Silence Tortures My Concentration and Sleep

Silence Tortures My Concentration and Sleep

Georgina "Gigi" Hayes

College Composition - EN 200A

Professor Paige Talbot

Warner Pacific College

April 22, 2012

Silence Tortures My Concentration and Sleep

For as long as I can remember I have never truly had any complete silence in my life, nor do I think that anyone truly has. There is always some sort of intermittent sound in our lives but for some of us there is constant rhythmic noise that stays with us every moment of every day. This essay will show you the noises I have experienced and what noises are necessary for my concentration, imagination or just resting in general. Contrary to skepticisms some of us cannot function without strange disturbances that to one person is peaceful and to others not so much.

The volume of background noise is very important for my level of creativity. The louder and more rhythmic or melodic the noise the better I concentrate, this also frees my mind enough to pull words out of it. For example when it comes time for me to sit and just let my hands start typing what I want to get out of my head, all I need is to have headphones on with the volume at maximum playing slower rhythmic ballads this kind of puts my head at rest and I can hear all of my words in my head. I don't really hear the words to the music, so that free's up what I can listen to. Most of the music is with words or sometimes I can simply listen to instrumentals but it is very important that it have a good steady beat so symphony is out of the question because, I need drumming and to slow of a rhythm almost puts me to sleep. That style of music does also help but that is for another paragraph. This description of my creative noise reminds me a lot of when Seneca states, "But I swear I no more notice all this roar of noise then I do the sound of waves or falling water" from his letter "On Noise."

Different from my intense method of getting into my zone of writing, is my just plain concentration of everyday studying or reading a book. For me the home has always been chaos, I grew up in a house with six siblings and there were four adults on top of that so there was always some sort of commotion; we used to do our homework at the kitchen table and there was always commotion around us because of this I just learned to tune it out all the background noise. On a different point though, when my mother would raise her voice or my little brother would let out a sharp scream this was enough to break my concentration and completely throw off what I was doing. I think that Seneca described this specific instance well when he stated, "Voices, I think, are more inclined to distract one than general noise; noise merely fills one's ears, battering away at them while voices actually catch one's attention."

In my new home my desk sits in the front room which is the