I thought once: I don’t really care what kind of music you listen to because if I take myself for an example, I listen to almost everything: rock, pop, alternative, country, Japanese and Korean, classical, new age and new wave, or combinations and ones I may have forgotten to mention. What freaks me out is the loudness – turning the volume up at decibels of sound that makes the earth beneath me shake or makes my heart go have a cardiac arrest even if I have no history of heart ailments.
It’s very difficult to have insensitive neighbors who listen to very loud music. They, perhaps, think that the world, music, and volume are theirs to abuse. If it wasn’t a crime to cast them into fire, I would have burned them down already just to shut them off. Whenever they turn up whatever it is they’re listening to at its most abusive volume, I curse and swear they would fuck off and stop masturbating in public. That’s how it felt for me, listening to their music in its most abusive volume is like them masturbating in public because I feel that listening to music is personal – something that needs to be enjoyed alone or in low volume, like when you hush-hush over secrets or tiptoe during midnight on your way to bed.
Meanwhile, this makes me think of a lesson in school about art. I remember vividly the terms horror vacui. As I remember how I understood it, horror vacui is the fear of being alone or in terms of art, the fear of leaving an empty space. So if you’re going to observe Filipino art pieces, you’ll find that some of them leave no space without color, figure, image, or object. Every space of the canvass is filled, literally.
I think now of horror vacui in terms of the noise that many Filipinos make a lot of. My parents, especially my father, are the closest examples to home of those needing noise. Right from when I wake up, I can hear the radio already on. Although it’s not exactly too loud, it’s still distracting to me that many times, I would get up the bed just to turn the volume low. I have nothing against songs on the radio except that when it’s early in the morning, I want to hear the birds, the chickens, and the day that is beginning to wake up as I do. It’s also alright for me to listen to music on the radio as long as the volume is also turned down low.
Sometimes I hate it that people don’t understand my need for silence or the absence of noise coming from or made by humans and/or technology. But I also realized that people who have the need for noise might hate me as much, too, for claiming so. I just fear for the loud ones – the too-loud ones, because to me it seems that they’re not only breaking their eardrums when they listen to too much noise; they might not know how to listen to their inner selves anymore because they have drowned themselves in technological noises they have surrounded themselves with. For me, this is just another form of horror vacui.
However, it is also important to note that the loudest of noises come from within such as unresolved feelings and issues, undiscovered selves, scars and memories. I understand that listening to silence, to nature, and to your inner self can bring out the purest of pains. Although I pity myself when I get lesser chance to enjoy listening to silence, nature, and the natural beauty of all forms of music without the loudness, I also pity those who have the need for too much noise. Perhaps their inner voices and purest of pains are becoming louder and louder by the day that they need the loudest of volumes to drown out the voices and drown out the pain.
Lothlorien~dream flower 