So I tried something last night I’ve thought of doing for a long time. I recorded myself sleeping. Just audio, using the phat field recorder. At first I thought wow, I’m totally silent. But about an hour in I start in on brief moments of howling, groaning, snort-snoring, and all that. But it is short-lived. Nothing surprising, I don’t guess, but it’s a little weird to hear for the first time. I’ve been told I snore for a couple of minutes when I first fall asleep, but that it stops. I didn’t catch that behavior at all this time, but maybe next. I could compile hours of this, and make millions.

There is a lot of white noise from the air filter, but I can’t sleep without that, or rather it’s very difficult to sleep without that steady sound when upstairs neighbors stomp around as they sometimes do. The recorder itself is also very sensitive, and it picks up vibrations from things like the front door of this building slamming and even the subway rolling past 2 blocks away. Those sounds are inaudible to me but they always intrude on recordings made with that device.

So I looked up on that Internet thing to see who else does this. As I should have expected there is an app for this, and I don’t intend upon using one but it led me to this strange story which I have some trouble understanding. A woman shared a brief recording from her sleep in which a clicking sound is heard. Her voice is heard asking “What are you doing?” and what was described as a male voice is said to have replied “nothing.” Problem is that I don’t hear the male voice as a male voice, but the clicking sound is distinct. I don’t know what it is but something missing from that article linked to above is the fact that she lives with a pre-school aged son. The story says she lives alone. But it’s interesting to listen to that short recording and simply not hear some of the things others say they do. Life is like that on many levels. We talk about hearing, seeing, comprehending things yet no evidence exists to prove any of these sensory experiences happened.

But what of silence? Mozart was a master of silence but I tend toward thinking that even silence sounds different today than it did in his time. I guess a dictionary definition of silence might echo the biological definition of death. Death is the absence of life, and silence is the absence of sound. Except there never really is true silence. There was an exhibit at the Guggenheim last year where a room was insulated such that all outside sounds were muted, but I did not get to experience that. I think that exhibit would have driven me insane. The quietest place I’ve found in NYC was at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. Every creaking of my bones felt like thunder, and stepping across twigs and leaves felt like pouring rain.

Cemeteries around here are not especially quiet. Calvary is surrounded by highways that deliver a constant din of noise. There is a magnificent effect I discovered years ago, before they tore down the old Kosciuszko Bridge. That old bridge was scary for all the noise it made, rattling and vibrating from everyday vehicle traffic. I discovered that if you sit at a certain spot next to one of the mausoleums you’ll hear noises from the Kosciuszko bouncing off the tombstones that stand on the hill that is Section 1-West. I don’t think there is any way to truly capture that effect, though I tried, investing in professional audio field recording gear and ultra-sensitive nature microphones that can pick up sounds of geese pooping from miles away. I was never able to truly capture the sensation of being there, concluding (not that this was lost on me) that sound is an element of our experience on earth that cannot be passed on to future generations. It’s not unlike seeing things. You constantly hear people say that they “saw” something or “looked at” an object or a situation. Seeing things is such a fundamental unit of currency in the way we communicate but there is no way to prove or to collect evidence that anything has truly been seen.