SOUNDS LIKE LIFE IN THE DARK NIGHT
LYING in bed I thought about sounds in the night. It could be the title of a jazz album early in Miles Davis’s career, when he used to play slow, sweet, simple tunes before the more complex sounds of his fusion years.
If you aren’t familiar with Miles and the reference has no relevance, perhaps Sounds in the Night would be the title of a latenight FM easy-listening program with some smooth-voiced old DJ playing banal tunes.
There is something about night and its sounds that seem more atmospheric, more immediate, more acute.
Perhaps it’s the idea that night is a quiet time for sleep, and that under the cover of darkness sounds you hear have an extra impact and more acute feel to them. That the reactions they may illicit have a more visceral emotional impact.
Like the difference when you hear a curlew call during the day and when that long, drawn out, mournful cry is heard in the night. It’s a sound that wraps around your heart a little and, for some reason, I feel a little melancholy, as if the cry is a hint to whatever grief or loss the listener might have lived through.
And a dog barking during the day is of little consequence but a mutt sounding off at night is either the cue for an outburst of annoyance or a hint that something may be attracting the dog’s attention.
In the house I grew up in, sounds at night were everywhere; the old weatherboard was a breathing thing with rumbles, creaks and even a few groans as it navigated the night. I remember I always felt very safe though for I think that, to me, that house and its noise meant home and family.
Sometimes in the noisy home of my childhood, I would hear a bus stopping in the night, the hush of its brakes, the sigh of the door opening.
It meant someone had come home; some unknown fellow citizen was making their way to their nest, and I would feel comfort for them for I assumed they would be as happy in their home as I was in mine.
In a hotel room once, the sound of the bar fridge became so noticeable it started to drive me bonkers with its hum, and then the more I listened, I discovered a rattle that drove me to investigate.
Hazardous business, investigating a sound in the night. Especially when, idiotically, I didn’t switch on the bedside light but tried to creep around the bed as if I was going to take the bar fridge and its noise by surprise. Of course I tripped, roared and ended up switching the bar fridge off, defrosting it and leaving a pool of water across the floor.
Sounds in the night. Funny old things.