Nicholas Allan

The Anthropause

As natural history filmmakers, many of us have experienced it: we arrive at our camp, or filming location, switch off the engine of the 4x4, and, as we step out, the first thing that hits us is the immediately calming, sublime sense of quiet.

When we left our homes in the city suburbs or surrounding villages we hadn’t noticed the noise that enveloped our world. We might have felt we’d visited quiet places from time to time over the preceding months. But we hadn’t been somewhere this quiet. Suddenly we can hear in hi-fi; the sounds of the natural world are allowed to breath.

For all of us apart from those living in the most remote countryside or coastal areas, noise is, of course, all around us. A large component of the modern soundscape is the diffuse, broadband noise that radiates from the collective surface airflows, tyres and engines of vehicles from miles around, and the aircraft above. Diffuse so that it surrounds us, with little discernible directionality, and broadband so that it lacks a definable pitch. Together these characteristics allow noise to sit in the background, and for us to continue to communicate, hearing foreground sounds mostly without too much difficulty. This in turn has allowed us to become habituated to it to the extent that even when actively listening we are often unaware of its presence.

But this diffuse noise masks the subtleties in the soundscape, leading to reduced clarity and the loss of some information altogether.

Many of us noticed the drop in ambient noise during lockdown this year. An event we thought we’d never experience – the anthropause – led to people commenting on the new sense of peace, or the presence of more birds.

My peak–quiet moment came when I walked to my local shop here in north Bristol early one still Sunday morning. The only sound as I stepped out into the street was the birdsong emanating from the scrub patch 50 metres away. Then, in the foreground, a collared dove sung loudly from a rooftop, its song reflecting off the widely-separated rows of houses. It was the crystal-clear reverberation that was striking – this was an effect normally inaudible with the usual buzz of the suburb, the low hum from the city centre and the 24-hour roar from several mid-distant motorways. Suddenly I could hear the ‘space’, as opposed to the ambient city drone that normally filled it.

As I walked, further sounds revealed themselves: the zooming-by of a tiny fly, so small that it was closer in sound to a mosquito than a housefly, and the faintest of breezes through the vegetation in a neighbours garden. Fairly mundane or inconsequential sounds you might say (unless the buzzing was from a biting insect, in which case this might have been an important and normally missed audio cue!), but the ability to hear them felt like the revealing of the full picture; the auditory equivalent of putting my glasses on or switching to HD.

It’s not just about the listening experience of course. Noise is connected with a range of health issues and behavioural effects in humans and wildlife and has even been shown to slow the development of speech in young children living next to busy roads.

A recent study linked road noise to a reduction in diversity of bird species in Britain, as rarer, often migratory bird species are found to be less common where suitable habitat is noise-polluted.