White Noise

I clearly recall the image of the cracks that signal the collapse of the ice, but the sound escapes me. The women of the Yukon say that glaciers listen and respond to the slightest challenge from the wind and rain. When did I stop listening?

As Martín Virgili suggests, falling silent is not just listening—it is an act of surrender. It means opening ourselves to chaos, to the unpredictable. It is allowing the world to invade us until it transmutes us into something new. To be silent is to allow oneself to be touched, to be transformed. Why have we allowed visual signals to monopolise our senses? Sound, so fleeting and erratic, seems unable to compete with images. Yet, the human ear can capture a much broader range of frequencies than the eye, so, where do all those sounds we fail to hear go? Why aren’t museums dedicated to the vibrations that have shaped our voices, jungles, and mountains? We have surrendered to the domain of sight, forgetting that sound is more than vibration: it is life escaping us.

Our gaze hasn’t always guided us; its absolute reign began with the printing press and Renaissance perspective. Since then, the visible world has conquered our minds. In its desire to control everything, the enlightened society of the 18th century—that one that feared darkness and its mysteries—erected an empire of white paper and black ink, channelling knowledge toward what the eyes could possess. It was the age of reason, and with it, the world’s sound was relegated.

However, sound doesn’t surrender; it pierces volcanoes, walls, and bodies; sound waves penetrate, bounce, and travel between oceans and cities. Some claim that rocks cry before earthquakes, that snow crickets predict heat, or that cicadas foretell misfortune. Each vibration is an omen, but we have tried to tame sound by confining it to plazas and auditoriums. We attempt to evade it with headphones and soundproof materials, but the noise of the world remains, in the slightest provocation of wind and rain, in the interjections that vary with each language and culture.

Sounds rebel, and even if we don’t fully understand them, they are carving their own space in our perception. Meanwhile, the visual becomes immortalised, controlled. Perhaps that’s why we’ve embraced the stability of images: they offer refuge from impermanence.

The world never falls silent. In silence, there’s an underlying murmur, an echo reminding us that everything is in constant motion. In jungles, trees communicate through the whispers of leaves; in glaciers, the ice murmurs and sings before becoming water. Sound is witness to change, to birth and death, to transformation. It penetrates the visible and touches us in infinite ways. The soundscapes that surround us are living manifestations of the spaces we inhabit, echoes of a world that speaks, that suffers, that adapts.

Antarctica 2023

Language has been our oldest museum, a place where sound finds refuge in symbols, in the written word. Words are not just letters on a page; they are resonances, codes of the living, voices of this world. Language, in its essence, is an echo of what we were and what we will become. But even here, sound has fallen behind, and though onomatopoeia attempts to capture the whistling wind or the crashing thunder, they are only pale imitations of the world’s conversations.

What if we could transcribe the conversation between a river and the rocks? If words could carry rhythm and cadence like sound does in nature, we might recover some of that lost connection between human and non-human languages. Writing would not merely represent the images our eyes capture but evoke the non-human conversations that resonate around us. Instead of linear codes, writing would transform, becoming living texts that narrate the rhythm of waves, wind, and the message of a mountain.

Some poetic movements have already approached this idea. In visual and experimental poetry, words play with form, striving to break the limits of the page. But what I propose goes a step further: a language that imitates the flow of sound itself, that can be read not only with the eyes but in the rhythm of its patterns. It would be a language for a world where sound and all those ignored voices regain their place.

To hear is to be touched from afar, says Pascal Quignard, and as I think of it, I can’t help but imagine how infinite human and non-human voices travel, cross the air, slide through water, and reverberate in the ice. Unlike light, which strikes and reflects, sound penetrates us, touches us. In this invisible act, in this intangible vibration, there is a subtle and powerful contact reminding us that we are connected to the world, that silence is just a veil, a pause among the incessant murmur of reality. Each time we listen, it is as if the Earth touched us.

In a world that seems to have forgotten how to listen, perhaps it’s time to recover that capacity, to create texts that are, at the same time, images and sounds, that speak and sing, that see and hear and touch the world.