The Noise of Time

There is a sound that accompanies every era, and it is never just music. It is the rustle of air vibrating around a generation, its way of existing in time, of occupying the acoustic space of the world. Every age believes it has found its own voice, and every age, inevitably, ends up hating it when it hears it again in memory.

Sound, before it is language, is identity. It allows a group to recognize itself without words. Adults perceive only the noise; the young, instead, read in it a secret code, an unwritten understanding. Then, as the years pass, everyone finds that noise unbearable—like the ticking of a clock that once marked the rhythm of their enthusiasm.

Across the decades, the relationship between generations and music has shifted like an ocean current. Generation X believed music was a flag; Y turned it into a personal soundtrack; Z transformed it into content; and the emerging Alpha generation is turning it into pure background, an ambient emanation. It is not decadence but metamorphosis: the transition from shared listening to diffuse diffusion, where a song is not owned but crossed—like the conditioned air of a shopping mall.

Yet, in this slipping of sound from ritual to routine, one thread remains: the desire to recognize oneself through something invisible. Perhaps the only sacred residue left in our digital age is precisely this—a piece of music that resonates within us, even for a few seconds, and once again deceives us into believing we belong to someone, or at least to a rhythm.

Sound as Belonging — Generation X

For those born in the second half of the twentieth century, music was not a product: it was a territory. One entered it as one enters a foreign city, with respect and curiosity, ready to get lost. Every record was a map, every B-side a secret detour.
Listening was a solemn, almost liturgical act. The door was closed, the lights were dimmed, and the needle of the turntable became a tiny priest officiating the rite of time.

Sound, then, still had the weight of material things. Songs had a precise duration, records had a smell, covers had a handwriting recognizable from afar. But above all, music was collective: it was not listened to alone, it was lived together. A concert, a shared Walkman, a poorly tuned radio were enough to create a community.

Generation X—the one raised between post-ideological disillusionment and the melancholy of promised futures—found in music its alphabet of resistance. Every riff was a proud “no,” every lyric a manifesto of fragility in a world pretending coherence.
And so, while the world learned to call “market” what had once been called “culture,” this generation learned that music was not meant to escape, but to remain.

Perhaps that is why, even today, those who belong to that season tend to approach new sounds with diffidence, like someone revisiting their childhood home transformed into a shopping center. It is not nostalgia; it is simply that sound—for them—was a way of saying: we are here. And now that this “we” has dissolved into pixels, what remains is a silence that sounds more like echo than absence.

Sound as Archive — Generation Y

With Generation Y, music ceased to be a banner and became a private collection. It was the season of the passage from vinyl to file, from gesture to click. The revolution was not in the sound but in the way it was preserved: no longer etched, but saved.
Music was no longer something one bought—it was something one downloaded. It was not stored on a shelf but in a folder with an ambiguous name: New Folder (2).

It was the age of digital pioneers, those who discovered the idea that the whole world could fit on a hard drive. Sound, from a promise of community, became a promise of access: participation no longer mattered, possession did. The pleasure of listening turned into that of accumulation. No longer ten records loved to exhaustion, but ten thousand tracks heard halfway through.

And yet, hidden within this frenzy of archiving was an anxiety of loss. The act of saving became a way to hold on to time—like photographing a sunset instead of watching it. Generation Y learned to fear the silence of disconnected headphones, because within that silence lurked the oldest question: what remains, when everything is available?

Thus, for them, music became an inner museum. Every playlist a showcase, every track an emotional fossil. It was the first generation not to fear the fragment, but to find comfort in it. The unity of the album was replaced by the mosaic of memory.
And as in every museum, one walks softly here too, afraid to touch something that might break: the illusion of still being connected to a world that makes sound—but no longer speaks.

Sound as Content — Generation Z

With Generation Z, sound loses its duration and becomes an event. No longer a track to follow, but a fragment to consume. It is the era of the scroll, of “ten seconds and gone,” of synthetic, immediate emotion.
Music no longer accompanies images: it chases them.

Every song is a filter, a fragment of atmosphere that must fit a gesture, a choreography, a story. Sound has become an extension of the face, a form of aesthetic expression as fleeting as it is defining. Lyrics no longer matter; what counts is the emotional temperature of a few seconds of rhythm.
One does not sing anymore: one performs pre-packaged emotions, as if every clip were a confession synchronized to the metronome of the algorithm.

Generation Z does not listen to remember, but to show that it listens. Music is a visual language: sound serves to define who you are for the duration of a video. And when the video ends, so does the sense of belonging.
Today’s viral track is tomorrow’s silence, erased by a new trend identical in everything except the date of release.

Yet it would be too easy to dismiss this generation as distracted. In truth, what they are doing is recomposing the musical experience as an instantaneous act: a gesture of presence, a flare of identity.
They have turned listening into an iconic language, a grammar of the body and the image. It is the first time that music does not describe the world but lets itself be described by it.

Perhaps, between a loop and a beat drop, Generation Z is saying something subtler: that art no longer needs to endure to be real. It only needs to happen.

Sound as Environment — Generation Alpha

Generation Alpha is born immersed in a permanent soundscape. They do not listen to music; they live within it. Sound is everywhere—in objects, in rooms, in algorithms—a continuous soundtrack that no one really chose but that everyone accepts as part of the air they breathe.
It is the first generation for whom silence is not absence, but anomaly.

Music has become an invisible infrastructure, like electric light or Wi-Fi. It flows in the background, modulates mood, accompanies attention. It does not ask to be heard; it simply exists. It is the final transformation of sound—from ritual to climate, from language to function.
And yet, within this apparent neutrality, there is something dizzying: the idea that music no longer serves to communicate but to regulate the perception of the world.

For the Alphas, every sonic environment is personalized, calibrated by an algorithm that learns their heartbeat and daily rhythms. The aesthetic experience has merged with biochemistry: playlisting is the new pharmacology of the soul.
It is no longer about listening to feel alive but about being accompanied to remain stable.

Thus, while their predecessors sought in sound a flag, an archive, or a scene, the Alphas find in it a form of quiet.
The noise of the world has dissolved into a digital murmur—and perhaps it is there, in that frictionless homogeneity, that the true unease lies: the sense that no sound truly belongs to us anymore, because all inhabit us before we can recognize them.

Silence as Revolution

Every age, after multiplying its sounds, eventually longs for silence. Not as emptiness, but as space to breathe. It is the revenge of pause against frenzy, of listening against production.
Silence is what remains when the noise of the world has consumed itself—an echo without origin, a question no one has time to ask.

Perhaps the next cultural revolution will not be made of new voices but of new absences.
After centuries believing that music served to say something, we may discover that it serves instead to learn how to be silent better.
Not the silence of indifference, but that of attention: silence as a form of pure listening, as availability to the world.

Modern humanity has delegated rhythm to devices, inspiration to algorithms, emotion to notifications. Yet somewhere in memory, between a deleted file and a forgotten sound, remains the archaic instinct to stop and listen without purpose.
It is in that gesture—small, untimely, almost scandalous—that a form of freedom might still be born.