Silence is Golden.

In my normal day to day job I work shifts. This means that I am no slave to the alarm clock and that I am quite often at home when the rest of the family are at work; bliss. Some people like to have the TV chattering to itself in the background for 'company' or the radio on listening to a talk show with people moaning or the latest pop tripe. Personally, I prefer the silence.

I put this love of silence down to the fact that I'm a tortured artistic genius and I find background noise tends to disturb my train of thought. How people can study or work listening to death metal raging in their ears is beyond me yet many people seem to manage it. If I'm doing the housework or ironing then no problem, I'll put some music on but when I'm trying to be creative, noise is to be avoided, especially telephone sales people.

It begs the question as to whether Michelangelo would have had music on in the background while he was painting the Sistine Chapel. They didn't have radios in those days of course but he might have had a tame lute player running thought the current hits and golden oldies to while away the time. I don't think it would have improved his concentration. Did Damien Hirst chop up his famous cow to the strains of The Archers or Women's Hour, I expect we will never know for sure; unless we ask him. It seems unlikely that Stephen Hawking would have developed his theories of gravitational singularity while listening to the Terry Wogan Breakfast Show. Lucky old Albert Einstein didn't have any of these distractions back in the 1920s. 

My own particular creative endeavours demand silence so that I can pace up and down lost in my train of thought while muttering to myself and looking 'Byronesque'. Alternatively, I'll be hunched over my guitar trying to magic up an original chord sequence and melody line out of thin air.  The incursion of any other music into this delicate process is like someone trampling all over the wet concrete you have just laid. Maybe others like to work with background noise but for me silence is golden.