I recently came across a YouTube video about a man named Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist from the United States. His personal quest is to preserve silence in nature. With his “Sound Tracker,” he travels the world recording vanishing sounds — especially silence. One of the most endangered sounds today, he says, is silence itself, and noise pollution has become a growing global problem.
I live in Catania, on one of the city’s most crowded streets. Catania is a metropolitan area that never sleeps — noisy, chaotic, overflowing with traffic, ambulances, and scooters. The sound pollution here is a constant struggle. The infrastructure is outdated; it works… when it works, so to speak.
This often brings me back to what I truly miss about Sweden — the nature, and the deep silence you can find there. Like those early Sunday mornings when snow begins to fall and people are still asleep. The whole city turns quiet, and all you can hear is the soft sound of snowflakes settling gently on the ground.
Here in Sicily, I find a different kind of silence — the one that comes early in the morning by the sea. Often, as early as I can, I go for a walk on the beach alone. The waves roll in softly, the air feels new, and the world hasn’t fully awakened yet. There’s a healing rhythm in that moment — the meeting of sound and stillness. It’s there I recharge my batteries, where my thoughts find space to breathe again.
Today, with advancing technology, we use noise-cancelling headphones to shut out the unwanted sounds of the world. I use them myself when the noise becomes too overwhelming to bear.
But I’ve started to think that this has become a modern health issue. Even if we believe we can handle the constant noise around us, it does affect us — more than we realize. Unwanted sounds trigger the amygdala, the brain’s internal alarm system, releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline — even while we sleep.
Silence, on the other hand, and calm soundscapes — like those found in nature — have measurable healing effects. They lower our stress, restore our focus, and reconnect us with the world around us.
To read more about Gordon Hempton, click here
