Deep Listening

A recent "deep listening" experience, and one that changed my perception of environmental sound:

I was home alone one night this summer when the power went out.  I was using my unplugged laptop and did not have any lights turned on, so what initially alerted me to the outage was not the lights going off or my screen going dark, but the sudden absence of sound.  I realized that normally, the perennially plugged-in refrigerator, TV, modem, stereo, clock radio, and microwave (maybe even the lamps?) make much more noise than I would have expected.  Being within the walls of an electricity-less third-floor apartment in the middle of an electricity-less swath of city was quieter than being in the woods at night, where a larger set of flora and fauna infuse the environment with many things to hear.  The streetlights were out, too, and it seemed nobody was daring enough to drive their car in the darkness.  From my porch, in the absence of traffic noise and air-conditioner hum from other buildings, I could hear, word-for-word, the conversation of neighbors congregating at the other end of the block and an array of sounds that clearly emanated from a greater distance than I was used to perceiving - faint but distinct dog barks; traffic hum from Uptown, a mile south, where the lights were still clearly on.  Wondering how much noise streetlights normally make, I lit two candles to read by but was distracted by the infinitely complex sounds of their tiny flames.  

When the power came back on an hour or so later, the returning hum of the appliances seemed incredibly loud - a huge, beautiful, static chord.  I wandered through the apartment, crouching by each appliance, trying to vocally match the pitches it was producing and understand the internal time structure of its sound emissions.  These sounds' brief absence had made them much easier for me to hear - or perhaps it was just the first time I had found value in trying to hear them.  

Which left the aesthetic dilemma: which sound environment did I prefer, or should I prefer?  The absence of machine noise produced by the power outage uncovered a world of sound that connected me more to the sounds of my community, to a much larger area of space and non-machine sonic detail.  But the machine sounds of my apartment were gorgeous.  Ultimately, I think I prefer the lack of machine noise on both aesthetic and moral grounds, but the experience made clear to me the complex spectrum of positions one might hold on the subject of environmental sound, both "natural" and man-made, elective and non-elective.