The Irish Times view on the sounds of the pandemic: Tunnel of silence

How does the pandemic sound? Is it birdsong on a city street, clapping from the doorsteps, or the din of the public loudspeaker, at once unsettling and reassuring, that instructs us to keep our distance? For medics, it may be the whirr of overworked machines in the ICU. For others, the daily, familiar intonation of the death toll on the evening news.

But the defining sound is silence. Lockdown has quietened everything around us. Office blocks and building sites stand deserted, urban centres are post-apocalyptic film sets. The car sits idle because there is nowhere to go. Our phone calls trail off for want of news to impart. With his notion of The Museum of Disappearing Sounds, the composer R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s spoke of the nostalgia we feel for sounds that have been edged out of our lives through neglect or human development.

Silence can bring terror, but also peace and even the urge to make things anew

Lockdown has enabled the retrieval of lost sounds. We hear the beep of a reversing lorry, or the squawk of a seagull venturing farther inland. A paper in the journal Science last July, drawing on data from seismic monitoring stations around the world, found that humans made less noise in the period from March to May last year than at any other time since modern seismology records began. All of this could inform how we plan our future cities, putting acoustics at the centre of things and perhaps designating tranquil areas free from development and noise.

Silence can bring terror, but also peace and even the urge to make things anew. It may not save us from distraction, as anyone who passes their time mindlessly scrolling their Twitter feed can attest, and many of us would take the noise we cannot have – a heaving concert venue or a sell-out game – any day. Silence in itself is not a virtue. But does it at least fashion more space to listen, to hear ourselves think, to imagine? If so, it might influence what artists make of this strange time.