Less than zero

What does silence really sound like? Step inside an anechoic chamber to find out.

Marisa Taylor | July 2008 issue

Steve Orfield could probably tell me a thing or to about why the silence has made me so uncomfortable. At his laboratory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Orfield conducts what he calls “perceptual market research”; in other words, the measurement of sound quality.

From the roar of a Cessna to the rumble of a Harley to the clicking noises coming from your computer’s hard drive, every product makes some kind of noise. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies have come to Orfield Laboratories to figure out, through extensive consumer tests, how the sounds of their products can denote power, or quality, or expense.

But consumer testing is only part of the picture at Orfield Labs. On the grounds of his facility, complete with auditorium, acoustic simulation lab and reverberation room, is an anechoic chamber that Guinness World Records has deemed “the quietest place on Earth.”

This dubious distinction wasn’t something Orfield ever planned when he opened the laboratory as an architectural and lighting consulting firm in 1971. He stumbled into sound quality research during the dour economic times of the 1970s after realizing his business might not survive. Years later, he purchased the anechoic chamber from the Sunbeam Corporation in Chicago, Illinois. “It’s as if you are sitting in a room that was lined with a foot of fabric on all sides—the floors, the ceiling and the walls—there’s just nothing to create a reflection,” Orfield explains.

But this particular anechoic chamber is special, and much more sound-tight than the facility in Berkeley. The six-sided room floats on springs in a concrete pit, which is surrounded by another chamber, which is surrounded by another concrete structure that’s about three metres (10 feet) thick. When the manufacturer of the chamber took a sound measurement of –9.64 decibels, he decided to contact Guinness, and, well, the rest is history.

Orfield emphasizes that in technical terms, the quietest place on Earth, like Cage’s symphony, isn’t actually silent. It’s really just a place where sound can’t reverberate—the opposite of, say, a cathedral or a sports arena. Still, the Guinness distinction warrants that people often want to come by and visit. If nothing else, it’s a study in sensory deprivation.

“We’ve offered to give anybody who will sit in there for 45 minutes in the dark a case of Guinness,” Orfield explains. “But no one’s ever taken us up. People are kind of frightened of the room.” Even he won’t do it. “If I sat in there for a half an hour, I would be uncomfortable. If I did it 10 times in a row, I would still be uncomfortable.”

While I’ve beaten steve orfield’s record time, I was no less frightened of the room for having stayed in it so long. Plus I had to leave the lights on.

Gerry Popelka, chief of audiology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California, and inventor of the digital hearing aid, can explain why silence is so spooky. The ears don’t make any kind of physical adaptation to it, he says. And people are so accustomed to excessive noise that it just feels odd to be in a place that eliminates reverberation or outside noise, like an anechoic chamber, because no one ever experiences it.

“We walk around in environments that are naturally noisy,” Popelka says. “And as we live in more mechanized societies, there’s even more noise. Now you remove all of that noise and you have a different sensation. But your ears didn’t change at all. The idea of hearing your own blood rushing through your arteries is odd. It’s only odd because you haven’t listened to it before. But it’s always been there.”

Moreover, Popelka continues, there’s an emotional and psychological reaction connected to such a dramatic change in the sensory environment. It’s kind of like having a fear of climbing to the top rung of a ladder, only to practise it a bunch of times and find your bones didn’t become less brittle as you practised; you just became less afraid of falling and hurting yourself. The shock to my system, then, has to do with the fact that I’m not accustomed to this form of silence.

“Hearing is strongly associated with language and communication,” says Popelka, “but it also connects us with the environment.” Being cut off from that environment so completely is, well, scary.

Experts like Orfield and Popelka say young people today will likely suffer from more severe hearing loss than their Baby Boomer parents, simply because they’ve grown up in the era of the Walkman and the iPod. And the more damage to the ears that occurs from wearing ear buds or headphones, the more a listener will turn up the volume, rather than adjusting to a lower volume based on diminished hearing abilities. With advances in technology and a constant need for convenience, perhaps younger generations face a whole new concept of silence—or, rather, a whole new concept of noise.

<< PREVIOUS 1 2 3 4 NEXT >>
view as a single page

Tools: Discuss | Email | Print | RSS | Weekly Newsletter
Save/Share:

Comments