Silence, and Shutting Out the World

Silence. It's a simple thing. Complete and utter quiet. When you think about it, though, in our lives, we have never actually been in complete silence. There are always small background noises and distractions, creaking and rustling. A soft background whirr that breathes behind everything we do.

So, is it ever possible to be completely disconnected from the world: To have complete silence? 

In music, a composer named John Cage performed a musical experiment, called 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds). The sheet music instructs each performer to be completely quiet, and not play a single note, for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

Speaking of music, there are rooms in some recording studios called anechoic chambers, with spongy wedge shaped patterns in the walls, which cancel external sound. However, even when the outside world is shut out, you can still hear yourself. The brain, not used to total silence, goes into a sort of shock, after which your ears become enormously sensitive as the brain scrambles for some sort of acoustic stimulus. Eventually, you begin to hear your own bodily fluids pulsating inside your veins. You hear your heartbeat as a loud thud every second. This pseudo-silence, however, is not enough for me.

Another alternative to shutting out the world is white noise. White noise is a default hissing noise sound, a mix of all "colors" of sound. There is also pink noise, brown noise, red noise, and so on. Each type of noise has its own "feeling": White noise is harsh and crisp, pink noise is… smooth, and… flow-y, brown noise is very deep and rumbly, and so on. Put on headphones and turn your favorite color of noise to maximum volume, and you can shut out everything. Here is a link to a great website where you can select intensity for every noise color and listen to it:

 http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php.

Contrast THAT to a noisy crowd cheering for a football team, or a particularly loud rock concert!

 

Photo Credit: Steven Orfield via Google Images. cc.