Noise

“ It was the kind of noise that, one knew, had been going on for hours before one began to notice it, and would go on, unchecked and unchanging, for endless hours more: like the heat, like the drought—like Africa. ”

“ It seemed more like a tremendous vibration that filled the space about me, that seemed to close in on me; and while I was not afraid—how could I have been with her in my arms? I felt, sort of dimly, a rushing wonder as to the aspect, the source, the nature, yes as though it may seem silly to you—the all-fired use and necessity of that unknown noise! I want you to feel that noise as I felt it—yes, felt it more than heard it—perhaps a combination of the two sensations. I seemed to both feel and hear somebody, something listening in the dark! ”

“ After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible—a long, low, mysterious moaning, which never changes, which is felt on the ear as well as heard by it—a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height—a sound so unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven ”

“ The noise and tumult, the confusion of forms and cries, fatigue all the senses; everything swims and flickers before our eyes; there is singing and ringing in our ears, till at length we are conscious of neither colour nor noise, scarcely even of the usually very penetrating odour. ”

“ For some moments the silence threatens to remain unbroken between us; for some moments the subdued sound of father’s and mother’s talk from among the rosebeds and the piercing clamour of the canaries—fish-wives among birds—are the only noises that salute our ears. Noise we make none ourselves. ”

“ By night each noise is individual, and leaves its impress on the mind. Whoever remembers the quality of noises he hears by day in the city, however great the uproar? Who can forget the soothing chirp of crickets in the grass at his feet by night? ”

“ Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air. ”

“ Any noise causes renewed pallor. A whistle, a cry, a sound of any kind, the bark of a dog, a sunbeam suddenly penetrating into the cage, the shadow of a swiftly passing cloud, the flight of a distant bird, each suffices to produce a rapid loss of colour in the ears, shortly followed by a more vivid flush. ”

“ Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices, speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and multiplied without transferring them into music. ”

“ The ear must hear but one footstep, when the night reveals its secrets and there rises that wierd vibrating hum, a noise like that our earth might make, moving through the grooves of space. It is like a fairy dream, dearest, to look up to the stars and become absorbed in the measureless silent enigmas ”

“ In the tumult of a city, pulses of different kinds strike irregularly upon the tympanum, and we call the effect noise; but when a succession of impulses reach the ear at regular intervals we feel the effect as music. ”

“ The noise is something astonishing. A score or two of men are yelling at the top of their voices, screaming, scolding, damning each other in polyglot, gesticulating, jumping up and down, quivering with excitement. ”

“ Always there was traffic, always movement, always activity, and always noise—much noise. A great noise: where boatmen are there is always noise; they exchange the joke Fescennine, they laugh, they quarrel, they fight, they sing. ”

“ Then, far away, but sounding very near at hand, for sound travels very strangely in mist, so strangely that often a very distant noise will strike loudly, while it is scarcely heard close to, there came a shot. ”

“ Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music,—pure, unmixed music,—in which no wail mingles. ”

“ In ordinary language, we speak of noise, of common sound, and of musical sound-terms employed by Dr. Thomas Young in illustrating the mechanical agencies of articulation:—“A quill striking against a piece of wood causes a noise, but striking successively against the teeth of a wheel, or of a comb, a continued sound, and, if the teeth of the wheel are at equal distances, and the velocity of the rotation is constant, a musical sound. The general terms—pitch, loudness, quality, and duration, embrace all the distinctions with which the musician has to deal, and which he uses in his art.” ”

“ Sound means a succession of vibrations produced in their regular order, like music, whereas noise is a disorganized vibration. For instance, falling water, like our cataract here, is sound, but the report of George's gun was a noise."
"I can see the difference. Would a wagon going rapidly over a pavement be a noise or a sound?" ”

“ On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves:
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o'er the green. ”

“ Within a certain restricted length of air-waves lies all of the pleasurable sensation which we call musical tone. But as we rise in the scale the tone begins to become uncertain, until the highest note of the instrument is again indefinite noise. ”

“ One day she was telling the little girls—they make such a noise at tea, you know—'The more noise you make, the less jam you will have, and vice versâ.' And I thought they wouldn't know what 'vice versâ' meant: so I explained it to them. I said 'If you make an infinite noise, you'll get no jam: and if you make no noise, you'll get an infinite lot of jam.' But our excellent preceptress said that wasn't a good instance. ”

“ In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. ”

“ He must be ready on the instant with all sorts of effects, such as glass-crashes and wood-crashes, when a noise like a man being thrown downstairs or through a window is required, or if a doorbell or a telephone-bell must ring at a certain instant on a certain cue, or the noise of thunder, the wash of the sea on the shore, or any one of a hundred other effects be desired. ”

“ This tuning-fork produces a sound which, by exciting our retina, gives us a sense of movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space. Matter is noise and nothingness is silence. ”

“ The sensation of sound is produced by rapid fluctuation in the pressure of the atmosphere on the tympanum of the ear. If the fluctuations are irregular and non-periodic, the sound is called a noise; if they are cyclic and follow a regular and sufficiently rapid periodic law, the sound is musical. ”

“ When the rapid motions which produce sound are irregular, we hear noise; when the motions are regular and definite, we have a musical tone; the rattling of carriage wheels on stones, the roar of waves, the rustling of leaves are noise, not music. In all these illustrations we have rapid but irregular motion; no two stones strike the wheel in exactly the same way, no two waves produce pulses in the air of exactly the same character, no two leaves rustle in precisely the same way. ”

“ When a fire is made in a room, why does the furniture often make a snapping noise?
Because heat expands the wood, and the particles make a snapping noise upon separating.
Why does a stove make a crackling noise as it grows hot?
The particles of the iron make the noise in expanding. ”

“ All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going
Forth alone,
He hears the winds cry to the water’s
Monotone.
The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing
Where I go.
I hear the noise of many waters
Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing
To and fro. ”

“ In hearing, the minute auditory nerves merely receive an impulse from the vibrations or wavelets of the elastic atmosphere, and this constitutes what we call noise, tones, music, voice. But these tones or noises are in the mind only; they are not appreciated by the exercise of any other sense. ”

“ On approaching it this apparent cloud is found to consist of thousands of starlings, the noise of whose calling to each other is indescribable—the country folk call it a ‘charm,’ meaning a noise made up of innumerable lesser sounds, each interfering with the other. ”

“ He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence, ”

“ In fact, if there is no air there is no noise, and as there was a noise - that famous trumpet, to wit - the phenomenon must occur in the air, the density of which invariably diminishes, and which does not extend for more than six miles round our spheroid. ”

“ The effect of every shock will be renewed before it vanishes, and the recurrent impulses will link themselves together to a continuous musical sound.84 The pulses, on the contrary, which produce noise, are of irregular strength and recurrence. The action of noise upon the ear has been well compared to that of a flickering light upon the eye, both being painful through the sudden and abrupt changes which they impose upon their respective nerves. ”

“ Through water the musical sound is not transmitted, only the harsh material noise. In air the noise is heard very near, the musical sounds only are transmitted. Be thankful, poets and prophets, when you live in an element such that your uncomely features are known only to your own village. ”

“ Sufficient has already been said to make it clear to you that one essential difference between sound or noise and music, as far as regards the events taking place outside of our own organism, is that, in the first case, we have a more or less irregular motion in the air, and, in the second, a rhythmical movement, constituting a train of air waves. ”

“ They say gravity is the centre of attraction; I rather think that noise is. Nothing so soon assembles the inhabitants of a house as a loud and sudden noise: it did so in the present instance. ”

“ Hearing.—What we call sound, noise, or tone, is a mental appreciation of the effects of the tremulous or vibratory motions of the particles of an elastic fluid, such as air or water, on the auditory or acoustic nerves of the internal ear. Sonorous vibrations are produced by the concussion of hard bodies, by the bolt of lightning, by the vibrations of stringed instruments of music, by the forcible current of air thrown into the tubes of wind instruments, and by the air driven from the lungs through the organs of voice in reptiles, birds, and mammalia. ”

“ Other animals are affrighted at noise, but the human animal makes a deliberate orgie of noise as a special means by arrangement for obtaining a sensual satisfaction of the ear. Amongst savage tribes and barbarous nations, and amongst nations emerged from barbarism well banded in social communities, everywhere we find that this sheer delight in noise, called music, is manifest and on record. ”

“ Noise is an irregular wave in the air—which is a real thing, and has weight and power, remember. A wave of air may break a window exactly as the wave in the sea will break a breakwater, though, as the name tells us, the breakwater will break the wave, as long as that wave is not too strong. ”

“ This writer endeavors to establish his views on this subject, by observing, that “grandeur or sublimity of sound, can no otherwise arise from its loudness, than as that loudness excites an idea of power in the sonorous object, or in some other associated with it in the mind: for a child’s drum, close to the ear, fills it with more real noise, than the discharge of a cannon a mile off ”

“ A simple noise being a sound-wave, has its wave-form or make-mark. The blending of many such would produce a tone in that likeness; hence, a musical note is a blending of like noises, and every noise is really the first wave, the key-note of a musical tone. Take the ringing of a door-bell. Here the ear hears not only a musical tone, a sound-blend, in the ring of the bell, but also the noise of the clapper's clang, clang, clang. The vibrations of the bell throw the air into musical waves, shown in Fig. 5, while a huge clang-wave will sweep
Fig. ”

“ There are, however, subtler and remoter analogies between music and noise, which produce their effects whether the musician wills them or not. Such, for example, are loud bursts of tone suggesting falling or crashing, events which usually have a terrifying significance ”

“ The very noise and hum of the great city seemed to have stopped—or, at least, we did not hear it. Could the world have stopped in its rotation, and the hand of Time have arrested itself in its dismal march? ”

“ The noise must be exceptional and unreasonable. The ringing of bells, building operations, vibration of machinery, fireworks, bands, a circus, merry-go-rounds, collecting disorderly crowds, dancing, singing, &c., have been held under certain circumstances to constitute nuisances so as to interfere with quiet and comfort, and have been restrained by injunction. ”

“ The noise creatures make depends more on the construction of the windpipe, its relation to the lungs and the strength of the muscles which force out the breath, than on their size. As for example, how loud is the song of the nightingale and the little canary bird. ”

“ The Spectre Carpenter.—The noise caused by planing and sawing wood can also be imitated without much difficulty, and it causes a great deal of amusement. The student must, however, bear in mind that every action must be imitated as well as the noise, for the eye assists to delude the ear. ”

“ The Various Qualities of Sound.—Physically, sounds consist of vibrations, and these are, generally speaking, aërial waves. When the waves are non-periodic the result is a{54} noise; when periodic it is what is nowadays called a tone, or note. The loudness of a sound depends on the force of the waves. When they recur periodically a peculiar quality called pitch is the effect of their frequency. ”