Noise

I've been thinking about Noise...

We're surrounded by it, but the human brain has developed such complex processing that we actually don't notice most of the time the level of noise and noises that we are dealing with...

Where I work, noise is pretty much part of what we do, we provide a coherent, continuous stream of music, chat, news, etc which pumps out across almost 100,000 radios in Dublin.

Not boasting, not moaning, but the product of my job as such creates a fair amount of noise in peoples lives... I'm responsible for that radio burbling away in the back of the shop, or the thum thump as some kid in a car drives past you at the traffic lights.

So, you become accustomed to it, you live in the middle of it... You forget about it.

But somedays it gets to you...

I find myself, on the phone, radio on, tv in the newsroom, people shouting, mobile phone ringing, sound playing from my computer... Suddenly it just all seems to much.

Shut up.

Stop the noise.

So I do... at least for me...

It sounds simple, but I drove home in silence tonight... only slowly becoming aware that being in the car means the radio is on, that means, I'm working, jumping from station to station, thinking about links, about how songs fit together, about what the competition is doing, about whether that's the right ad or not...

Silence makes things noisier for me...

And when I get home, I leave the TV off... No Seinfeld, no chatter, no burbling brook of television... just quiet.

I definitely live on my own...

There are only really three noises in my house at the moment

1) This sound, the sound of my rattling away at the keyboard
2) That sound, the sound of the whirring computer fan
3) The distant sound of the oven

And the funniest thing of all for me is, that these three sound are so terribly noisy