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yes! though I suppose horses were loud prior to cars, and people in aggregate are loud regardless--
Still, cars (and buses) are a constant background hum--the sound of modern life in the West, I suppose. So people get away from it all in the country, in quiet spots. I found a great quote about this, relating to 4'33:
And here it can be demonstrated that the much poeticized silences with which the country restores nerves shaken by city life are made up of an infinity of noises, and that these noises have their own timbres, their own rhythms, and a scale that is very delicately enharmonic in its pitches. It has been neither said nor proven that these noises are not a very important part (or in many cases the most important part) of the emotions that accompany the beauty of certain panoramas, the smile of certain countrysides!
But let us leave nature and the country (which would be a tomb without noises) and enter a noisy modern city. Here, with machines, life has created the most immense, the most varied sources of noise. But if the noises of the country are few, small, and pleasing, then those of the city ... Oh! To have to listen to noises from dawn to dusk, eternal noise!
http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm
Not only that but your neural networks are chattering away all the time even where there is no stimulus. It's what neurons do when they're at home. So when 'nothing' is happening, the low-level neural chatter comes into consciousness. ie the Noise becomes Signal.
One can study this effect by lying in a bath of body temperature water in a totally black bathroom when noone else is in the house. It is not the isolation tank of Dr John Lilley or Michael Jacksob, but it will be effectively spooky. You can't be me, I'm taken
Always check you've put your light bulbs in properly or it will come back to haunt you Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
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