My acoustical romance

There is something inherently romantic about falling snow. I’m not talking about the blizzards that descend on those northern places leaving foolish drivers blinded and drifts of heart attack inducing proportions behind. No, I’m talking about the kind of snow that falls at a rate that leaves 5 inches in as many hours.

Most people who subscribe to the idea that a sufficient dusting of snow – usually defined as enough to completely cover the brittle, winter desiccated grass of your neighbor’s yard – probably believe that it is snow’s ability to visually remove imperfections (that pile of leaves, the dog shit that someone didn’t bother to bag, the pothole that the city just won’t fill) that imbues snow with its transformative quality. The white blanket covers all rendering the world clean and pure, at least until traffic comes along and you get a sense of what it is you’re really breathing every day. The people who believe that snow’s primary transformative quality is visual are wrong. It is aural.

It’s true without a doubt that snow changes the visual landscape. It takes the shadows of everyday life, the gray concrete, the brown telephone poles, and it turns them into reflective surfaces smoothing the edges and making the world, paradoxically, a little more visible. In the snow covered landscape the visual becomes high contrast.

But in the aural landscape exactly the opposite occurs. Falling snow seems to deaden sound. It fills up the space between you and everything else with something that is more akin to grey noise than silence. The rush of frozen water, thousands of unique particles of it, cuts you off from the rest of the world and the clamor of the daily soundscape. Falling snow creates an aural illusion of privacy and in the right situation can lead you to the grand place where you can forget and avoid the noise of others, where instead of the honking of horns and the sound of rushing traffic there is only the huff of your breath as it issues from your lips and the thump of your heart in your chest as it pumps blood around your body. To welcome the company of another in such an environment, then, becomes the ultimate act of intimacy: you are acknowledging that person’s existence. Since intimacy is the implied promise of romance the act of welcoming someone into your private soundscape naturally takes on the flushed-face, world falling away aspect that we are led to believe constitutes true romance.

The auditory illusion breaks, though, once the snow stops falling. Then you are left with nothing but a landscape devoid of shadows and filled with the sound of rushing water as nature tries to restore the balance.