The Total Ubiquity of Noise
6th January 2018
As I sit here at my desk I hear a faint susurration of the air-conditioning system and a few random clicks and pops from various disk drives in the computer and the NAS. I don’t mind the air-conditioning noise because I spent my formative youth in the Navy where the sound of moving air meant that we could breath (and that was a good thing) — you didn’t ever want that noise to stop. (Now there’s the lawn mower from my neighbor next door but that’s an occasional thing, very comforting to we who live in suburbia. Plus the occasional plane over head and who knows what the Hell that is all about?)
I don’t mind a little noise; total silence would say to me ‘The world is dead’ and that would be an uncomfortable thing. There is a reason that those noise machines that supposedly help you to sleep have settings like SURF and WIND and RAIN. When I was younger and working I had a little all-in-one unit about six inches in diameter that contained a radio, a single-disk CD player, and a bunch of built in ‘relaxation’ sounds that were a great help in closing out a noisy office and allowing me to concentrate on my work.
