Mr. Film and Watch

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips says it all:"I sometimes think about how quiet the world must have been, maybe a hundred years ago. I say that, having just come back from a walk outside (outside the recording studio which is in Cassadaga, a sparse farming community in western New York) and it was so dark I could not even see my own feet as I walked. But more startling was what I could hear...?? I could hear everything... but it made so little clatter that the mere volume of my breathing drowned out the entire world.... I thought, "How torturous this soundlessness would be, a hundred or so years ago, when music and the noises that surround us today - like even just the whir of the refrigerator - could give no shelter from the dead silences that easily provoke anxiety in someone with a troubled mind... not to have the slightest distraction from your worries could prove to be unbearable." My imagination stops in fear that if, for some reason, the molecular structure of our atmosphere shifted slightly and all sounds ceased - not hearing, but sounds - for even just twenty-four hours, the suicides could be in the millions, myself perhaps included."