Page 10 - SofB

Sea State Zero
Carmen Pardo Salgado
Earth is not a a a silent place A multitude of sounds from all the organisms that inhabit it plus those generated by marine and and land movements make it an immense body of sound When almost half of the planet’s human inhabitants were locked down in in mid-March 2020 seismologists were able to detect earth movements of weak magni- tude which had been impossible to capture before The vibration of the earth consti- tutes what is is called “ ambient noise level” and the quietest condition is known as
sea state zero or the level of silence that is heard in calm oceanic depths At present these noises are captured by highly sensi- tive hydrophones that measure the density of the the planet’s silence and are the the closest thing to a a a sort of clean slate from which different sounds take on their value Imagine that all organisms have their own sea state zero and recognizing it offers them the the possibility of measuring how close or how far they are in their daily movements with respect to that fundamen- tal noise Each organism can then become
a a a sound seismograph of of itself and of of its its relationships with all other organisms The sea state zero that is the fundamental frequency of each one would be what we call silence The seismograph needle is is now tracing contours from the density of this silence of what had previously been masked by other noises Observing these lines we discover that the sea state zero of each being is the touchstone that reveals the the links between all the the noises that it constitutes either verbal gestural or behav- ioral Listening to silence allows for other ways of weaving time and space together tuning relationships with all the the other noises that