Lhas UNESCO Sound Week, which runs until January 28, invites us to listen to the voices of the world. However, there is one to which no program offers us the opportunity to lend our ear. This is the voice of silence that we rediscovered during a long pandemic-imposed lockdown and that is returning with the snow these days.

Because snow is the true image of silence, a delicate film that envelops the world and is only revealed by the fact that bird prints and noises mark its surface. Silence is closer to fullness than to emptiness, to presence than to absence. It also allows us to find ourselves.

But our lifestyle is hectic and consumer-oriented and therefore inevitably loud. The noise pollution we create is negligible, difficult to quantify, but now ubiquitous, except when the snow immobilizes us, and harms all living things. L’Anthropophony whose ill-inspired composers we are, poisons us as much as it corrupts the relational universes that give life to the world.

The sound that reaches from the sea to the sky

Worse, we have entered the era Thorivocene, [du grec thoryvos pour « bruit »] this era of noise in which everything becomes uninhabitable. In the Paris region, 70% of residents say they are disturbed by outside noise while resting at home. Harsh rumors about road traffic, factories and industries, construction sites and aerial ballets are circulating everywhere.

Life needs a film of silence to reveal itself, to make a statement and to create a framework for relationships. He needs this white canvas to spread his characters and make them visible. A Study conducted in the United States in 2017 found that in almost two-thirds of protected areas, noise caused by human activities exceeded the baseline noise levels of ecosystems. This is this black scum that invades the world and makes it so ugly that it no longer recognizes itself.

At sea, the sound marks, the only ones that draw a relief in a unified space, are leveled by the noise of the merchant marine. The sound intensity there doubles every ten years. The whales get lost there and are sometimes washed up on the beaches disoriented. Stray belugas and whales are now venturing into the Seine estuary. Fish, whatever they are, are exposed to the stress of no longer being able to hear themselves: their beak clicks, teeth grinding, fin rubbing and gill movements are lost in nothingness. The sea can no longer be heard.

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