Sounds of Silence

Think Tank #13

How is it possible for artists to convey quietness with sound?

I’m a big Simon and Garfunkel fan. Some of you may know this. Thinking Man is littered with posts about them. Whenever I think I’ve said enough about them, another one of their albums reveals itself to me and inspires me.

This time it’s the album Bookends: what might be the duo’s masterpiece.

The first half is a concept album, exploring the stages of human life from birth to old age, and, well, onwards. It’s beautiful. Listen to it.

I won’t go through the whole album song by song and rave about each individual one, although I’d like to. What I want to focus on is one idea—that somehow, throughout their exploration each phase of life, from the eager emptiness of youth to the comfortable staleness of middle age to the soft, weary contemplativeness of old age, the album manages to keep with it an overarching feeling of quiet.

I’m in awe that they’re able to do this. I’ve listened to a lot of music. Loudness and energy is easy to pull off. So is contrasting powerful and soft sounds, producing a feeling of dynamism and change. But being able to keep up a feeling of quiet for a whole album—especially while changing up the sound (not all of the songs on Bookends are quiet songs, in a strictly auditory sense)—that’s remarkable.

I think it’s because the music doesn’t actually ‘live’ in the sound waves at all, but in our minds. These songs make you think. They make you calmly imagine your own life. Its past, its future. Calm remembrance is a quiet activity. Therefore, listening to an album like Bookends gives us a feeling of quiet more than, say, being in a quiet room with your mind going wild.

Perhaps this can be applied to all art, and the musician conveying silence with sound is harnessing the same magic that a novelist does when he paints scenes with words. We often think of books as static, imagine that the story lives within its pages. This isn’t true. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. A word, just like a musical note, is impotent without the others that surround it.

We can only perceive one at a time. Our experience of art relies entirely on memory.

Were Simon & Garfunkel aware of what they were doing? Perhaps. There’s evidence that they’d at least given the concept some thought (recall “The Sound of Silence”—another ‘quiet’ song with a supremely self-aware title).

I don’t know. I just really like Bookends. It’s one of those things that remind me of how beautiful art—and life—can be.