A show about nothing

A few months ago, we put out an episode about what silence sounds like, and it caught the attention of Rob Rosenthal, who hosts a podcast called Sound School about the craft of audio storytelling. So he called up host Noam Hassenfeld to ask him a question he couldn't stop thinking about: How do you make something that sounds like nothing? Host: Rob Rosenthal, host of Sound School PodcastGuest: Noam Hassenfeld For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 1:35Speaker 02

  Joanna Salataroff. Fancy seeing you here.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Sally Helm, top of the morning to ya.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Top of the morning to ya. You and I are here, Joanna, for a specific reason, not just to chat with each other, which is the episode that we're airing today on the show. You and I both have a special, personal connection to one of the voices that our listeners are about to hear.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  It's true. So I'm so excited to share that our episode on silence, which was part of our Sound Barrier series that Noam hosted.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  And that you edited.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  And that I edited, was featured on Rob Rosenthal's podcast called Sound School, which really digs into the craft of audio storytelling. And today's episode, he dials way, way, way, way, way into the complexities of silence and storytelling with Noam.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  But also, you and I were both students of Rob's. And so it's just like, feels like a little full circle moment to have our work on his show.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  A little family reunion, if you will. Yeah, Rob is, I mean, I would go so far as to say he is maybe the central teacher in the world of podcasting. Like, not just you and I, but many, many producers have come through his classes at the Transom Story Workshop, previously at Salt in Maine. And he's just like a huge behind the scenes force in the world of podcasting. Like, many, many shows have been affected by his teaching and the way that he sees the craft. So I am so excited to hear him talk to Noam because this episode about silence, it really is an interesting audio storytelling puzzle. And yeah, I just think it's going to be amazing to hear Rob and Noam talk about how it was made.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  So yeah. Should we let people hear it, Joanna?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Okay. Shh.

• 3:34Speaker 00

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• 4:19Speaker 00

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• 4:58Speaker 00

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• 5:41Speaker 00

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• 6:23Speaker 04

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• 6:58Speaker 05

  This is Sound School. It's the podcast with the backstory to great audio storytelling. It's brought to you by PRX and Transom. I'm Rob Rosenthal. There's no two ways about it. I live in sound. In my house, music is always on, or the news. In my car or on the bus, I listen to podcasts. When I'm outside, here on Cape Cod, the wind, the waves, bells ringing on the channel buoys, there's fog horns and all the birds, so many birds. Cape Cod is a waypoint on the Atlantic flyway, so lots of migrating birds here in the spring. Also in the spring, there's these guys, little frogs, peepers.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  I love the dissonance. So even though I'm very sound centric, give me some silence and I'm just as happy. In fact, I sometimes crave silence. No talking, no radio, no music, no podcasts. And by silence, I guess I mean quiet, since it's hard to achieve absolute silence. There's always something making sound. As proof, listen to this.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  I'm trying to be a little tricky here. I didn't play any sound. So what you heard, that's the sound where you are. I'm guessing it's not absolute silence, but hopefully it's quiet enough so that I'm coming through loud and clear, even the silent parts. Given how much I appreciate quiet, I was surprised to learn this last fall comes from an episode of Unexplainable, the science podcast from Vox.

• 8:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Erin Westgate used to be an optimist.

• 8:44Speaker 07

  When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop wellbeing interventions to actually make people's lives happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh, my goodness, I'm so busy. I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think.

• 9:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  So Erin recruited a whole bunch of people and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence.

• 9:18Speaker 07

  And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better.

• 9:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was going to try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead.

• 9:42Speaker 07

  So like someone throwing up, nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, et cetera, rather than simply sit in silence.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  Is that you? Are you that person?

• 9:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  Definitely not.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  This is Noam Hassenfeld. He's the host of Unexplainable.

• 10:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  I wouldn't say I love silence. So I identify with some of the people in that research in that I often find silence uncomfortable and making this episode was in part kind of a desire to get more comfortable with silence.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  What about silence makes you uncomfortable?

• 10:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  I guess the same thing that makes everyone uncomfortable is that it's an unstructured space. It can be, it can be difficult, right, to have to structure your entire experience on your own and not be listening to something, be listening to music, be talking to someone, have something structured your thoughts, like art or movies or a book, you know, to be fully on your own, fully autonomous, you know, it asks a lot of you.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  To be sure, Noam says he loves a good, long hike up a mountain, getting to the top and taking it all in, the view and the quiet. But mostly, he likes to fill his ears with music. He's a musician and plays drums. Plus, he composes music for Unexplainable, so silence isn't the first sound he's looking for. But wait, is silence a sound?

• 11:06Speaker 08

  So, one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt is like when I was at a symphony, and the symphony was working out to a kind of crescendo, and like right when it hit the crescendo, it ended.

• 11:21Speaker 08

  And the moment before the applause, you're just kind of like hit by this experience. And I definitely felt silence like hit me across the face.

• 11:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Raja Go is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. And that experience that he had at the symphony, it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing, like the absence of sound, but he felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling?

• 11:53Speaker 08

  So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence, whereas other people argue that silence is just the absence of experience.

• 12:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions, like, what is silence?

• 12:14Speaker 05

  This episode on silence was part of a four-part series Noam and the crew at Unexplainable called "The Sound Barrier." They explored hearing problems like tinnitus, which I always thought was pronounced tinnitus, but either way, it's a debilitating ringing in the ears. Another episode dove into audio illusions, sort of like optical illusions, when you hear one thing, but it's really something else. Another episode explored the sound of space, and of course, the episode on silence.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  In a show about silence, it makes sense to have some silence, right? If you're producing a show about the Clash, you'd play songs from The Clash, of course. If you're producing a story on whale song, you'd want listeners to hear whale song in the piece. Problem is, silence is an anathema in a sound story. Include too much silence and a listener might think they accidentally hit the pause button, or maybe the file is corrupt, or the producer's goofed somehow. Most radio stations have alarms that go off when there's dead air. Back when I worked in radio stations, people used to say, "Dead air is bad juju." Noam was aware of the problem with silence, but he not only wanted to have moments of silence in that episode, he wanted to lean into it.

• 13:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  I actually had a goal, which is that I wanted people to have the feeling that I think I often get when walking around. "Oh, my God, all of these sounds are awesome. Just listen to all of these sounds." And it's difficult. I don't want to say like I'm some sort of, like, I can go out and just like listen to the cars drive by and feel excited by it. But I really wanted people to get to the end of the episode, and I wanted them to hear my silence and their silence together, like the ambient sound of my studio and the ambient sound of their kitchen, or their porch, or their yard, or their street, wherever

• 14:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  they are, and just have this idea of, oh, there are tons of sounds in this space, and they're layered in interesting ways.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Noam understood that he couldn't throw listeners into the deep end of silence, like today on Unexplainable, silence, and then toss in a long stretch of silence. Instead, he did what I've been doing, easing into the silence by sprinkling bits and bobs of silence here and there throughout the episode.

• 14:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  And the other thing I was thinking of while I was doing it, what I need to score with is silence. There was, there was obviously some music in the episode, but I started thinking about scoring with silence. So often where maybe I would have music come in and you'd have a little bit of, like a little post of music. Here, we had sort of a post of silence.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, et cetera, rather than simply sit in silence.

• 15:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  At this point, Aaron was just morbidly curious.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  That was the first moment of silence in the episode, about four to five seconds worth, which is kind of long considering how infrequently silence is heard in an audio story. As the episode went on, a post of silence would sometimes get longer, like the next moment in the story where there's five to six seconds of silence.

• 15:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if silence is a real thing we can hear, what does it sound like?

• 15:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  To find out, I decided to go to one of the quietest places on Earth.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  By that, no means an anechoic chamber. It's a room designed by sound engineers to be completely quiet. No sound, zero. Noam was certainly not the first person to make a pilgrimage to an anechoic chamber. John Cage most famously did so in 1951. Side note here, I've listened to several stories about silence over the years. Almost all of them reference the story about John Cage's experience in one of these chambers. It's legendary, mostly because it led to one of the most pivotal moments in music composition, truly revolutionary. Cage was an avant-garde composer, and one time he saw Robert Rauschenberg's work called "White Painting", and the painting is just that, three canvases painted white. And at first, it seemed to Cage that there was nothing there.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  But looking closer, he could see texture and flecks of paint and the little shadows cast by those flecks. In the nothingness, there was something. And Cage wondered, and I'm paraphrasing here, is that true for sound? That's when Cage got permission to stand in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University.

• 16:52Speaker 09

  I heard in that room two sounds. One was high and one was low. And I thought there was something wrong with the room.

• 17:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer, who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was his circulatory system.

• 17:12Speaker 09

  There's no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  From that experience, Cage concluded, "There's no such thing as silence. There's always sound." And that led him to that revolutionary composition, "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds." That's the name of the piece, "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds." Oh, and by the way, it's four minutes and 33 seconds long. The performer does nothing. The audience sits in silence. Whatever sound is made during those four and a half minutes is the composition. Noam first heard "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds," or maybe I should say, experienced "433," when he too was at Harvard, a freshman, taking a class called "Sound, Noise, and Music." His teacher told the class, "We're going to perform the piece together."

• 18:11Speaker 05

  And there they sat, listening. Noam was not impressed.

• 18:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Obviously, this is stupid. Like, modern art is dumb. And then you kind of realize what he's trying to do. And it does really shift your perspective on what sound can be. And if you can find something interesting in silence, I mean, come on, then you can find something interesting in anything.

• 18:36Speaker 09

  Please welcome our soloist, William Marks.

• 18:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  In one recording, I found, an older man walks out onto the stage, wearing a tux with tails and a white bowtie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys. He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor-style flourish, presses "go," and just sits there for four minutes and 33 seconds.

• 19:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s.

• 19:32Speaker 05

  That, by the way, was the longest stretch of silence up until that point in the episode. Nearly 14 seconds. That is an eternity in podcasting and radio. Noam figured that the first 20 minutes or so of the episode would be setting the table for a long swath of silence. The question was, how long could that silence be?

• 19:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  It was something that made me very nervous. I was very worried that people would either think there's a glitch, or they would roll their eyes.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  At first, Noam thought, well, maybe I'll just put in a minute of silence.

• 20:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it was always going to be, you know, some amount of room tone running, like it wasn't just going to be digital zero. And that felt way too long to me.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  Then Noam had a conversation with his editor, Jorge Just.

• 20:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  He was just like, however much silence you're going to put at the end of this episode, I'm going to say, put more at the end of this episode. Like, I kept thinking, oh, it's too much silence. He's like, more silence. Just put a lot. And then Joanna Solotaroff, who also edited the episode, was like, oh, maybe you should just do 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Right now, I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet. It's pretty still. But wherever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room, or the idling traffic as you cross the street, or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent

• 20:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  light. So, I don't know. Maybe this is weird. But what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're going to have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm going to have mine. But yeah, let's, uh, let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Well, in the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of recorded silence, there's a rustle of pages, there's a sniffle, a cough, a breath, a sniffle, a shift in the chair, exhale, there's some movement and an exhale, a sniffle, a knock, someone opens and closes a door, somebody else says, "Not right now," I suppose that's you. There's a mic adjustment, an adjustment in the seat, maybe a pencil on paper, I'm not sure, a movement, and some sort of clicking possibly, right at the very end. I'm not sure what that was. Did you purposely add those sounds?

• 22:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so some of them were purposeful, some of them were just kind of normally sitting there. And I wanted it to be almost indistinguishable from what a person might hear if they were in their own room. So I just envisioned someone listening to it in a relatively quiet space, and then hearing a rustle, or a click, or a cough, or a sniffle, or a knock on the door, and wondering whether it was in their space. And then having that moment of, "Oh, I'm in a space, and I'm listening to someone else's space, and our spaces have different levels of slight ambient noise. Isn't that interesting?

• 23:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  And how does that impact everything I listen to?"

• 23:51Speaker 05

  Well, I have a weird thought for you. I wondered if you included some sounds in the silence in order for people to recognize the silence.

• 24:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes. Like, when I started this, I was like, oh, maybe I should just make four minutes and 33 seconds of Digital Zero, right? Then, people will purely hear the four minutes and 33 seconds in their own space, right? They'll just be listening to their space. But I wanted, I don't know, I wanted them to, exactly, have sort of some idea of the texture of silence. It reflects back on the silence. Like, Digital Zero is not interesting.

• 26:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  That was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. And this was the third episode of our series, The Sound Barrier. We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. What did it sound like? What did you hear? As soon as I finished the whole series, I went outside and I just stood on my back porch of my apartment here in Somerville in Massachusetts. And I just listened. I actually, honestly, I went outside and I was listening to a podcast, which is, I'm like, always listening to podcasts. And then I was like, dude, you just did this thing on silence. Like, what are you doing? Why are you filling all this space with podcasts? And so I was listening to this podcast.

• 26:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  I took off my headphones and I just sort of stood there and listened. And, I don't know, I was like really astounded by all the different things I could hear. And also at different levels. I remember hearing the wind, my neighbor across the way smoking a cigarette, the leaves blowing in the wind, and then I heard footsteps walking through the leaves that felt like a little bit further away. And then, you know, you have these sort of moments where the traffic is going and then the traffic's stopping as the lights turn red. And it just, like, I closed my eyes and it's almost I could, I could like map my neighborhood in sound. It was a very cool experience.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  My last thought is, I was just in Provincetown for a little winter break. And whenever I'm up there, I always visit the Provincetown Art Museum. And there was a piece there called Piano Sketch Number One, Shimmer, by an artist named Tess Oldfield. And basically, it was just, it was a piano. And basically, it was timed to start playing every 30 minutes. Why I'm telling you this is because there was a poem on the piano, and there was a line in the poem that I wanted to run by you, just to see what you had to say. Silence is not absence.

• 28:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that is a very succinct way to put it. Like, that's sort of our superpower as humans, that we can fill the space, or we can imbue meaning into spaces that just seem empty, that everything has something to tell us.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Thanks to Noam Hassenfeld of the Unexplainable Podcast for talking all things silence. Heads up, people, there is a Transom Festival on the horizon. Ira Glass, Al Letson, Erica Heilmann, Jay Allison, Bianca Gaver, all those folks and many others are descending on Woods Hole on Cape Cod in Massachusetts to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Transom. Think of it as a big radio, podcasting, audio storytelling party. The Transom Festival is happening this September, the 17th through the 19th, to be exact. You'll fill your days with listening sessions, masterclass workshops, performances, and, hopefully, a swim or two in the ocean. Yes, the water is still warm then.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Rumor has it, I might even lead a bike trip on the Shining Sea Bike Way. So keep an eye peeled on transom.org for ticket and lodging information. Of course, I'll keep you updated here, too. This is Sound School. My production partners are PRX and Transom. My fellow travelers in radio are Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Jarrett. I'm Rob Rosenfeld. Thank you very much for listening.

• 30:07Speaker 10

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