The growing airplay led Tom Wilson, the song's producer, to remix the track, overdubbing electric instruments and drums.

1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, leading the duo to reunite and hastily record their second album, which Columbia titled Sounds of Silence in an attempt to capitalize on the song's success.

"The Sound of Silence" was a top-ten hit in multiple countries worldwide, among them Australia, Austria, West Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.

Having performed together previously under the name Tom and Jerry in the late 1950s, their partnership had dissolved by the time they began attending college.

They billed themselves "Kane & Garr", after old recording pseudonyms, and signed up for Gerde's Folk City, a Greenwich Village club that hosted Monday night performances.

[3] In September 1963, the duo's performances caught the attention of Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson, a young African-American jazz musician who was also helping to guide Bob Dylan's transition from folk to rock.

[4][3][5] Simon convinced Wilson to let him and his partner have a studio audition; their performance of "The Sound of Silence" got the duo signed to Columbia.

[7] Simon wrote "The Sound of Silence" when he was 21 years old,[8][9] later explaining that the song was written in his bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate.

Dave Van Ronk, a folk singer, was at the performances, and noted that several in the audience regarded their music as a joke.

"[15] Wednesday Morning, 3 AM sold only 3,000 copies upon its October release, and its dismal sales led Simon to move to London.

[19] Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. had been a commercial failure before producer Tom Wilson was alerted that radio stations had begun to play "The Sound of Silence" in spring 1965.

A late-night disc jockey at WBZ in Boston began to spin "The Sound of Silence", where it found a college student audience.

[20] Those at Harvard and Tufts University responded well, and the song made its way down the east coast pretty much "overnight", "all the way to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where it caught the students coming down for spring break.

[21] An alternate version of the story states that Wilson attended Columbia's July 1965 convention in Miami, where the head of the local sales branch raved about the song's airplay.

[22] Folk rock was beginning to make waves on pop radio, with songs such as the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" charting high.

[24] As stated by Geoffrey Himes, "If Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson hadn't taken the initiative, without the singers' knowledge, to dub a rock rhythm section over their folk rendition, the song never would have become a cultural touchstone—a generation's shorthand for alienation.

[23] Engineer Roy Halee employed a heavy echo on the remix, which was a common trait of the Byrds' hits.

[citation needed] In the fall of 1965, Simon was in Denmark, performing at small clubs, and picked up a copy of Billboard, as he had routinely done for several years.

"[24] Garfunkel was far less concerned about the remix, feeling conditioned to the process of trying to create a hit single: "It's interesting, I suppose it might do something, It might sell," he told Wilson.

This structure is supported by a melodic contour, where the first and second lines are paired with the arpeggio A-C-E-D and a repeat a step lower, respectively.

[25] The first stanza presents the singer as taking some relative solace in the peacefulness he associates with "darkness" which is submerged "within" the ambiguous sound of silence.

In the third stanza, a "naked light" emerges as a vision of 10,000 people all caught within their own solitude and alienation without any one of them daring to "disturb" the recurring sound of silence.

The false neon god is only challenged when a "sign flashed out its warning" that only the words of the indigent written on "subway walls and tenement halls" could still "whisper" their truth against the recurring and ambiguous form of "the sound of silence".

[31] Throughout the month of January 1966 "The Sound of Silence" had a one-on-one battle with the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" for the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

He later described his experiences learning the song went to number one, a story he repeated in numerous interviews:[33] I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house.

I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer [on the radio] said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel."

[74] Additionally, on April 1, Simon sent Draiman an email praising Disturbed's performance of the rendition on American talk show Conan.

This was an unusual decision, as the song had charted more than a year earlier, and recycling established music for film was not commonly done at the time.