...of audible beauty

I think Thomas Mann sounded that "faint, clear, metallic tone" to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

(Yes, I realise you don't know what I'm talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise - the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music - we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]