In Pursuit of Silence Documentary - Kickstarter

IN PURSUIT OF SILENCE is a meditative film about our relationship with sound and the impact of noise that will be released globally.

The award-winning Los Angeles-based filmmakers are currently in the final stages of production, and have launched a Kickstarter campaign to finish the film. The funding will allow them to complete the last few production trips and move deep into the editing process towards a final cut of the film. This unique crowdfunding campaign includes a range of exclusive rewards for backers to engage with silence and sound, including 30 minutes in the quietest place on earth, dining at a silent meal (to be featured in the film!), a custom made “Silence Kit”, pre-orders for the completed film, limited edition prints, and more. All funds raised will help the film to serve a catalyst for a global movement towards a better sounding world. The campaign ends November 7, 2014. See a short video and more details about the project at http://kck.st/1vnGOxz.

The Problem with Noise:

Noise impairs our ability to hear the world around us. In 2008, Johns Hopkins University conducted a study and found that hearing impairment among Americans is reaching epidemic proportions with one in three suffering from some degree of hearing impairment. Each day millions of New York City subway commuters are exposed to a piercing 107 decibels of screeching and buzzing, which according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) can cause permanent hearing damage to the human ear if exposed to those levels for as little as three minutes and 45 seconds. Studies show that even prolonged exposure to sound in the lower decibel ranges, such as from an iPod, can cause hearing impairment.

Noise impairs our children’s ability to succeed. According to a 2007 study conducted by the University of London, “children exposed to chronic environmental noise have been found to have poorer auditory discrimination and speech perception as well as poorer memory requiring high processing demands. Finally, chronically exposed children tend to have poorer reading ability and school performance on national standardized tests.” Our noise problem has become so severe that the entire auditory cortex of many children may now be rewired for noise which leads some experts to suggest that the rise in incidences of autism among children is directly tied to our noise problem.

Noise is detrimental to our health. In a 2007 study by the World Health Organization, findings revealed that “noise pollution is causing more deaths from heart disease than was previously thought” and that the numbers could reach up to “the hundreds of thousands around the world.” As our technologies expand and as our dependency on them grows more extreme, the world will simply get noisier and more dangerous to our mental and physical health.

Noise can influence our behaviors. Implications for our physical and mental health aside, sound also shapes our experience of a time and place and can even manipulate our behaviors. Corporations worldwide commonly use sound as a subliminal means to manipulate consumers in order to hike up profits. Inspired by studies which show that faster, louder music increases chewing by almost a third, restaurants have developed computerized sound systems that are preset to raise the tempo and volume of music at hours of the day when corporate wants to turn tables. All of us have experienced the obnoxious booming music echoing throughout certain retail outlets. There’s a science behind that too. According to author George Prochnik, “the principle is derived from the effects of military music on the speed of marching soldiers. Not only does the process of falling into step with a drumbeat make the pace of the marcher subject to manipulation and lead to general arousal; recent research has demonstrated that when people are moving in synchrony to a beat, their behavior is more compliant to the collective will.”