I once wrote a short piece about music asking whether it was a ubiquitous annoyance or the highest form of art, as Ruskin thought:
'All art should aspire to the sublimity of music'.
For a long time I agreed. Now I am not at all sure. Shops and shopping centres trivilialise everything from Vivaldi, Mozart and Handel to the ephemeral but not unmeritable popular music from the sixties to the present. Music is used in Lifts, on telephone lines, it can be downloaded, copied, forgotten and replaced by newer songs, quartets and symphonies - which will, just as quickly give way to more 'product'.
But music is not the only invasion that drowns out the silence that gives rise to reflection and thoughtfulness. The roar of traffic, the 24/7 rolling newscasts, the senseless racket of talk shows, local and national, these all conspire to reduce our natural tendency for peace and thoughtfulness to a premature and tragic end.
We are desensitised to the many serious threats to our survival by being constantly distracted from distraction by distraction'. Is it really surprising that famine, war, epidemics are invariably met with a charity concert. How many of us know how to practice and feel even 15 minutes of pure empathy with the poor and the victims of wars and dictatorships? Yet that fiften mintes could change our perception of suffering and lead us to act in ways which we are not even aware of.
Noise has reduced us to a state of constant unnatural excitement and made us fear the backdrop of silence that is essential to unique ideas, insights and understanding leading to a strong conviction and an untapped ability to really change some of the injustices - the insane inequalities of this world.
Maybe noise is the result of the fear that without it we would find ourselves and our environments terrifying?