We live in a silent century. Though no less powerful than their pre-millennial ancestors, our post-millennial innovations are mostly intangible; even when they do occupy physical space, they but wobble neighboring air particles and scarcely make a sound.

Compiling the "Sounds of the 21st Century" is a steep challenge, therefore, but one that legendary beatboxer Beardyman didn't shy from.

"There's an absence of sound rather than a defining sound," he tells Wired.co.uk. Pay attention to the objects around you—the ones that are truly 21st century make next to no noise when we interact with them. The clatter of keyboards? 20th century. The din of car engines? 20th century. The cacophony of the city? Choose whichever century BC you like.

To create a track that begins to "encapsulate the mood of living in the future," as Beardyman puts it, you have to amplify the silent touches we make to interact with modern society. First and foremost, the tapping of fingers on smartphones. "That's all everyone does these days. That's [partly] the point of the video," he says.

In the song, Beardyman meshes beatboxing, phone-tapping, key-bashing, and other sounds in a glitchy track, which will be performed live on September 2 at the O2 Campus Party Europe opening party.

Beardyman is frank about the challenge of capturing our auditory experience of a digital world when most of its sounds are either skeuomorphs (the clack of a digital camera, for example) or hidden from us entirely.

"I could have done the beeping of a server room, but you wouldn't recognize that sound anyway," he argues. You might understand the reference, but there's a only small minority of us who experience the lonely beeping of a server stack in real life.

The 21st century is Cageian, he says, referencing John Cage's famous four minutes of silence piece 4'33". He points to the human genome project and Kickstarter as true achievements of the 21st century and asks, "what noise do they make?"

The music video was made with David Hopkinson (aka Mr_Hopkinson) and includes flashbacks to a 1950s imagination of what "futuristic" meant. The one thing people never imagined, he said, was the Internet and the Web. Hoverboards, jetpacks, living on the Moon—we haven't figured those things out. "But we have figured out a way of broadcasting people's thoughts anywhere for anyone to hear," he says.

Even the tangible advances that are starting to define the century (Tesla's electric cars, for example) signify a move away from noise and toward silence.

"I was in Herbie Hancock's Tesla S the other day," he says, noting how quiet it was. "Now I can die in peace," he adds, laughing.

"We have the potential to live in a much quieter world," says Beardyman, arguing that if and when we get rid of the noisy technology of the past, we'll live in "crazy silent cities."