The Sound Barrier #3: What does silence sound like?

A scientist asked people to sit in a silent room for 15 minutes. Almost half of them decided to give themselves a painful electric shock instead. What is it about our brains that makes our relationship with silence so strange? And should we learn how to listen to it? This is the third episode of our new four-part series, ⁠The Sound Barrier⁠. Guests: ⁠Erin Westgate⁠, assistant professor at the University of Florida; ⁠Rui Zhe Goh⁠, doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University; ⁠Melody Baglione⁠, professor at Cooper Union 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.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system. But I also want something that's easy. It just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible, and my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment, louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos: Love the sound, feel the system.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 0:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Erin Westgate used to be an optimist.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  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."

• 1:29Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 1:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:45Noam 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.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  At this point, Erin was just morbidly curious. Do people hate silence so much that they'd actually prefer pain? Like, what if you put people in an ankle cuff and gave them the option to shock themselves?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  It is not pleasant. It hurts a little bit. I always liken it to the feeling of like a cat sort of jumping out and scratching you. It's sort of like, aha, you know, shocking, but it's not actually harmful. And so we set this all up and we just sort of waited. And the first few participants, we just sort of were like, are they going to do it? Are they actually going to shock themselves? But we saw very early on that people were indeed shocking themselves. Yeah, I know. So it's like, why, why would you do that?

• 3:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Almost half the participants gave themselves an electric shock. They couldn't even make it 15 minutes.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  People actually do something that's painful rather than simply sit in silence.

• 3:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  The more you think about it, silence is a really strange thing. On the one hand, it's so uncomfortable that people would rather shock themselves than sit through it. At the same time, silence and other forms of sensory deprivation, they've been shown to reduce anxiety and PTSD. There's this one experiment I love where mice were exposed to silence and their brains actually got new neurons, like more neurons than when they were exposed to any other sounds, just from listening to silence.

• 3:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is episode three of The Sound Barrier, a series from Unexplainable about the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through. Today on the show, how can something that's nothing do so much?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  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 up to a kind of crescendo and like right when it hit the crescendo, it ended. 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.

• 5:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rajah 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?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions, like, what is silence? But Rajah wanted an actual answer, which would mean he'd have to do an experiment.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  So at that point, when I was thinking of the experiment, I was actually kind of fascinated by this illusion.

• 6:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Something called the one is more illusion?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And you'll see in a moment why it's called the one is more illusion.

• 6:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Suppose I play you two sounds, right? I play you boo boo. And then I play you a single sound, boo. The two sounds and the single sound take up the exact same amount of time, but you will hear the single sound is longer.

• 6:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's why it's called the one is more illusion. One sound seems longer than two.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And one of the great things about auditory illusions is that you can experience it for yourself.

• 6:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is there, is there a website I can go to now to check it out?

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Sure. Um, let me just send it to you.

• 6:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  One.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Two.

• 6:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, that sounded way longer.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Right, right. It's exactly the same length.

• 6:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  That didn't even sound close.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 7:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Audio illusions like this one are great ways to learn about how our brain processes sound. They seem like glitches, but they really just show us how our brain is constantly editing the world we hear. Like when we're in a room and our voice is bouncing off all the walls and hitting our ears at slightly different times, the brain cancels out the echoes so that we only hear a single voice. When there are sounds that are muffled or distorted, the brain can fill them in without us noticing. For some people with a cochlear implant, the brain can recreate almost the entire world they hear. And scientists think this particular glitch, the One Is More illusion,

• 7:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  it tells us something pretty fundamental about how our hearing works.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  If you look at the sound waves that enter our ears and you visualize it on the screen, it's gonna be a bit of a mess.

• 7:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Think about what a waveform looks like. It's just a blobby thing. But the world doesn't sound like a blobby thing. We hear different individual sounds.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  If you're at a park and you're talking to a friend and you hear a dog barking in the background, you don't hear a continuous jumble of noise, you hear discreet words.

• 8:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is the big insight from the One Is More illusion. Our brain is always on the lookout for discreet sounds. It's why we're able to pull out individual sounds from a noisy background. And it's why the one boop sounds longer than the two boops. But Rajah wanted to see if our brain would do the same thing to silence.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  My idea was to try to create a silenced version of this auditory illusion.

• 8:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rajah replaced the boop boop with silenced silence. His idea was that if these silences caused the same glitch, it would show that our brain is processing silences just like it processes sounds. That in a pretty literal sense, we're hearing silence.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  So what we did was in our experiment, our subjects had to wear headphones and we immersed our subjects in the ambient noise of a restaurant. There would be people talking, plates clinking, people walking around. And then when the trial starts, they would hear a sequence of two silences and then a one-silent sequence. And subjects are just asked, which one was longer? Was the one-silent longer or was the two-silent longer?

• 9:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And you have an example of this too, right?

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Yep. I think if you play that, you should be able to hear it.

• 9:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I'm in the restaurant.

• 9:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, that's nuts. Okay, that's... But again, that just felt...

• 9:44Speaker 03

  It's good, right?

• 9:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's the same exact feeling. Like, the single silence feels way longer than the other two, which is basically the same thing as those notes.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So like, it does definitely feel like it's exactly the same thing happening.

• 9:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  This one might be a little bit harder to hear the first time through, so I just want to play it one more time. Notice how much longer the uninterrupted silence feels compared to the two short ones, even though they're the same amount of time.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  And when we ran this experiment on subjects, we actually found that exact same proportion of subjects felt that one silence sequences are longer than the two silence sequences. Right? So it definitely does seem like exactly the same mechanism as I play.

• 10:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow. And did you try this illusion on yourself? Did it work for you?

• 10:34Speaker 03

  It definitely did work for me. When I created this illusion and played it to myself for the first time, I was like, wow, it works.

• 10:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Our brain isn't just editing sounds. It's editing silence.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Silence is not something out there in the world, and yet we can have an experience of it.

• 10:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, your results seem to say that we are hearing the silence. We're not just not hearing anything.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it tells us that like, the auditory system treats silences the same way as it treats sounds.

• 11:06Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 11:16Noam Hassenfeld?

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

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Loud noises.

• 11:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's in a minute.

• 11:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 11:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room, but you gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 11:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 12:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp, they've got great bass, and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So, I don't know, if I want to head outside for a minute, it's super easy. And yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 13:06Speaker 06

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• 13:49Speaker 06

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• 14:31Speaker 01

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 15:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  A couple of months ago, I hopped on the subway. And I headed to Cooper Union, this tiny, private college in Manhattan. To talk with a wonderfully named expert on sound. Hello.

• 15:15Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 15:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Melody Baglion.

• 15:17Speaker 07

  Professor of mechanical engineering at Cooper Union.

• 15:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can you just tell me a little bit about where we are right now?

• 15:23Speaker 07

  So we're in the vibration and acoustics laboratory. And we also have the only anechoic chamber in New York City.

• 15:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  An anechoic chamber is designed to be absurdly quiet. It's got double doors, it's got padding all over the walls. It's this place where you're supposed to be able to get as close to complete silence as possible. And anechoic chambers, they're pretty weird. There are all these stories about what they'll do to you if you spend too much time in there. Stories of people feeling nauseous, or starting to hallucinate, or this one violinist who apparently started pounding on the door immediately to get out. It's not exactly clear how much these are urban legends and how much of them are actual real events. But it isn't hard to find all kinds of people who've heard these stories and then wrote

• 16:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  articles or made videos being like, "I survived the quietest room on earth." It's a whole thing.

• 16:22Speaker 07

  You know, I've never done really studies to show you can spend this much time in here before you go crazy, because I'm always so busy that I don't have time to sit there. But there are many people that are interested in that question, and I'm asked that a lot. But I haven't done it myself.

• 16:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can we go inside?

• 16:39Speaker 07

  Sure. All right.

• 16:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  As soon as I walk into the chamber, my ears feel different. Okay, that feels really, really weird. The only word I can think of to describe the silence is... Thick, like I'm waiting into Jell-O or something. And the whole place is covered with these wedges.

• 17:05Speaker 07

  So you don't want to touch these wedges because they're fiberglass?

• 17:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  They're on the walls, they're covering the door, they're on the ceiling, they're even on the floor. I'm actually standing on a catwalk suspended from the wall, so we don't touch the fiberglass floor wedges. And those wedges are what make the room sound so weird. When you're in a normal room, your voice is bouncing off all the walls and the ceiling and the floor. You're hearing your voice come out of your mouth, but you're also hearing it reflected off all the other walls and then hitting your ear. That's how we're used to hearing sounds. But in an anechoic chamber, the wedges absorb so much of the sound that there aren't echoes. That's why it's called anechoic, as in without echo. And it sounds really strange.

• 17:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hello, I'm screaming in a, in a room and it's really quiet. That's really weird. That's so weird. To be honest, it's hard to describe how surreal this all felt. It was almost like yelling into a black hole, but the sound was being sucked into nothingness. The weirdness doesn't exactly translate on a mic, but here's what it sounded like outside the chamber.

• 18:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And here's what it sounded like inside.

• 18:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  But the longer I stayed there, the more my ears started to adapt to the silence, just like your eyes might adapt slowly in a dark room. It's extremely, extremely quiet in here. And after a couple of minutes, I started hearing things. Every noise felt like the volume was just jacked up. My own breathing started to feel loud. I heard my own heartbeat. I feel like I can hear noises from my own head.

• 18:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  I can't tell if I'm making them up or not.

• 18:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this high pitch. There's this kind of swirling.

• 19:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Almost like I'm putting like a seashell up to my ear, but like reversed, does that make any sense? Like reverse seashell?

• 19:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  That was just 20 minutes in.

• 19:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  As my head was swirling in the chamber, I was thinking about this story of one of my favorite composers, John Cage, who also once visited an anechoic chamber on his own quest for complete silence.

• 19:35Speaker 08

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

• 19:46Noam 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.

• 19:55Speaker 08

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 09

  And now, a performance of John Cage's 433.

• 20:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you've ever heard of John Cage, it's probably because of this piece, 433.

• 20:22Speaker 09

  Please welcome our soloist, William Marks.

• 20:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  In one recording, I found an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bow tie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys.

• 20:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor-style flourish, presses go, and just sits there for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

• 21:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s, but it still goes viral all the time. Like, this particular performance has almost 10 million views on YouTube. And, yeah, it might be because people think it's some kind of stunt. And the comments are kind of hilarious. Like, "I once didn't speak for five minutes and this guy sued me for copyright." Or, "I set this song as my ringtone and nobody called me." And I felt the same way when I first heard it. I was in a music class in college and my professor told us we were gonna perform it in class. So, we pulled up the sheet music.

• 21:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's basically a whole bunch of nothing, divided into three movements of nothing. And my professor signaled us to start. For a moment, it was silent. And then I started to notice little things, like a cough, a chair creaking when someone adjusted their position, this low murmur of voices coming from the hallway outside, my own breath. And because I had the sheet music in front of me, I started hearing all these noises almost like they were intentional.

• 22:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  I heard them interacting, I heard them layering on top of each other, I heard them getting louder and softer. And I started imagining them as if someone had composed them, you know, written them like notes into the sheet music. Notes that would be different wherever 433 gets performed.

• 22:59Speaker 08

  The first performance, you could hear the breeze in the trees. And then miraculously, when the second movement began, there were drops of rain that you could hear coming on the roof.

• 23:13Speaker 08

  And you know what happened in the third movement? People began talking because they realized that David Tudor wasn't going to make any sounds. So the sound of people talking was in the third movement.

• 23:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Cage was OK with people laughing sometimes. He had a sense of humor. But 433 wasn't a joke. And I do hope that at least some of the people behind those 10 million views on YouTube understood what Cage was doing here. He was reframing what silence is and what it can be.

• 23:46Speaker 08

  It doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in an anechoic chamber or outdoors on the street, there always are sounds to hear. There is no such thing as silence.

• 24:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is where we finally get back to that original mystery from the electric shock experiment. Erin, the researcher behind the study, she says when she told people not to pay attention to anything around them and just focus on their own thoughts, they spun out pretty quickly.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  People's, I don't think their goal is to fill it with anxiety, but it's actually a giant, you know, stress induction.

• 24:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  When people thought of silence as just this empty box, they filled it with their own anxieties. But silence isn't empty. Rages Experiment tells us silence is something we can hear. And Cage's piece shows us what it sounds like. It's not nothingness. It's full of noise. There's a texture, almost like the particles of air in a room that seems empty.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  There can be beautiful silences, there can be awkward silences, there can be really powerful silences. Like, I think often an infected speaker makes powerful uses of silence, right? When they pause, you kind of feel the weight of their words.

• 25:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Silence is something worth paying attention to on its own terms.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world, you know, in the same way that what is the value in the Grand Canyon? Or what is the value in Mount Everest? Like, the value is that they're there. And so I think that when we think about things like the value of silence, or the value of boredom, or the value of grief, they're beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them.

• 25:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  And sometimes you get a clock chiming right through.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  This is what happens when you inherit your grandparents' grandfather clock after they die and then actually hang it up and let it do its thing.

• 26:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  In the last couple of weeks, I've started thinking about silence as turning up the volume knob on my perception. Like, 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 light. So, I don't know. Maybe this is weird. But what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're gonna have your own particular kind

• 26:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm gonna have mine. But yeah, let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear.

• 29:53Speaker 10

  Not right now.

• 31:34Noam 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? Or if you want to record a voice memo of silence wherever you are, an email at us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear it, too. On the next episode of The Sound Barrier, how a blind astronomer learned to listen to space.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  I thought those sounds were bothersome and ugly. And at that moment, everything transformed into beauty.

• 32:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's next time.

• 32:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  As for this episode, it was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. I also wrote the music. It was edited by Joanna Salataroff with help from Jorge Just. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact checking from Melissa Hirsch, and silent support from Sally Helm. Meredith Hadnot runs the show. Julia Longoria is our editorial director. And Bird Pinkerton ran towards the wooden carriage as the octopus army stampeded onto the runway. She hoisted the octopus onto her shoulders, and she turned to face the chaos.

• 32:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks to Robert Liu. Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Bird. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at [email protected]. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Really helps us out. And if you're really into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back with the final episode of The Sound Barrier on Wednesday.

• 33:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. No matter how much you know about frequency response or harmonic distortion, the thing that's going to make you fall in love with a speaker is how it makes you feel. And Sonos has that it factor, you know? It's this seamless system that makes things sound good in every room. That obviously takes some serious engineering, but it also takes a big picture understanding of how and why we actually listen to things. The birthday playlist, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.