Clear-headedness is a great way of describing it — and I totally agree wouldn’t be able to notice these moments without meditation. I guess what I was trying to convey is that I think about “inner silence” as a product of where your attention goes, and it’s “silent” when you are able to hold some of that attention inside your body irrespective of what’s going on around you.

I’m pretty interested in “attention” in general and not to get all scientific (lol) but in the book I just read, The Shallows, the author mentions attention restoration theory (ART) as an explanation for why we have generally improved cognition after even just a few moments in nature. His argument is basically that there are fewer distractions for the brain to process in these environments, which is interesting to your point that even the ocean has sound so I wonder what is inherently different about the stimulation from nature vs. the rest of the world.