RogerEvansOnline.com

While selected sound is always on my conscious mind, during the past few days I’ve mentioned to a couple of musician friends the fact that I’m noticing the unchosen noise of the city in a new, and often painful, way. As a consequence, I reckon, of spending so much of the past few months in my own relatively serene environment (because of writing a book pretty intensively) and spending such a large proportion of my outdoor time in Central Park (only a block away), I now suddenly find common street sounds almost unbearable. This feels like a reversion to my earliest days in New York: in my early twenties — being country-bred and not habituated to a large city — I felt it necessary to wear earplugs in the streets and subways. At some point I became hardened, evidently. This new TED Talk encourages me to be more attentive to my renewed impulse to avoid the abuse of cruel noise: