Is Silence Sexy?
by Hemant Sreekumar
In 2020, something strange happened - an acoustic gap. The world went quiet. The pandemic silenced us in a measurable decibel collapse. The sonic vibrations of construction, ports, airports, factories, traffic, streets, rail, freight, schools, temples faded to murmurs. The hum of civilization went down, and for the first time, many of us could hear birdsong more clearly than traffic. But it wasn’t just noise that vanished. It was the cadence of industrial time itself. The mechanical pulse that structured our days, the syncopation of shift changes - paused.
Still, silence isn’t just absence. It’s never neutral. Behind every quiet moment lies a story - sometimes of conflict, sometimes of invention, often both. The following text briefly narrates how we reached here.
Sound is moving air. It is mechanical violence resulting from longitudinal pressure waves traveling through a medium, colliding, compressing and spreading air molecules at ~343 metres per second. Noise, in essence, an aperiodic disturbance in pressure - a broad spectrum of overlapping waves with random amplitudes and phases generated through friction, turbulence and impact.
Since the atmosphere first formed, sound has not just followed but helped shape nature’s most brutal transformations, its violence carried in waves, encoded in the air itself. Each shockwave marked the atmosphere like a needle on a record, air molecules displaced, compressed, and released, holding the shape of violence long after the event had passed. Tectonic collisions, volcanic ruptures, forest fires, earthquakes, massive screaming reptiles on land, sea and air - it’s a rough soundtrack. Early humans took refuge in caves, not only against claws, these were acoustic refuges from the aggressive sounds of storms and lightning as well. Architecture itself began as acoustic defence. Thick walls, insulation, mats, fabric, acoustic panels shaped how we live with sound.
Now picture Bronze Age warriors on open fields: shrieking to the percussion of metal-on-metal impact along with pounding battle drums, screaming animals, the sonic weight of thousands marching in disciplined cadence. Sound was strategy - overwhelm the enemy’s nerves before the swords even met. Antique battles echoed vibrationally leaving scars in historical consciousness. I have heard from believers that the ground at Kurukshetra still holds the vibrations of ancient battles. Maybe it’s just imagination, pure fantasy. But it’s a disturbingly plausible idea in “acoustic logic” - a kind of “hearing” that is not mechanical but phenomenological - a bodily response to place, architecture, narrative, and silence. The psychoacoustic afterglow of environments shaped by centuries of collective imagination and buried trauma.
Three hundred years ago, sound got its modern texture, when the iron age became steel, with rhythmic clangs transforming subterranean matter into imperial wealth. Steam engines, forges, and looms droned across landscapes. The acoustic environment shifted fundamentally as the industry revolved its colonies and noise turned chronic from its former episodic occurrence. It changed from being momentary violence into background brutality. A constant hum that never stops. A new urban atmosphere submerged entire populations in a mechanical din. Today, that brutality persists in subtler forms of a new ambient defined by power, data, and friction. We now inhabit charged environments where silence is engineered, but the noise never truly leaves, merely shifts register.
Our ears and brains had evolved in nature’s surveillance networks, forest floors, prairies, where silence meant safety, and any small noise signalled potential danger. Urbanisation flipped this sensory logic: perpetual noise masked threats, acoustic blindness replaced clarity. We learned not to hear clearly any longer - not because we lost the ability, but because clarity became irrelevant in a soundscape where everything screamed at once. When every signal competes for attention, none can hold it; meaning drowns in excess. In this acoustic surplus, the mind filters to survive, tuning out nuance, flattening complexity, teaching the body to endure rather than interpret.
Wars also got exponentially louder. A million shells hit the earth in a single day at Verdun in 1916. The tradition of soldiers losing their minds along with their limbs from the trauma of sound starts here. The quiet before the blast deafened at Hiroshima in 1945, even before the arrival of the wave that destroyed eardrums and lives. Our submarines and warplanes once pinged and screeched through sea and air, their presence announced in bursts of aggressive acoustics.
But wars soon learned to travel quieter routes. Tactical silence became a virtue - radio waves traversed continents without a sound, carrying death instructions at electromagnetic frequencies beyond human hearing. This shift from noise to spectral signal marked a deeper transformation: violence no longer needed volume. In the theatre of modern warfare, sound was no longer the weapon, but the ghost - replaced by pulses and code, invisible transmissions that kill without resonance.
During the pandemic’s brief quietude, global arms dealers experienced opposite acoustic dynamics. Hours after Hamas attacked an Israeli rave in October 2023, valuations of Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon rose sharply. The imminent sustained sonic violence implied at Gaza drove market rhythms. In the Ukrainian battle fields exact impacts are being geo-located acoustically by AI-assisted microphone mounted surveillance drones, invisible frequencies tracking targets, ultrasonic sensors guiding lethal trajectories.
The same soft whirring of drones used to shoot wedding montages and geomarketing films has taken on a new register in Ukraine and the Red Sea, where these airborne cameras became instruments of reconnaissance, targeting, and lethal delivery - sound repurposed from spectacle to surveillance, from cinematic glide to mechanical death.
In contemporary riot control Serbian police this year wielded sonic devices as invisible assaults using pulses engineered precisely to disorient crowds without visible violence. The “Havana syndrome“ remains controversial, yet reveals acoustic paranoia: American diplomats suffering inexplicable neurological symptoms allegedly caused by ultrasonic frequencies deployed by ‘covert adversaries’. Whether genuine or imagined, the acoustic threat is now spectral and terrifyingly plausible. Our information itself generates noise. Server farms hum relentlessly, electricity converted to heat and acoustic waste. Crypto mining rigs vibrate subtly, banks of GPUs resonating quietly. Relentless noise pollution moves from factory floors to invisible data centres, the acoustic residue of digital capitalism.
Advanced designs prioritise quietness: phones vibrate more than they ring; digital devices hum less audibly; aircraft engines are engineered for minimal sonic footprints; stealth aircraft dissolve acoustically in radar’s invisible silence. Some of our ‘quietest technologies’, electric vehicles, noise cancelling headphones, modern servers in data centres, exist as reactions against historical noise : the relentless din of combustion engines, industrial forges, steam-powered factories, rattling trains and crowded mechanical cities. These were not just loud environments, but symbols of progress articulated through volume, eras where power had to be heard to be believed. Today’s silence, by contrast, is engineered as a deliberate retreat from the acoustic violence that once defined modernity.
Silence is never absolute, only shifting along sensory thresholds. Even the outer space throbs with electromagnetic vibrations, solar winds, radio signals, inaudible yet measurable. Anechoic chambers, spaces engineered for absolute silence, demonstrate how difficult achieving true silence is. Within them silence makes bodily existence loudly explicit, when we hear our own heartbeat moving blood inside us. Silence thus emerges as intensely artificial, perhaps as unnatural as the mechanised sound it seeks to escape. This is why the makers of electric cars face legislation that mandates artificial acoustic signals in their products to alert pedestrians.
Philosophically, silence and sound intertwine in an unstable equilibrium and complete silence escapes us. Human ears never shut; unlike our eyes, there’s no flesh flap that can act like a built-in blink. We evolved as perpetual listeners, ears tuned continuously from birth until death, yet our response is selective, our minds filter out the drone of the speed of life, the persistent hum of the omnipresent.
The sonic spectrum extends far beyond human hearing, from infrasonic vibrations sensed by animals preceding earthquakes, to ultrasonic communications utilised by military surveillance equipment. Acoustic surveillance, whether by animals detecting predators or humans monitoring submarine battlefields ultrasonically, remains central to perceptions of survival against threats. This expanded auditory domain is far richer, more violent, more intrusive than the soundscape we inhabit.
So what did the pandemic lockdown silence really mean? A pause? A warning? Maybe both. It showed us how deeply we’ve come to depend on noise - not just for information, but for reassurance. In its absence, we felt exposed. Sound and silence are parallel not opposites. One speaks to our need for progress, movement, and industry. The other taps into our fear, our need for safety. Silence reminds us, uncomfortably, of our fragility.
It is a theoretical absence we chase, a ghostly negative space revealed momentarily between an acoustic tension. We live between sonic extremes, evolutionary instincts - ears alert, forever tuned to survival - continually assaulted by new sensations. Silence, the pure quiet we want so badly, is an empty thing we chase forever till death.
About the Author
Hemant Sreekumar is an artist and technologist. He creates sound performances that explore themes of decay and emergence. Using sonification and
psycho-acoustic notions his compositions evoke a loss of meaning and purpose.