A Mute World

Before there was language, there was the rhythm of music: the thumping beats of drumming, distinct pulses of sound in an environment otherwise filled with indistinct, ambient sound. It was like the beating of your heart your chest, that indescribable feeling that sound is being produced—rhythm being generated—without any audible noise until you get real close. Otherwise, before language, the world was mostly silent, or at least we believe it was.

And yet there were flying insects that buzzed, monkeys that howled, whales that sang, and trees that crackled in the passing breeze. The world has never been silent, and yet we interpret our noisy baseline (that unquiet flatline hum when you’re all alone in an enclosed room) as such. What would it do for our psychology to actually internalize the fact that we are never without the comfort of what audio engineers call “presence,” that compressed, high-energy sound that is emitted by almost all electronic media? And when are we ever not surrounded my electronic media?

In sensory deprivation tanks, the only “sounds” (that which the human brain imagines) are your own internal dialogue, the sloshing of saliva in your mouth, and the thumping of your heart, tapping out the seconds that go by. Bodily sensations are turned into sound waves. An eminent French physician and hearing specialist, Dr. Alfred Tomatis, has stated that the first sense organ that develops when we are in the womb is the ear—first as a receiver of internal dialogue, then it matures to pick up the outside world. It has been shown in numerous studies that the body is capable of amplifying and conducting sound frequencies—bones carry these sound waves. Without audible sound that originates from the outside (as in a sensory deprivation tank), is the music of our own bones the only thing we can perceive? That total silence is terrifying.

A clip from Ron Fricke’s nonverbal, nonacted film, Baraka: