The Sound of Silence The Sound of Silence 
Guitar
tablature
This early version is featured on the Paul Simon Songbook. Recorded in England in May 1965 by Paul Simon, in the wake of the Wednesday Morning 3AM album. It starts on a slower tempo, and then speeds up in the 2nd verse.
Capo 2 - or tune down half a tone, capo 3.
Amsus2 e-|-----0-----0-----0-----0--|-----0-----0-----0-----0--| B-|--------0-----------0-----|--------0-----------0-----| G-|--2-----------2-----------|--2-----------2-----------| D-|--------------------------|--------------------------| A-|--------------------------|--------------------------| E-|--------------------------|--------------------------| Hello Darkness my old ...
Guitar
tablature
Studio version from "Wednesday Morning 3AM", 1964
This acoustic version can be found on the Wednesday Morning 3AM album.
The part which is transcribed here can also be heard on the electrically-dubbed version featured on the Sounds of Silence album, next to the electric guitar part.
The first chords ( Amsus2 and G5 ) contain no third note, so the tone of the song becomes apparent starting from the 5th bar only, when the tension is released, on the word "again".
Capo 6th fret
Musical
score
Low-part harmony sung by Simon
The melody line shown here is the low-part harmony sung by Paul Simon on Sounds of Silence. It adds to the harmonic texture of the song since it keeps with the root note in the first chords ( Am G Am C ) and starting from the middle of the verse, it departs from it to play the fifth or the third notes of the chords ( F/C C F C/E ... C G/B Am )Transpone 3 tones higher to match with the original recording.
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence. ...
Video Clip:
Songs Of America
( Entire song : ISDN
VivoActive video )
Video Clip: TV
Show, 1965
( Entire song : VivoActive video : 28Kbps
/ ISDN
)
.jpg)
Written Interview
in :
Playboy Magazine
Simon : The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run - I like that sound, it's very soothing to me - and I'd play. In the dark. "Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again".Playboy : Is that where The Sounds Of Silence came from ?
Paul Simon : Well, that's the first line. Then it drifts off into some other things. I've always believed that you need a truthful first line to kick you off into a song. You have to say something emotionally true before you can let your imagination wander.
Paul Simon's Interview in Playboy
by Tony Schwartz, ©1984 Playboy
Concert Introduction "Live in Haarlem", The
Netherlands, 1966
( RealAudio 1.0
)
Art Garfunkel : This is a song about the inability of people to communicate with each other, and not particularly internationally, but especially emotionally. So what you see around you is people unable to love each other. This is called The Sounds Of Silence.
Live performance: "Live
in Haarlem", The Netherlands, 1966
( First verse : RA
3.0 ISDN Mono )
TV Documentary:
Born At The
Right Time - TV Documentary
Eddie Simon : I remember the night that I heard Sounds Of Silence for the first time, I'll never forget it. He called me and he said listen to this and he starts to sing it, and it was a totally different style, and it was obviously the start of his folk stuff - "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls"Paul Simon : I doubt that I would have written a song like The Sound of Silence had Bob Dylan not broken that ground and made it possible to write a song about subject matter that was not teenage life, teenage love, teenage world. After it was out about a year, and already like considered dead, a radio station in Gainsville, Florida began to get requests for the song The Sound Of Silence.
Art Garfunkel : So that filters its way back to the home office in New York and during that summer of 65 they overdub electrified intruments on that record. Musicians were brought in and we know nothing of it.
Born At the Right Time - TV Documentary
Suzan Lacey, 1993
Biography :
Simon and
Garfunkel - The Definitive Biography, 1996
Then, on Friday 22, November President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. In a horrifying, panic-filled few moment, he slumped down in the back of his car, from which he had been waving to thousands of overjoyed people. All over the world, viewers witnessed his death on television. America went a little crazy with grief and shock. In small towns all over the country, there were outbreaks of angry protest. Those cries were taken up on the college campuses. Nothing would ever be the same again. With the death of Kennedy, a dream had died.
It was in the context of this turbulence, that Paul wrote his contribution to the sixties - a song called 'The Sound of Silence". The song uses imaginery of light and darkness to show how ignorance and apathy destroy people's ability to communicate on even a simple level. The light which should symbolize truth and enlightenment is destructive, painful force with metaphors of stabbing, flashing - even worshipping the false Neon god. In such a violent context, the song was perfectly fitting. Paul had the theme and melody in November but it took three frustrating months of writing and re-writing before it was finished. He played it to Artie in its completed form on 19 February. Neither of them could know how drastically that song would alter their lives.Simon and Garfunkel - The Definitive Biography
by Victoria Kingston, © 1996
Live performance: Queens
College, London, 1964, rehearsal
( Whole song : RA
3.0 ISDN Mono )
Paul Simon: Well, we are now into the area of obviously contemporary music. It's called the "Sounds of Silence".
Biography :
Simon and
Garfunkel - A Biography in Words & Pictures, 1977
Also on Wednesday Morning is a song that Garfunkel describes in the liner notes as a "major work": "The Sounds of Silence." Written in February, 1964, before "Wednesday Morning, 3AM," it is a definte cut above the songs of the previous year ("Brother", "Sparrow", "Bleecker street") both melodically and lyrically. Sung plaintively, with Garfunkel's voice particulary prominent, it casts Simon in the role that marks some of his otherwise very affecting work. The sound of "Sounds" is enormously pleasing, and the language is chosen with care, but the tone is too didactic, most gnawingly when the singer becomes the ignored sage ("but my words like silent raindrops fell") after his offer to lead ("take my arms ..."). Simon's assumed position of wisdom is also patronizing ("Fools said I you do not know/ Silence like a cancer grows"). It would take quite some time for these flaws to disappear from his work. Still, "The Sounds of Silence" is a song by a promising writer.Simon and Garfunkel - A Biography in Words & Pictures
by Mitchell S. Cohen, © 1977
TV Documentary :
Paul Simon
Solo TV Documentary
Paul Simon : At a corner like that - there was a corner just like this, when Sounds of Silence was a number-one record , and I just come back from England, and Art was still living at home, he was still at College, we're gonna pass his house in a minute, and we were sitting in my car - a Sunbeam Alpine - we were sitting in the car, smoking, and Sounds of Silence came on and they said : "#1 record, The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel", we were just sitting there at night, we hadn't anything to do, and Artie turned to me and he said : "those guys must be having so much fun !".Paul Simon Solo
TV Documentary, 1987
Written Interview
in :
Playboy Magazine
Songtalk: In your early songs with Simon, you often sang melody and he would sing a lower harmony. How did you develop that idea?Art Garfunkel: The song seems to ask for the harmony. You do two things: You try not to repeat yourself shake up the formula and observe what the song and the lyric and the arrangement seems to call for. We do that, for example, on "Sounds of Silence." I sing the melody. We pitched the song fairly high because I'm a tenor. That left Paul below me, looking for a harmony part. I don't know how we originally come up with these things...
Songtalk: Do you recall constructing that harmony part with him? Would you do it together?
Art Garfunkel: We were in my kitchen in my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, uptown in Manhattan, when I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. And that was the sixth song he had written, "Sound of Silence." And he showed it to me in my kitchen and I went crazy for how cool it was. Then, I don't remember us saying, "Who'll do melody?" It could be he said, "I have you in mind for melody," I don't know... which necessitated it being fairly high. No, I can't remember us working it out.
SongTalk Interview : Art Garfunkel
by Paul Zollo, ©1991 SongTalk
Biography :
Bookends
- The Simon and Garfunkel Story, 1982
... As a phrase, it has now entered the popular conscience, and as a metaphor for the insularity of big city living, it is still a striking image. From the consoling welcome "Hello darkness, my old friend", the song's protagonist is clearly defined as the poet, an outsider. As those seamless harmonies, weave around the tightly disciplined structure of Simon's poetry, there is a chill realisation of the potent new talent making itself heard. It still stands as a classic hymn of alienation, of a voice which has to exist in a city but finds no comfort there. The poet sees the crowd prostrating themselves before "the neon God they made ", realising that their downfall is of their own making.
The inability to communicate is the theme of the song, although it touches other areas, of Simon as a poet, aware he stands outside the mainstream ("People writing song that voices never share." ). The core of the song, though, is how people become immunised against each other, how they are unable to convey their feelings. [ ... ]
It is also, ironically, one of their most requested songs in concert - thousands of people paying to hear a song about loneliness and the inability to communicate with each other !Bookends - The Simon and Garfunkel Story
by Patrick Humphries, © 1982
Live performance:
"Monterey Pop Festival", 1967
( Verse 1 and 2 : RA
2.0 28.8 )
Biography :
The Boy
in the Bubble , 1988
With regional interest in the song growing, CBS approached Tom Wilson - Simon and Garfunkel's producer and also the man who had helped steer Dylan towards electricity on his two seminal albums - with a view to giving the song a more folk- rock sound to cash in on the summer's craze. Wilson used the same band who had worked with Dylan, and overdubbed bass, drums and electric guitar onto Simon and Garfunkel's original acoustic track to beef it up.Needless to say, neither of the original artists were even consulted. Art Garfunkel had virtually given up music, singing only occasionally at Gerde's Folk City in New York, but concentrating on obtaining his master's degree from Columbia University, while Paul Simon was drifting around the folk clubs in Europe. Simon was actually in Denmark in September 1965, when he chanced upon a copy of the trade paper 'Billboard' and to his amazement noticed a song called 'The Sounds of Silence' in the lower reaches of the Hot 100. Nearly twenty years later, Simon recalled that as he went on stage to play a Danish folk club gig, with that copy of 'Billboard' at hand, he realized that life would never be the same again for him. Returning to Cable Street flat, Simon immediately contacted Garfunkel to try and map out their future.
A few days later Al Stewart ('Year of the Cat', M.C.) was there when: 'Tom Wilson mailed an electric copy of 'Sounds of Silence' to Paul, who was *horrified* when he first heard it. In fact, if you listen to that original version, you can hear the rhythm section slow down at one point so that Paul and Artie's voices can catch up... The single went in at something like 86 then up into the 30s on the second week, and Columbia rang Paul to say, "It's going to be Number 1".
The Boy in the Bubble
by Patrick Humphries, © 1988
Biography :
Simon and
Garfunkel - A Musical Biography, 1984
'The Sound Of Silence' wasn't an accident. Garfunkel's notes suggest that they had been looking for a blockbuster song to sum up their direction: 'The Sound Of Silence' is a major work. We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this was more than either of us expected.''The Sound Of Silence' was definitely a song for its time. Simon accurately tapped a general feeling of existential alienation and isolation that was part of what Garfunkel referred to as the 'dig yourself' syndrome in the '60s. The image of silence as a cancer, growing and wiping out the possibility of communication, is powerful, as is the famous image of the neon sign, representing the empty commercialism pervading life, being worshipped as a god. Garfunkel's voice cracks in a somewhat unconvincing series of sobs at the beginning of each line in the climactic verse. The song had a strong appeal for lonely, introverted teenagers who elevated their inability to ask their girl friends for a date to the level of global crisis. The power of the song was that it helped them realize they were right.
Garfunkel quite correctly plays down the title track, the last of the Simon originals on this album to be written:"Wednesday Morning, Three A.M.', written in April 1964, is a change of pace. The heightened intensity of 'The Sound Of Silence' has given way here to a gentle mood, and the melody is once again a soft, smooth vehicle. It is a painting that sets a scene, sketches some details and quietly concludes.'
It is also a precious story song about another one of the losers that populate Simon's imagination. The sweet melody and perfect harmony singing seem an inappropriate musical setting for a tale of armed robbery and imminent escape, and sure enough the protagonist's plight is ultimately bathetic, making it virtually impossible for the listener to find him a sympathetic character. The song shows a penchant for overwritten effects and overdeveloped imagery that characterize the other Simon songs of this time. 'The Sound Of Silence' was, however, pointing in the right direction , and gave an indication of what Simon would be writing in the near future.
[ ... ]
In a very real sense. Simon and Garfunkel didn't exist as a partnership when one of the songs on their first album drew an extraordinary grass roots response in America. 'The Sound of Silence' became one of those rare hits generated purely by audience requests. 'There were stations in Florida,' said Garfunkel, 'around Cocoa Beach, that started getting requests from kids for 'The Sound of Silence' and Florida was starting to call New York. And that's when they overdubbed, and electric instruments went on 'The Sound of Silence'.'
Tom Wilson had produced Dylan's electric album and went ahead to overdub a similar, though more subdued style on 'The Sound Of Silence', adding bass, electric twelve-string guitar and drums. The resultant effect did add something to the original - it sounded a bit like the Byrds, another C.B.S. group who had a number one hit in America at the time with a folk-rock version of Bob Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man'.
Wilson made the decision to overdub electric instruments on to 'The Sound Of Silence' on his own, and thus must get at least part of the credit for creating the Simon and Garfunkel phenomenon. 'He never called to ask,' Garfunkel pointed out. 'You could do pretty much what you wanted with Paul and Artie in those days.'
Garfunkel was not unhappy about the way Wilson doctored the song. 'I thought it was fair,' he said. 'And the record came out slowly, just as I had expected. But by November it was clear it would be a big hit. When Paul came home in December it was number one on all the charts.'
Simon had learned about the song's success while on tour in Denmark. He must have had mixed feelings - obviously he was happy that he'd made it back home but he realized, perhaps, that it could mean the end of the carefree folksinger lifestyle he was enjoying in England. He returned to the States, where Simon and Garfunkel were suddenly a big attraction, and played a number of concerts, but Simon had thinly disguised contempt for the pop world and didn't really want to be part of it.
[ ... ]
This is an intriguing period in Simon's songwriting because of the number of opportunities the listener has to compare different versions of the same song.
Simon's meticulousness as a composer and his constant interest in revising existing material would later manifest itself in long delays between albums, but at this point we can see this fascinating process at work.
After the release of Sounds Of Silence there were three separate versions available of the title track. The first version was the 'major statement' Garfunkel referred to on the Wednesday Morning album, the culmination of the duo's early attempts to codify their image. Simon's solo version of 'Sound' is his personal vision, with all the introspective bitterness and sense of failure up front in his vocal delivery, which contrasts markedly with the arranged, professional interpretation he clings to in the harmony vocal version. You can hear Simon's foot stamping the floor almost by way of punctuation on his solo version in a very Dylanesque gesture. When Wilson adapted the song to rock, Simon and Garfunkel had no direct decision-making input but the fact that their version was so perfectly laid out to accomodate the treatment it got is to their credit.
Simon and Garfunkel - A Musical Biography
by John Swenson, © 1984
Written Interview
in :
Rolling Stone
Jon Landau : The early albums used to be explicitly about alienation - Artie used to say so in all the interviews - that was really a late Fifties, early Sixties thing ...Paul Simon : The Sound of Silence was written about a year before it was recorded on Wednesday Morning 3AM. So that puts The Sound of Silence in '62, '63, I guess - two years before it came out as a single. So I've written about a feeling I had then. And it took me a couple of months then to write it. So, a lot of these songs are written in the past, and they come out as if this is what we're up to. Then, a kid comes back from England with a big record, and everybody says, "You seem to write a lot about alienation." "Right," I said. "Right, I do." "Alienation seems to be your big theme." "That's my theme," I said. And I proceeded to write more about alienation. Actually, Dylan was writing protest, and whatever it was, everybody had a tag. They put a tag on the alienation. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I wrote alienation songs. Of course, we all had a feeling of alienation ...
The Rolling Stone Interviews : Paul Simon
by Jon Landau, ©1971 Rolling Stone Magazine
Live
performance :
"Live in New York", 1966
Concert Introduction "Live in New York", 1966
RealAudio 1.0
Art Garfunkel : We have an album, the first one we made for Columbia, it's called Wednesday Morning 3AM, and it features on the cover Paul and myself, standing in the Shadows of Love, standing in the subway in New York City, next to an iron post. If you're familiar with the cover, you know that we both wear business suits, standing as the train is about to come in. It happens that on the day that we took the pictures, we took about 400 shots, not of that post but of the two of us both leaning against the subway wall which is wide off camera range as you see on the final shot, and we took all these poses and we spent the entire afternoon leaning against this wall until we were pleased with the shot that we thought we were gonna use, and packed up our and cameras and guitars and began to head out of the subway, when I took a brief parting glance at the subway wall in front of which we had taken all the pictures for the first time that day, and noticed that written rather illegibly in the baroque style of New York City subway wall writers was the old familiar suggestion. It was a beautiful illustration that went with it so, we had 400 choices for an album cover and all not acceptable. That was the beginning of the theme which has crept into several of the songs, that people who write on the subway walls - it's made an appearance in the Sounds of Silence - and it's become the theme of a song that went into our last album. The idea is that the people who do these things are in some sense writing a poem, and the sense is that what they're doing is expressing something that is very sincerely felt at the time, would it be anger or whatever, but the point is that there is a reason why people do or do not do that sort of thing, that song is called 'A Poem on the Underground Wall'.
Studio
recording :
"Wednesday Morning 3AM", 1964
The Sounds of Silence is a major work. We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this was more than either of us expected. Paul had the theme and the melody set in November, but three months of frustrating attempts were necessary before the song 'burst forth". On February 19, 1964, the song practically wrote itself.Its theme is man's inability to communicate with man. The author sees the extent of communication as it is on only its most superficial and "commercial" level (of which the "neon sign" is representative). There is no serious understanding because there is no serious communication - "people talking without speaking - hearing without listening". No one dares take the risk of reaching out ("take my arms that I might reach you") to disturb the sound of silence. The poet's attempts are equally futile (" . . . but my words like silent raindrops fell within the wells of silence"). The ending is an enigma. I find my own meaning in it, but like most good works, it is best interpreted by each person individually. The words tell us that when meaningful communication fails, the only sound is silence.
Wednesday Morning 3AM album notes
by Art Garfunkel, 1964
Live performance: "Across
America", Ellis Island, 1996
( First verse : RA
3.0 ISDN Mono )
Biography :
Simon and
Garfunkel , 1984
"The song begins quietly, with a single bar of unaccompanied guitar tracery oscillating between three notes; the singers' entry has Garfunkel with the melody and Simon providing the harmony.
The result is an ethereal texture, like a faintly glowing object in the sky with the wordly shadows darkening the earth below."Simon and Garfunkel
by Robert Matthew-Walker, ©1982
Studio
recording :
"Paul Simon Songbook", 1965
"Take my arms that I may reach you" across the silence that divides the hearts, the neon that burns cold and stabs sight and "formulates at the end of a pin" all that lives in its light and shadow. A major work, it expresses the love of any poet, any individual in the face of an indifferent world and almost pleads "hear my words that I might teach you", teach you to love again.The Paul Simon Songbook - Album Notes
by Paul Simon and Judith Piepe, 1965
Biography :
Bookends
- The Simon and Garfunkel Story, 1982
The Paul Simon Songbook formed the foundation of Paul Simon's live appearances for many years. It contains the classic hymns of alienation (I Am A Rock, Sounds of Silence, A Most Peculiar Man) and the haunting love songs (Kathy's Song, Leaves That Are Green). It's a crucial album in any understanding of Simon and Garfunkel. It's simple and direct, a touching testament to a writer who has found his voice.
The innate simplicity of the production means that the songs have to stand on their own merits, and any deficiencies cannot be disguised by lavish production. Simon's singing is earnest and intense for, with- out Garfunkel's harmonising, the songs take on an urgency. Of the many available version of Sounds Of Silence, this 1965 version is, I believe, the best. Simon is still resting himself with the song, none of the complacency which is apparent in later versions is there (just listen to the way he attacks the penultimate verse " Fools, said I ...") What is apparent on this version is a young man, justifiably pleased with the song he has just written, intensely proud and determined that each lyrical nuance should come across. There's an endearing vulnerability in Simon's performance here.Bookends - The Simon and Garfunkel Story
by Patrick Humphries, ©1982
Biography :
Simon and
Garfunkel , 1984
In the light of later developments the next song The Sounds Of Silence is a most revealing performance. It begins slower than we expect, if we know the succeeding Simon and Garfunkel versions, and in general Simon is a little rougher with his song than he allowed it to be used later. Judith Piepe calls it 'a major work', the very phrase Art Garfunkel applies to it on his notes for the Wednesday, 3 a.m. album, and it must have created a vivid impact on listeners of twenty years ago. In many ways this performance senses the need for fuller treatment; Simon - or someone else - taps an insistent rhythm as the song grows in intensity; his voice becomes more urgent and compelling; the tempo is gradually increased and the guitar is heavily struck. It is as though the artist is about to burst the confines of his own resources, to tell the world of the certainty of his vision.
In the complete recorded legacy of Simon and Garfunkel this may not be the most profound version of the song, but on its own terms it provides an overwhelming experience.
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jmo@medialab.chalmers.se 
