Earthquakes are not silent. I'm not sure where you experienced yours but earthquakes are deafeningly loud. Movie-style earthquake sounds don't even do it justice.
I was in an apartment building in Santiago, Chile—in fact, pretty much all of the earthquakes I experienced were in Santiago. Never heard any (out of the normal) sounds. Is that because the buildings were built to handle earthquakes?
I was in a heavily affected part of LA during the Northridge quakes. It did 50b in damage, killed people, injured thousands. The most significant noise I remember was the cacophony of car alarms and people screaming.
Our house didn't collapse. If it had, i'd probably remember that noise.
Memory is faulty, so who knows. Maybe it was loud, but that's not what I remember, so I can understand why the descriptions vary so broadly.
No good footage of the Northridge event is really very available, but there is plenty of detailed (and unfortunately graphic) footage of the 2015 Nepal event, the 'sounds of chaos' far and wide out-match the sound of the low rumbling quake -- but that could be a deception of the microphones; I would imagine most of them lack the range to properly capture the low roar of an earthquake.
I heard a very small one somewhere that really isn't meant to get them, through a TV show in earbuds. Perhaps the volume has something to do with what's happening beneath the surface vs magnitude? In our case, as far as I know, the epicentre was a ~5h drive away (and out at sea), but it sounded about the same as loud subs at a concert to me.
I was in an earthquake in the balkans last year. Didnt hear a thing. Everything vibrated and some stuff fell down though. But it was still quite far from the epicenter (perhaps that is where you hear it).