A Writer's Ambient World

In seasonable weather the windows are open when I write. Background sounds of the outdoors: traffic in the distance, birds calling for mates, children playing far across the neighborhood, a train horn, wind in the trees... these sounds allow me to focus on the task at hand.

Yet in winter, when the windows are closed and the house inside is filled with silence, I turn to the internet and YouTube channels for ambient nature sounds—as well as various soundscapes and futuristic musical compositions—to dispel the crushing sound of silence, like light chases away darkness.

I’ve found that utter silence is a killer of creativity, and I’ve always had problems trying to write in a silent room. The silence becomes so loud I cannot focus. It’s just the opposite of too much noise, as in the form of very loud machines or incessant talking. It’s very hard to be in your own mind when others around you are talking.

I know of people who say they cannot fall asleep at night unless the TV is on in the background, or voices are filling their ears from talk radio, a podcast, or the like. As when I’m writing, voices at night drive me mad with interference.

Years ago, when I needed to cure the problem of a silent room when writing, a wondrous instrument of the era, the electric typewriter, provided just the right background sound to assist my concentration.

Back when I started writing, the IBM Selectric element ball typewriter was my main instrument for composing poems, essays, stories, and novels. The hum of the motor was a perfect and continuous sound my brain needed to lull itself into deep creative pondering. Each of the Selectric machines I owned and used through the years: I, II and III, all had that wondrous motor hum and cycling pulsation that powered my writing. It was as if, through the air, I was plugged into the machine—or it was plugged into me—and we operated on the same frequency. It was like a perfect marriage. The fingers caressed the keyboard and poetry was born.

Then the IBM technology was changed. As the old Selectrics died for one of a number of reasons: a bad motor, a broken drive cable, gummed up works within that labyrinth of mechanical parts that could no longer dance in perfect unison, I was forced to switch to the newer IBM Personal Wheelwriter units. But these new electric typewriters no longer hummed! The Wheelwriter’s silent efficiency gave me an new set of problems... how was I to keep the silence of my winter writing room from blocking my imagination, preventing the free flow of words that were contained behind the dam of my own skullcap?

I tried a wind-up kitchen timer. The ticking, ticking, ticking worked for a while but soon lost its efficacy. That was when I discovered the simplicity of a box fan placed on medium speed and faced away from me on the floor so I was not sitting in a cold draft. If I grew tired of the fan I might play classical music on the one or two rare radio stations that played something other than grating rock or agitating talk radio (those incessant voices again!).

Then I made another discovery in my endless quest to create a sound ambience that allowed me to work with razor focus. A catalogue arrived in the postal mail containing an advertisement for cassette tapes of ambient nature sounds: waves on a beach, a babbling brook in the deep woods, birds in an “ultimate aviary.”

The discovery of these nature-sound tapes turned out to rank right up there with some of the best creative works I’d ever learned about. I was so pleased that someone else thought like I did and knew that a silent room needed natural sounds in order to become a human space, not just a container space.

So those tapes, when played on my bulky stereo system, created the atmosphere I needed to both work and to relax. When not writing I would lie on the couch with a bright lamp shining on my face while my eyes were closed—to simulate the summer sun—and I would imagine I was on a tropical beach while listening to ambient ocean waves breaking in a long line in the sun. This routine—ambient music or ambient nature sounds—boosted my mood and also fueled my writing during those long, dark winter days.

Very soon, advancing technology rendered the cassette tape a dinosaur and new CD technology allowed me to loop the recording so I could write (or nap) for hours straight and not have to suffer the interruption of the tape reaching the end and my having to flip the cassette.

Then arrived the internet, YouTube, and the retirement of my old bulky stereo system. The CDs first found their way to becoming drink coasters before landing in the recycling bin at the local transfer station.

Today, when I prepare to write each morning in the silence of an empty room, on my equally silent computer, I first queue up YouTube in my URL browser, and then choose from among the plethora of ambient music and ambient nature sound options available at no additional cost.

Some of these play for three hours, others for eight or ten or even twelve hours. Depending on my mood, and what I’m writing, I choose what I think will best align with my work for that day.

If I am writing about travel I play ambient All Aboard It Is Sleepy Time by Bababouy, the clack of the train wheels carries me through cities and country. When listening to Airplane Cabin White Noise by DNA of New York, the continent slides by below my feet and I feel I’m off to a faraway land, without having to live from a suitcase or deal with crowds, car rentals, and germs.

When I’m writing science fiction I’m aboard an ambient spaceship exploring the vast empties of the universe while 8 Hours of Dark Ambient by Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse oozes from the computer speakers. Or I queue Cyber Punk Future City by Fox Mooder’s Ambient Worlds, or soundscapes by MRM Team, or Specific Gravity by Mathias Grassow.

When writing a ghost story? I stream Haunted House Ambient/Creepy Haunted House by Soul Candle.

The list of ambient music and sound choices seems endless. Some of it is ethereal, others give a sense of drifting among clouds, some are more grounded to the earth. Yet all of it plays in a repeating yet changing pattern in near perfect balance with my thoughts.

During those closed-up, locked-in, coffin-like silent winter months when the incessant nonsense chatter of TV shows and talk radio agitate more than they inform or relax—and I cannot open the house windows to let the sounds of the outside world in—I now have the delectable gift of ambient soundscapes available via live-stream any time of day or night.

Yet, I do miss the old typewriter hum. My four IBM Selectrics long ago went to the great metal recycling plant in the sky.

But the laws of mutability—I learned back in college—do indeed demand that life change constantly. And part of that change is the evolution of technology around us, and adapting to that change.

Today, thanks to the internet, wifi, and live-stream, all the ambient songs and sounds are easily searched and found, and whatever my mood, I can feed the muse with beautiful ambient soundscapes to enhance my daytime creativity and my nighttime relaxation.

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