I did a pretty stupid thing back in the early 1990s. The first portable DAT recorder had just been released, the Aiwa HD-S1, a nice little unit, and I took one with me around the world, trying to record silence. Or at least, places that were as silent as possible. In the tumbled houses of Pompeii, the temple platforms of Olympia, down wadis in Jordan and up mountains in India, I set up my little twin-pair stereo microphone and dozed or read a book while recording half an hour of as little as possible.
My initial idea, so far as I can remember, was to see if there was silence, real silence, anywhere. I can’t entirely remember my initial motivation, but I think I had been impressed by the low noise floor available from digital recording and I had some notion of later recreating these quiet places at home by playing the recordings through a fine hi-fi on my return. This does work, to a certain extent, and most of the recordings remain in my music library, though I can’t say I’d be putting any of them into my personal Hottest 100 most-played.
