A Quiet Passion | Sierra Club

A Quiet Passion

The film takes viewers into Japanese tea houses, cacophonous subway stations, soundless audio chambers, and federally protected landscapes to explore the effects of silence on the body, mind, and psyche. To illustrate how much louder the world has become since Karstens’s time, the film documents the constant bombardment of chatter wrought by our increasingly technology-dependent lifestyles. The result is a seemingly inescapable envelopment into noise—a form of pollution that the World Health Organization describes as an environmental burden second only to air pollution. Along the journey, Shen and Vedder meet with sonic theorists, National Park Service soundscape technicians, environmentalists, shamans, scientists, and even a college student honoring a vow of silence while walking across the United States. The film’s many examples, including the pioneering work of John Cag...

Full article: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/quiet-passion