Why does silence sound different here than at home?
The short answer
Thick earthen walls absorb high frequencies while allowing low frequencies to pass through. Courtyard architecture creates acoustic wells. The absence of constant mechanical background noise—traffic, HVAC, appliances—reveals a different sonic baseline.
At 3am in the medina, you lie awake and hear everything. A dog three streets away. Water moving in a pipe somewhere below. The creak of old cedarwood adjusting to the temperature drop. A television murmuring through a shared wall. A rooster that doesn't know what time it is.
This is silence here. It's not the silence you know.
What you call silence at home is actually the hum of insulation, sealed windows, HVAC systems, and sound-absorbing materials doing their job. You've been living inside acoustic engineering so long you forgot it was there. Here, the building envelope is porous. Tadelakt, zellige, concrete, and plaster reflect sound. Carpets are decorative, not acoustic. Windows are single-pane or absent entirely. When the human noise stops, you hear the building itself.
The desert amplifies this. Marrakech has almost no ambient noise floor — no highway drone, no aircraft corridor overhead, no constant electrical hum from dense infrastructure. When the motorcycles stop and the shops close, what remains is not silence but its opposite: the sound of everything that was always there, finally audible.