The Relaxing Silence in the Woods

Nature for the most part is pretty quiet. The exceptions to this rule are large events: storms, migrating birds, floods, earthquakes, and eruptions. But for the most part, mother earth is a quiet gentle place. Someone once wrote to me that it was the silence between the sounds that was the most healing, which is an interesting thought, because we tend to automatically focus on the events we hear, and that reflex causes us skip over giving our attention to the silences.

My most quiet memory goes back to when I was outside walking in a wooded valley. It was winter. Snow was falling. Nighttime. No breezes just calm. Big fluffy flakes were floating down and covering everything. There was no sound. I stopped and listened... Except for falling snow and me, nothing moved. It was so quiet I could hear my heart beating. I could hear the blood circulating in my ears! I started to walk slowly, almost daintily, so as not to change the feeling, the environment. The Silence in the Woods. It was a wonderful night just like reading a Robert Frost poem. It really is something you cannot capture or record, bottle, or box and sell, because if you had a completely silent room lined with several inches of fluffy white stuff - then you would almost have it.

However complete silence is not automatically the most relaxing situation. Finding complete silence is so rare, that it seems to be more of a “special event”. That is, it becomes something to experience, explore and note. I guess having more elements of familiarity is a requirement of deeper relaxation. The more peaceful sounds have some tangible sound or sounds for the mind to focus on. Silence does play a role, by creating spaces between the sounds, and thus creating a very slow tempo. One sound comes to mind that is created by a large lake on a very calm day. A large body of water always has a slight undulation to its surface, even on a perfectly calm day. That slow undulation creates a swishing and sizzle as it caresses a sandy beach. Add some heat, and sunshine… and that is the scene where I recorded Whispering Waves. A free sample and more information is here.

Another relaxing sound is bird songs. There are many different birdcalls ranging from single chirps and peeps to never-ending long soliloquies. I am thinking of the type of call that has a pure musical quality that engages, and then is separated by rhythmic periods of silence. I went deep in the northern woods far away from human habitation to record such a sound. The sound is a beautiful musical trill that is repeated about ten seconds apart. It is part of a recording called Boreal Forest Birds. More information and a free audio sample is here.

Having regular periods of silence creates tempos. And slow tempos have been shown in experiments to create physical relaxation responses. The heart beats slower and breathing and respiration slows. The beauty of nature sounds is that there is variability in nature that creates Rhythmic Randomness. It is this quality that potentially creates deeper relaxation, and it is why nature sounds are especially effective. For more information about rhythmic randomness, please see Friday October 16, 2009 in this blog.

Karl Hamilton BFA
Nature Sounds.ca
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