Attaining+Silence

=Attaining Silence= by Eddie Rivera

Most of the articles we’ve read in class talk about a specific aspect of the perception of sound or music by humans, but what about silence?

A Lack of Sound
Sound is loosely defined as vibrating or oscillating pressure waves that travel through and around a medium such as air. If we think of hearing, or audition, as the process by which those waves are picked up by an auditory processor such as the human ear, perception, then, can be thought of as the detection and categorization of a sound that is heard. If we define silence as the absence of sounds, that is, the lack of sound waves, then we cannot hear, and therefore perceive, silence. Even if we modify our definition to say that silence is the absence of audible sound waves, we still cannot say that we perceive silence. How can this be possible if we’ve all experienced silence? Or have we?

When we say silence we’re typically referring to a lack of unwanted or obtrusive sound (we’ll call this noise). We’re all familiar with and have experienced a lack of noise. But who among us has truly experienced an absolute absence of sound?

Some believe that true silence is unattainable. Musician John Cage experimented with the concept of silence through various experiments. In one experiment, he entered an anechoic chamber, an externally soundproof room designed to absorb all internal sounds, believing he would be in complete silence. During his time in this chamber he still heard two noises, one high-pitched, and one low-pitched. These were explained to him as the sounds of his nervous system (high) and his blood circulating (low). Regardless of the accuracy of those explanations, his experiment showed him that you can never experience silence as we ourselves are constant sound emitters by breathing, pumping blood, etc.

But this hasn’t answered the question of how/if we perceive silence. What if rather than examining sound or the lack thereof, we examine our sense of hearing?

A Lack of Hearing
By closing our eyes, we can shut off our sense of sight. We can limit smell by holding our breath or breathing through our mouths. We can even keep from touching or tasting things to some degree. But we can’t shut off our hearing. We can be distracted from or block out noises and achieve a relative silence, but we cannot simply stop hearing. Even putting our fingers in our ears will leave us with the same sounds Cage was left with. What if you were deaf, though?

Someone without any sense of hearing whatsoever wouldn’t be able to hear their own breathing or their blood pounding in their ears. Aren’t they in complete silence? This question is rather interesting. On the surface, it would seem clear that, yes, such a person would be experiencing true silence. However, research has shown that those who have gone deaf after having learned a language may continue to think in that language. That is, their “inner voice” is in that learned language. Some contend that the perception of an inner voice by the brain is tantamount to hearing external sounds because the brain processes this phenomena in the same way it would audible sound. Furthermore, deaf schizophrenics have been known to have auditory hallucinations much like hearing schizophrenics have visual ones.

A Lack of Answers
Though there does not seem to be a way by which absolute silence can be attained, there is also no definitive proof behind this conclusion. This may just be one of those questions that are never fully resolved. Just so, it should come as no surprise that through much of my search for information on silence, I was led to philosophical, poetic, and religious articles.

Further Reading and Interesting Info
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2486/in-what-language-do-deaf-people-think http://www.discovery.com/area/skinnyon/skinnyon971128/skinnyon.html http://www.sysx.org/soundsite/texts/02/VOICE.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/04/980430044534.htm http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci906859,00.html