Silence holds a paradoxical place in science and in human consciousness. In science, the quietest conditions that modern technology allow are invariably used to research sound. And our own search for "peace and quiet" never extends as far as wanting no noise at all. Real silence is strange and disturbing, not relaxing. Most people cannot sleep without at least some background sound.
The closest humankind can get to complete silence is the inside of a heavily soundproofed anechoic chamber, a handful of which exist in universities and labs across Britain. These are used for a range of interesting research -- but they also have a profound effect on the people who go into them.
My search for one leads me to University College London, whose anechoic ("without echo") room is in an anonymous, windowless building. In one of the busiest parts of campus, and next to the low hum of an electricity substation, it is hard to believe the unassuming walls can block out all sounds. Dave Cushing, a technician in the phonetics and linguistics department, which owns the facility, shows me the stacks of equipment used in the chamber, and the extensive precautions taken to keep sound pollution inside to a minimum.
Stepping into the chamber is a strange experience, "like being in a field in the middle of the night" according to John Fithyan who runs Southampton University's facility. The silence is profound and the room looks unusual too, with jagged sound-cancelling spikes covering the walls and ceiling that take on a menacing look in the dim light.
A 1970s-style padded armchair sits incongruously in this other-worldly environment. As I sit on the chair, I try to speak. My voice sounds quiet and dead, and yet I am conscious of the sound of my breathing. As I hold my breath and try to experience the silence without the sound of my breath, I begin to hear a whistling noise in my ears. The experience is disconcerting.
Unpleasant or not, complete silence is incredibly difficult to achieve. Insulate a room, build it within thick brick walls, and vibrations will still get in. Mount the whole thing on springs, and the vibrations will stop -- but the echoes won't. Anechoic chambers eliminate this problem by covering walls, ceiling and floor with wedges of fiberglass which stick out into the room. These absorb virtually all the sound, meaning that measurements of sound levels typically weigh in far below zero decibels, the threshold of human hearing. The Bell Labs chamber, the first ever built, featured in the Guinness World Records as the "quietest place on earth" after its construction in 1940.
Once you have a silent room, you don't want to ruin it. So the chamber at UCL has specially designed silent air conditioning, and the walls contain coils to cancel out the hum of the substation. The chamber is lit with light bulbs instead of noisy fluorescent tubes.
And users must walk on a platform, raised above the soundproofed floor. Even the steel door is covered with a half-meter of fiberglass. While most anechoic chambers are used for acoustic research, UCL's is used in phonetics -- the scientific study of the human voice.
Researchers make precise recordings of voices, using both microphones and laryngographs. This latter device, developed by one of the academics who used this chamber, measures the opening and closing of the voice box while the subject speaks. Linguists at UCL use the recordings to identify the root causes of speech abnormalities in children.
Another device in the crowded control room is a spectrum analyzer. "The spectrum analyzer looks at the different frequencies in a voice," Cushing says. Using high-quality digital recordings,researchers employ the analyzer to examine the minute details of speech, furthering our understanding of human expression.
Elsewhere, scientists and engineers mainly use anechoic rooms for routine acoustic research, such as testing equipment and modelling sound propagation. But one complex technology developed in the chamber features finds a practical application in the nation's living rooms.
"Head-related transfer functions" (HRTFs) underpin the surround sound effects in many computer games. Audio systems using this technology create their 3D sound effects using only a pair of normal stereo speakers. The illusion is created using a detailed acoustic model of the human head, developed in an anechoic chamber, to subtly tweak the sound so as to mimic the realism of five-speaker systems.
The silence of the anechoic room has inspired musicians, too. The American composer John Cage visited Harvard University's facility in the late 1940s. Cage discovered that total silence is not actually possible: he claims he heard two sounds, "one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation." After this experience, he was inspired to write his "silent" piece, 4'33", in which the "music" is made by the ambient sounds of the concert hall alone.
Some people, standing in an anechoic chamber, have lost their balance. Professor Linda Luxon, an audiologist at the Institute of Child Health, questions why this might be. "I can't give you any rational explanation of why people would lose their balance in an anechoic chamber," she says. But she does agree that people find orientation easier if they have full use of all five senses.
As I step out of the anechoic chamber and back into the control room, my sensory deprivation ends. Before going into the chamber, I had thought the control room was quiet, but I now hear the fans of the computer systems, the echoes of students chatting outside. The shock of hearing all this is as great as was the shock of hearing nothing.
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