This Fall we hosted Composer, Bradley Thomas Turner, at Postcard Cabins Talladega Valley in Alabama for a full month so he escape the noise and focus on writing a new album in nature. Here’s what he had to say after week two of his artist fellowship.
I like to think about sound. More accurately, I like thinking about all of the sounds that exist in any given environment, and the way those sounds compete, the way a louder sound can drown out a quieter one.
Perhaps you’ve been in a crowded restaurant before and noticed this competition for loudness. There’s music blasting over speakers, and there’s the clanking of dishes, and people are trying to have conversations, and all of these sounds are bouncing off hard surfaces in every direction in a terrible buildup of acoustic energy. If you want to be heard, you’ll have to be louder. Of course, this adds to that overall mass of sound, meaning someone else will probably have to speak even more loudly to be heard at their table. This goes on and on until everyone in the restaurant is shouting.
I think I’m biased toward quieter sounds. I’m naturally a quiet person. I am okay with not talking for long periods of time, and when I am talking, I often notice the listener straining to hear me because I speak too softly. I have a sort of phobia of being too loud.
To me, it feels like everything is loud, and I think there’s quite a lot of evidence to back that up. Consider how loud a car is compared to anything that would’ve existed in nature pre-industry or how there’s no limit to how much volume we can generate via relatively recent inventions like amplifiers and microphones. Modern existence can feel like an extreme, permanent version of the aforementioned noisy restaurant scenario. Constant competing sounds, existing at magnitudes that can only be created by mechanical and electronic means.
My point is, we’re missing out on a lot of sounds. To me, it seems like as everything gets louder, the nuance gets lost. The softer sounds are buried.
If you’re skeptical about whether any of this matters, I suggest going out into nature, at least far enough to be away from the constant roar of vehicles and people, and try listening. In that quieter setting, you might be shocked by what you hear. Everything becomes magnified. A squirrel scurrying through the underbrush can sound as loud as a horse. Maybe you’ll notice the way that sound caroms and reflects off of the surface of the trees surrounding you, scattering sound in multiple directions. A falling leaf can become an explosion when it impacts dry pine straw.
At least for me, sitting in that experience and listening to those sounds gives me the feeling of order being restored. There’s lots of evidence for how the omnipresent humanmade sound we experience is not good for us or nature. But even without seeing that evidence, the act of listening to nature makes these truths implicit for me. It’s transcendent.
I wish more people (especially musicians) were thinking more about these things, and I think if they got to visit a tiny cabin and be still for a while, they undoubtedly would.
You can listen to the full album Bradley created at Postcard Cabins here.