to too much rock and roll!”

  For Luo, and many other scientists whose work focuses on the era in which mammals were establishing their viability as a life form, hearing may in fact be the sensory factor determining evolutionary sustainability. Only by being able to operate effectively at night were the pint-size early mammals able to evade the depredations of their giant forerunners on dry land.

  All of this poses a question: If we acquired our extraordinary auditory sensitivity—a sensitivity so pronounced that it can detect energy levels one hundred times lower than the energy emitted by a solitary photon in the green wavelength—because the world was striving to be as quiet as possible, what happens now when almost every day we’re exposed to sounds that treat our eardrums like bass drums? Is it possible that the sublime sensitivity of human hearing has become just a point of vulnerability? Will our very sensitivity get clobbered down to where we end up not being able to hear anything at all? Hearing may be the only one of our five senses that evolved to deal with an ecology, a ratio of sound to silence, the terms of which have been reversed over the course of human history.

  The more I learned about hearing, the more unfathomable it seemed that we became loud on purpose.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Why We Are Noisy

  On December 28, 1938, a speaker at the American speech teachers’ convention in Cleveland, Ohio, unveiled evidence that their modest profession held the secret to Hitler’s rise to power. In an address before a hushed crowd of fellow instructors, Professor M. D. Steer, director of the Purdue Speech Clinic, revealed his analysis of the German leader’s speeches. Exhibiting pictures of “Hitler sound waves,” with lines “zig-zagging sharply and remaining almost constantly in the higher voice level,” Steer showed how Hitler’s voice managed to batter his listeners into “a submissive state bordering closely on hypnotism.” The secret lay in frequency. Steer claimed the typical frequency at which anger was expressed was 220 vibrations; Hitler’s voice clocked in at 228 vibrations. This relentlessly shrill pitch dazed audiences “in much the same fashion as we are stunned by an auto horn.”

  It was a bold claim for the scientist from Indiana to make, but not altogether groundless. Hitler himself once remarked that without the loudspeaker he could not have conquered Germany, and his loud voice was a treasured property of the rising Nazi Party. So essential was its power to the Reich that he even had a voice double, one Adolf Wagner, whose sole claim to distinction seems to have been that his voice grew raspy and broke in exactly the same cadences as Hitler’s. The American National Broadcasting Company charted the volume of Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on October 6, 1939, comparing it with that of the speeches by Prime Minister Chamberlain, Premier Daladier, King George, and President Roosevelt on September 3, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Though the French leader hit some impressive high notes, nobody could compete with Hitler for consistent loudness. Chamberlain’s voice chart looks like a flatlining patient.

  If, as the monks believe, we seal our lips in order to draw closer to a higher truth, we shout to acquire earthly clout.

  Darwin viewed adult animal vocalization as a weapon. In Darwin’s schema, males make a lot of noise to threaten other males and to seduce potential mates, while females make a racket to indicate their choice of partner for reproduction. “The sexes of many animals incessantly call for each other during the breeding-season,” he wrote; “and in not a few cases the male endeavors thus to charm or excite the female. This, indeed, seems to have been the primeval use and means of development of the voice.”

  In more recent decades, perhaps in line with our own evolving self-image, the focus of animal research has shifted away from competition toward the use of learned vocalizations in coalition building. In addition to adding nuances to the story of animal bonding, the expansion of animal-communication studies has led many evolutionary biologists to enlarge the boundaries of the unknown. Birds that use their songs to imitate other birds and animal species are considered especially mysterious. “What are myna birds doing in the wild?” Heather Williams, a bird expert at Williams College, said when I questioned her about noise and song production among the feathered flocks. “And parrots? No one understands the vocalizations of parrots in the wild.”

  But the dynamic that Darwin focused on more than 125 years ago remains dominant: the intentional emission of sound helps animals secure their niche in a relentlessly competitive environment. And coalition building, for the most part, comes down to finding one’s rank in a group, and assuring oneself of a protective partner in family planning. Perhaps what has changed most is our understanding of the power of sound. It’s now widely accepted that sounds made by males can supplant the need for other physical action against a competitor, while sounds made by females can circumvent the need for making a firm choice among different potential mates. Males willfully maximize perceptions of their fighting prowess through acoustical displays, while females purposefully confuse their listeners with sounds suggesting multiple choices simultaneously. Both of these capacities have been dubbed “diplomacy.” They might also be thought of as a strategic deployment of noise. While silence is often used by an animal to foster invisibility, noise functions as signage for the bodily reality behind it.

  Since the late 1970s, Eugene Morton, a zoologist and ornithologist with the National Zoo, has been constructing sonograms analyzing the sounds made by a wide array of birds and mammals. Morton has found a near-perfect correlation between the pitch of a vocalization and its social utility. Low-pitched sounds are equated with aggression, while high-pitched sounds are associated with submissiveness and friendliness. (The cat is the singular, confounding exception to this rule.) A vocalized back and forth between two animals
consisting of a bellow and a high-pitched whine might mean the difference between retreat and a clash to the death. The duet becomes its own form of duel.

  Long before Bruce Masterton’s contributions, an intuitive understanding of this dynamic was exploited in the commercial sphere. One of the earliest histories of the telephone, by Herbert Casson, a Canadian journalist, published in 1910, describes how the first telephone exchanges were deafeningly loud because the switchboards were staffed entirely by boys who engaged in more or less constant “cat-and-dog squabble” with the public, “with every one yelling at the top of his voice.” Then one day someone thought to replace the boys with girls. “The quiet voice, pitched high, the deft fingers … these qualities were precisely what the gentle telephone required in its attendants,” Casson wrote. Girls “did not waste time in retaliatory conversation … and they were much more likely to give ‘the soft answer that turneth away wrath.’ A telephone call under the boy regime meant Bedlam and five minutes; afterwards, under the girl regime, it meant silence and twenty seconds.”

  Behind this phenomenon lies the notion of fundamental frequency. Assuming there are no mitigating factors, the frequency of an animal’s vocalization will be inversely related to the size of its vibrating vocal cords. Even when depth of pitch does not indicate an animal’s size, low-frequency calls often attest to higher testosterone levels. (Testosterone may cause vocal folds to lengthen independently of the rest of the body.) Whether on account of body mass or hormone rush, the deeper the sound, the more threatening the beast. Animals can thus size each other up and determine the advisability of doing battle on the basis of the frequency struck by their opponent.