The Roaring Gale of Complete Silence

I have long admired the music of vocalist, musician & producer Dominick Fernow and have followed his career for a number of years across his multiple aliases. In early 2014, I read an article where he spoke about his favourite record, which to my surprise wasn’t an electronic record or an avant garde piece of classical music, but a field recording.

The record in question was Environments: Totally New Concepts in Sound: Disk 4, which he described as:

“… the only record I have that has been used, listened to, absorbed and explored in every context I can think of inside the home. It has been… used to block out loudness, to create motivation… it has been sexual, dismal, romantic and utilitarian”

Being someone with a passion for music and a healthy interest in sound recording, I thought this sounded pretty incredible and duly set out to find this record and investigate for myself.

The Environments series was the brain child of Irv Teibel, who after trying to capture the sound of the ocean for a friend’s independent film noticed the benefits of looping his recordings in his Manhattan apartment to drown out the sounds of the city that never sleeps.

His mini-breakthrough was then developed and supported by his chess partner, who worked in psychoacoustics (the study of how sound affects the nervous system) who introduced Teibel to Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Von Helmholtz, a 19th century German polymath, who discussed in his work, the great psychological benefits of natural sound on the moods of humans, stating wistfully in one journal “...if only some means of accurate reproduction could be found”. Luckily for Teibel, in 1969 that method of accurate reproduction was available and ready to be utilised.

The series comprises of eleven volumes released between 1969 and 1979 and as the wonderful quotes and claims on the back cover recount from astounded listeners the series can “expand the room”, “improve concentration” and “develop creativity”. I was keen to see if the reviews were true.

I found my copy of Environments Disk 4 on eBay being sold by a German record collector, it consists of one track either side. Side A is the roaring fractured cacophony of the “Ultimate Thunderstorm” and Side B is the lulling humming hiss of “Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest”. Both are wonderful examples of dynamic field recordings and I have used them for a number of years now to support meditation, as a reading companion, to calm my daughter and for background sound after a busy day at work.

In seeking this record and its counterparts in the series out, I really started to think about why I enjoy the ambient, cyclical sounds of nature so much and how they create the illusion of space and curate a feeling of calm.

In real terms, silence doesn’t exist. As humans, we think of silence as 0db but that is merely the label given to the lowest level of our audible frequency range (which is of course limited). Even our own limited human paradigm of complete silence doesn’t ever necessarily occur. The closest we can get is in a man-made environment away from all ambient sound in anechoic chamber and even then, due to the jarring contrast between the relentless noise experienced in our daily lives and the extreme lack of feedback from our immediate environment (in a soundless, echoless room) we inevitably tune into our breathing and our heartbeat.

With that knowledge, it becomes very apparent that the marketeers who designed the garish covers for the Environments records were probably onto something. Creativity benefits from switching off, from thoughtlessness, from turning down the volume on a world that demands ever more of our attention and when the city sounds of the everyday are excluded and the hum of nature, in whatever guise enters our ears, we feel enveloped in silence, whilst engaged in sound.

Atop a mountain in the wilderness, the roaring gale stings our ears, forces us to hunker down, makes our heart beat faster, but also makes us feel calm, centred & focused. Whether you find peace in nature or with headphones on a busy commuter train. Give Environments a spin and see if 40 mins of rain, thunder & passing traffic does it for you!