Relentless

Kerouac and the Sea
As well as being influenced by jazz, the author of On the Road also liked the sound of the sea. On a trip to Big Sur, in California, Kerouac went down to the ocean to get inspiration from the sound of crashing waves: “One night I got scared anyway so sat on top of a 10-foot cliff and the waves are going, ‘Rare, he rammed the gate rare’ – Raw roo roar’ – ‘Crowsh’”.

White Noise Machine
White noise machines provide an aid to eliminate or reduce it, not by drowning this sound but by incorporating it. The machine, which can look similar to a clock radio or fire alarm, recreates the pleasant sound of wind blowing through trees or rushing waterfalls, leaving any other noise to get lost in this carpet of white. Most machines operate at 60 decibels, which is the volume for a normal conversation.

Foley Sounds
Traditionally, the job of a Foley artist is to recreate the plethora of everyday sounds of a film in the most convincing manner possible, which often means dispensing with computers and modern technology. Legend has it that the sound of sliding doors in Star Wars was created by pulling a piece of paper from an envelope, while in Star Trek the squeak of a sneaker was responsible for the sound of flare guns.

Hyperscore Music
Dan Ellsey was born with cerebral palsy and is unable to walk or talk. But thanks to the Hyperscore computer programme, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dan can write his own music. Ellsey composes melodies using a head-mounted interface that responds to his movements. The Hyperscore software then turns the movements into musical notes. Ellsey controls the melody through coloured graphs that represent the different instruments used.

Sonic Boom
Humanity exceeded the speed of sound far before it had any concept of it. The bullwhip is perhaps the first human invention to move faster than the speed of sound, pre-dating the Concorde, the F-104 Starfighter and the Space Shuttle. The efficient design of the bullwhip allows it to produce the sonic equivalent of a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier.

Waxing Muzak
From the 1940s onwards, employers started taking a scientific approach to Muzak. It was played in factories to increase the morale, productivity and even attendance of workers. Companies also introduced the idea of stimulus progression, which meant that the music’s intensity would be altered depending on the time of the day. The method is still used today by corporations and businesses around the world.

Greek Theatre Acoustics
The famous Epidaurus theatre, built in the 4th Century, BC, can hold 14,000 people in its 55 rows. Despite its scale and even when packed, audience members at the back can still hear a normal conversation taking place during the play. The secret is the limestone seats that filter out the low-frequency noise and highlight the high-frequency sound coming from the stage.

Auditory Hallucinations
The human brain’s audio cortex has its own method of dealing with enforced silence. Hallucinations are not psychotic but neurological. The auditory part of the brain can start to generate its own spontaneous activity. The composer Schumann experienced musical hallucinations most of his life. He often harnessed them creatively, but they eventually degenerated into dissonant music and finally into one single note, played ceaselessly and with unbearable intensity.

The Anechoic Chamber
Echoes don’t exist in an anechoic chamber giving near total silence. Every possible surface is covered in long foam protrusions to prevent sound from being reflected. Once inside, a person is instantly more aware of the sounds of their own body. There is no ambient noise at all, making the smallest hum – breathing, heartbeats and blood surging through the veins – seem astonishingly loud.

The Chirp of Quetzal
At the ancient Mayan Temple of Kukulcan, Mexico, the staircases are built out of a certain highly resonant stone. When hands are clapped, the chirped echoes resemble the primary calls of the Quetzal, a Mayan sacred bird. Technically, the echoes are periodic reflections from the steps, but legend has it that the bird represents the spirit of the Maya Indians speaking in echoes.

Singing Stars
Using stellar seismology, astronomers can listen to ‘singing’ stars. The sounds the stars make reveal their inner workings, with noise differing due to age, size and chemical composition. These are picked up in light signals and then transformed into sounds. Curiously enough, the music they produce bears a striking resemblance to the synthesizer tones of sci-fi films.

The Sound of Silence
In composer John Cage’s famous 4’33” piece, a pianist sits silent in front of a piano for four minutes and 33 seconds. On record it means very little, but its true nature is best experienced live. Silence allows the audience’s attention to be diverted to the sounds of the environment – chairs creaking, the shuffling of feet and the air conditioning, bringing the least prominent elements of a live performance to the foreground.

Inaudible Sound
Infrasound is an extremely low sonic frequency, far below the audible range of the human ear. It’s the product of strong oscillations that can have an incredibly powerful physical presence. Orcas are known to stun and even completely kill their prey with inaudible sound blasts, and earthquakes usually release an infrasound warning right before an eruption that most animals can hear but humans cannot.

Soul and Sound
Sound carries a great spiritual significance for some cultures. The tradition of vocal and mental repetition, often known as mantras, originated in India. These mantras were considered to possess the power or spiritual transformation. Buddhist monks believed mantras were one step closer to a divine consciousness because they detracted the unnecessary and fully occupied the being.

Sonic Illusion
It turns out that the recipe for silence requires noise. Noise-cancelling headphones, for example, have a sensor that reads and instantly reproduces a mirror image of outside frequencies. The mirrored sound waves counteract each other and create the illusion of silence.

Mozart’s Aide
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major K.453 was written with a bit of help from his pet starling. History has it that while he was deliberating over the final notes of the piece, the bird picked up the melody and repeated it, and finished it off with a different, sharper note, which Mozart found to be very pleasing and duly credited the feathered contributor.

Standing Wave
Quite often deemed the culprit in many historical bridge collapses, the standing wave phenomenon is created by two identical waves traversing in opposite directions. As traffic travels in opposite directions on a road, it creates vibrations that self-polarise and can lead to incredibly destructive outcomes, as witnessed in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in 1940.