The bird songs in the forest nearby that you could hear every morning when you went for a walk.
I remember the large windows in my small Berlin apartment that sealed all noise out. I had been there for a year on a fellowship in 2011/2012, and all I remember about the city is how quiet it seemed to be many days of the week and many hours of the day. And when I started thinking about when I had last remembered what silence felt like or what it had meant, I think about myself in Berlin, Germany. I had lived recently in India, in Delhi, where the noise levels were next level. It’s definitely pretty loud in my neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Noise will always be the easiest option and to search for silence, and discover silence is the difficult option.īilal Qureshi: The book Silence got me thinking about the geography of noise. And the reason of course is because in the silence you meet yourself while in the noise you live through other people. I came to meet him at home in Oslo.Įrling Kagge: Man has always been scared of silence. Kagge had walked to the South Pole, and it made him realize that he had forgotten what it meant to listen and to listen in silence. That they really need silence in their lives.īilal Qureshi: It’s written by Norwegian explorer and publisher Erling Kagge. That people feel cheated by circumstances. What that says is that it’s a global phenomenon. It’s layered with beautiful images of horizons and brief sentences and it’s called Silence: In the Age of Noise.Įrling Kagge: Today it’s translated into 37 languages. And then last year I saw a small, elegant book that’s become an international bestseller. And then I keep seeing books about the idea of quiet, of mindfulness, of the attention economy that’s taking all of our focus away from us. Quietly, I’ve started turning to apps to block the Internet, to try to block time, to try to stay focused.
But it seems like silence has gone missing. In the age of smartphones, incessant digital noise. In the age of global crisis, political noise. and noise is everywhere.īilal Qureshi: In the age of cities, traffic noise. īilal Qureshi: Why allow for silence where there could be music, ambient sound, chatter, conversation, and above all, the comfort of noise? Lately it seems to me that the fear of dead air - the fear of silence - has made its way outside the radio studio. So radio is against silence? That’s interesting. There is something happening that is to be avoided.īilal Qureshi: I mean it’s interesting you’re basically implying that our field, our medium of radio, has kind of natural immunities or has built up sort of natural antibodies to silence. Please next time don’t do it, because we have some special routines in our system that want to prevent the broadcast to be silent.” Because when silence occurs in radio, maybe something’s wrong. Oliver Brod: I actually did a radio broadcast, a radio drama, where I used this effect, and I had two seconds of silence, absolute silence, digital silence, no noise, no nothing in my show, and it came back from the broadcasting company and said “Oh there is an error, there’s something wrong with your piece.” I said no, I want it to be like that. He’s a fellow radio producer from Berlin, Germany. Oliver Brod knows the danger of Dead Air also. A stretch of quiet on the airwaves could lead to a broadcasting crisis. It was twelve years ago when I started working as a radio journalist that I first heard about the danger lurking in broadcast silence.
“The Latest at Goethe” spoke with Bilal about the making of his episodes for THE BIG PONDER - read the full interview here. Bilal took the featured photo on a train. In addition to this episode, Bilal produced the episodes “ In Friendship,” “ Radio Wanderlust,” and “ Black Art, Berlin Stories - Looking for Alain Locke.” “Quietude” and “In Friendship” are also available in German. For this episode, Bilal interviews experts in silence, including writers Alex Marashian, Sieglinde Geisel, and Georg Diez.
Bilal is a radio journalist and culture writer whose work has appeared on NPR and in “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” “Newsweek,” and “Film Quarterly.” From 2011 to 2012, Bilal was based in Berlin and Munich as a transatlantic fellow of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
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