Why does silence sound different here than at home?
The short answer
Thick earthen walls absorb high frequencies. Courtyard architecture creates acoustic wells. The absence of constant mechanical background noise reveals sounds that were always there.
What you call silence at home is the hum of insulation, sealed windows, HVAC systems, and sound-absorbing materials. Here, the building envelope is porous. Tadelakt, zellige, concrete, and plaster reflect sound. Windows are single-pane or absent. When the human noise stops, you hear the building itself.
Marrakech has almost no ambient noise floor — no highway drone, no aircraft corridor overhead, no constant electrical hum. When the motorcycles stop and the shops close, what remains is the sound of everything that was always there.