Stille (stil-le) noun Definition: stillness, calmness, silence Origin: German, Dutch Not Silence In early 2020, I attended a listening party for an NPR radio segment about how Germany is a much quieter country than other industrialized nations. It was an interesting segment because the producer needed to fill up radio space with a program devoted to silence or the absence of sound; and yet as I listened to the episode, there was hardly any silence. What was frequently articulated as “silence” in the episode were actually the sounds of nature without the interference of mechanized, industrialized noise. I heard sounds of birds, streams of water, wind, and rain, which were definitely not akin to silence. It unnerved me how during this episode the sounds of nature were described as silence or the absence of sound.
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A Word for Hearing Nature
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Stille (stil-le) noun Definition: stillness, calmness, silence Origin: German, Dutch Not Silence In early 2020, I attended a listening party for an NPR radio segment about how Germany is a much quieter country than other industrialized nations. It was an interesting segment because the producer needed to fill up radio space with a program devoted to silence or the absence of sound; and yet as I listened to the episode, there was hardly any silence. What was frequently articulated as “silence” in the episode were actually the sounds of nature without the interference of mechanized, industrialized noise. I heard sounds of birds, streams of water, wind, and rain, which were definitely not akin to silence. It unnerved me how during this episode the sounds of nature were described as silence or the absence of sound.