Sound. Listen.

Go outside and listen.

Okay, now that you’re back, what did you hear? Do you hear the TV inside, your phone ringing, traffic from a nearby thoroughfare or a car driving down the road in front of your home? Or was it just, Quiet. The buzz of a fluorescent street light or electricity poles, a faraway dog barking, crickets, or just the tiny cracks and creaks and droppings of the earth as a soft wind rustles through the debris on the ground. The Quiet sound is lovely.

The quantity of sound in cities has increased in the last two hundred years. Especially back in the early times after the death of Christ, there were no automobiles to cause engine and horn noise giving you the dull roar of a nearby busy road, only horses hooves clopping along the stone and dirt roadways. Electricity did not exist, eliminating the sounds of a television, stereo, blow dryers and washing machines. No telephones meant no ringing, blinging cells and home phones.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear the Quiet more often? An example of this quiet was during the above mentioned times. The Roman and Greek architecture of the outdoor amphitheaters built is amazing. One sitting on the top row of the theater can hear a person whispering to another on the stage, one hundred feet away, with no microphones or speakers. The architects must have had excellent knowledge of acoustics to be able to do that, we conjecture.

But wait, how did they figure it out, so long ago, without the many formulas and equations that have only been around for a few hundred years? No fancy Mega-billion byte computers to measure and test the effects of sound, to then be implemented in an outdoor site on the outskirts of town. What an awesome evening that would be, to watch a live outdoor performance with talented artists entertaining an audience of hundreds, and to hear every word.

Listen for the quiet, and see how quiet it really isn’t.