a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today’s digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.

Silence is not merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is a positive, a complete world to itself.

On the afternoon in question, at approximately 4:17, the downtown local screeched into the station, across the tracks from us. Even one train—with its steel wheels mashing steel rail, brakes woefully lacking in grease, ventilators roaring as they struggle to keep the temperature of both motors and passengers in check—hits the ears like an extrusion of New York, in all the city’s unapologetic whaddya, its in-your-face aggression. The level of sound it generates will set babies crying.

and at the same instant the downtown express entered the station, its seven burgundy-colored cars thundering shrieking roaring at 40 mph between the slowing locals. Immediately thereafter the uptown express, as if anxious not to miss the party, showed up around the curve from Seventy-second Street and blasted into a station already occupied by three other trains, two moving, one now stopped.

I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms. Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing.

The noise was immense. It was gut-pounding. It smacked the cosmos. Without thinking I clamped the flat of my palms to both ears and screwed my face into the scrunched expression of a root-canal patient. I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms. Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing.

But for once something had cracked the enamel coating New Yorkers must accrete to live in this town, and I kept my ears covered, cringing at the rumble that filtered through my palms; thinking, I can’t put up with this kind of noise, day in, day out, any longer.

But for once something had cracked the enamel coating New Yorkers must accrete to live in this town, and I kept my ears covered, cringing at the rumble that filtered through my palms; thinking, I can’t put up with this kind of noise, day in, day out, any longer. I mused, This has to damage me in some way, reflected also—because that was the other wheel of this scooter of thought—I need to find somewhere quiet. And the train rumbled slower, and stopped, and the loudspeaker blatted, “Eighty-sixth, let ’em off!” and I thought no, not just quiet; what I want now is silence.

All is so cold and silent, on that farm in my mind, that the stars, shining against a sky the color of tarnished lapis, seem to give off a vibration that is not sound and not light but something in between—something that is perhaps the essence of silence itself.

But a 2006 Columbia University study measured sound generated by New York subway trains and found that the average maximum noise on subway platforms stood at 94 decibels (the decibel, or dB, being the preferred unit of noise measurement), with peaks of over 100. This is well over the volume of a fully revved-up chain saw held at arm’s length. Moreover, the CU study found, merely spending a half hour in the subway system, exposed to the average noise level of trains, would exceed safety guidelines recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization, potentially resulting in damage to one’s hearing.

Europe and North America, and by extension most of the developed world, are in the grips of a pandemic of toxic or near-toxic sound, and no one, certainly no one I know in New York, seems aware of this.

Sounds with frequencies of eight cycles per second, for example, vibrate in time with the chambers of the heart, increasing the potential for thrombosis. Seven-cycle sounds trigger a harmonic with the brain’s 9 Hz alpha-wave frequencies, causing fatigue, headaches, and nausea.

Some research even suggests that sound, and not even very loud sound, can kill on the spot. Low-frequency noise, such as that produced in large buildings by ventilation and heating ducts or wind effects, can match and resonate with the frequencies of our body cavities. Sounds with frequencies of eight cycles per second, for example, vibrate in time with the chambers of the heart, increasing the potential for thrombosis. Seven-cycle sounds trigger a harmonic with the brain’s 9 Hz alpha-wave frequencies, causing fatigue, headaches, and nausea.

He had complained for years about his neighbor Imberia Boziki, a woman who blasted music on her radio the entire evening when all Lambrinos wanted to do was listen to the news. On May 31, 1996, Lambrinos snapped. He got up from his armchair, grabbed his hunting rifle, rang Imberia’s bell and, when she answered, shot her three times, dead.

Lambrinos was a retired farmer on the Greek island of Zákinthos. He had complained for years about his neighbor Imberia Boziki, a woman who blasted music on her radio the entire evening when all Lambrinos wanted to do was listen to the news. On May 31, 1996, Lambrinos snapped. He got up from his armchair, grabbed his hunting rifle, rang Imberia’s bell and, when she answered, shot her three times, dead.

Intensity, while it has concrete bearing on what sound will do to the hearing apparatus, is not the same metric as perceived loudness, which doubles with every ten-decibel increase, so that going from 40 to 50 decibels equals a rise of 100 percent.

The first lesson is that, at a safe distance from the launchpad, the world’s greatest noise can be matched by volumes I find on the Broadway train.

I am interested to note that the idea of silence is conceived of almost wholly as an absence, a withholding or subtraction from a presumed normalcy of sound. This strikes me instinctively as wrong, or at least prejudicial.

but in a society that pays no attention to aural environments, a culture that Greg Miller calls “functionally deaf,” I took it for granted, I suppose, as sound-the-city-makes.

in fact it doesn’t register to my ears as a big change, another indication of how broadly tuned our hearing is.

I have to remember that this is not a mathematical but a logarithmic boost, an increase in volume 7,943 times ambient levels.

When I switch them on, something impressive happens. The roar of New York, the monster-breath, stops dead.

Bruce R. Smith’s study of English sound environments in the 1500s backs me up by affirming that, except when bells rang, dogs barked, or thunder rolled, no one in those more active, noisier times was exposed to sounds louder than 60 dB.

The girls labored twelve hours straight at Boott’s looms, and the noise was so great that if an accident happened—if a girl lost an arm in the carding machine, for example—no one could hear her scream. To cope with this and other problems, the workers evolved a sign language to communicate over the din of looms. When at last the machinery was switched off at the end of the workday, a guide says, the relative silence was so unnerving that some of the new girls started to scream, from shock instead of pain this time, and could not stop.

It is a familiar paradox that the new technologies of production and communication that made their world so much noisier also provided the wealth, learning, and leisure time that allowed the middle class to first recognize, then revile, the ruckus that made them rich.

“Bravura noise-making was an essential signal of masculine identity for much of this era,” writes Peter Bailey, an authority on sound in Victorian England.

“Bravura noise-making was an essential signal of masculine identity for much of this era,” writes Peter Bailey, an authority on sound in Victorian England. The insistence, on the part of Florence Nightingale and others, that sick men needed quiet to heal accentuated the link between impotence, silence, and the home.

For the definition of what constitutes music, then and now, was always a political one.

Looking over my Kawa notes, adding up the average decibels and dividing by time, it tots up to roughly 50 decibels for every waking minute. If the noise of local traffic, at around 50 dB, can lead to increased heart problems, as some studies indicate, then we are not just deprived of silence.

For a few seconds I think I have found it. For a few seconds, once water has filled my ears and the gurgle of flooding canals has ceased, I hear no sounds in upper, middle, or lower frequencies. In my mind I shake my fists triumphantly, like a boxer who has knocked out a tough rival in the twelfth. Overall, I feel a full, tight awareness of nothing—a sort of presence-of-absence not that different from the split-second bubble of noise-canceling I got from the QCIII headphones on Columbus Circle.

The lust for total silence has only grown stronger since I first defined it in the sub way weeks ago. The boost in its signal strength might be a result of how much more focused on sounds and their absence I have become because of these explorations. But if it were only being sick of high volumes, then my twenty-four hours alone on the Cape with a minimum of artificial noise of any kind, and maybe a good scream à la Lowell mill-girls, should have cleared the desire for silence. Yet the need is still in me, ribald and growing, like one of those hospital bacteria that feed off what should kill them.

But I also sensed that this degree of quiet was too much. It was alien. Even against the backdrop of my own hoarse breath, the sounds my feet made walking, this sky, these mountains, this desert, were excessively big. They seemed to me a presence, an overpowering entity definable only by what they were not. The enormity of comprehending them overwhelmed my resources.

I remember making a lot of noise then—kicking at rocks, singing and talking to myself, as I turned back toward Tamanrasset—aware, at a gut level, that every crunch of boot, every trash top-forties song I warbled, was an act of defiance, a proof that amid all this emptiness I continued to exist.

I am intrigued by the fact that the quietest room in New England has apparently been destroyed in favor of housekeeping equipment emitting a symphony of loud mechanical sounds.

silence did not and could not exist, and what we as humans needed to do was to listen harder to the sounds of our lives, because they were music as well.

For Johnson silence is not a goal in itself but a medium through which the mind of the listener can achieve its potential as a creator of personal music.

The double beat after nymph helps us understand that Hamlet regards Ophelia simultaneously as seductress, mythic figure, and, because emphasis can be ironic, repressed teen-vamp. Finally, the sequence of pauses, which twist the whole sentence into a highly stylized insult, shows us the prince is hugely tense, emotionally involved with the girl, and hostile to her at the same time.

Silence not only creates the core rhythm, the time frame for the piece, it does something that is equally important: it crushes the time frame in which both artist and audience lived before.

But even the most sophisticated comedy works the same way a crude joke does, in that it’s based on the void created when a normal order is shattered; a void marked, even forged by silence. Here too, in the lightest lines, as in the pause between heartbeats, lies a faint hint of the greatest order-shattering event of all.

What I am learning now is that far from being empty, space is full of stuff. And some of it even qualifies as sound.

“Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond,” trumpets an article on the website Science.com. The discovery was made in 2003 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which attributes the sound to a black hole in the Perseus cluster, the on-ramps of which spin off gas in waves strong enough to warm interstellar space. The tone thus generated stands 57 octaves below the middle-C note on a piano, and is therefore inaudible to the human ear. It has been sounding across the universe for 2.5 billion years.

This is because, I think now, silence in each case—between notes on an organ, between WIMP strikes on an argon nucleus—is what measures out the great emptiness between spatial events. After all, we use time to measure space; time, according to some philosophers, is simply a rhythm we ascribe to distance.

Yet he finds this state less silent than when he is wearing his artificial receptors in a soundproof environment.

“You’ve heard of the phantom-limb effect,” he says, “this is the same thing.” In other words, the brain, knowing it cannot rely on the implants, invents what it longs to hear.

Otoacoustic emissions—sounds generated by your own hearing system—are a condition everyone’s flesh is to some degree heir to, simply because the hearing apparatus, from ear to brain, works not only as a receptor but as an amplifier.

In other words, a decrease in audible sound due to increasing deafness prompts the brain first to amplify, then generate data to palliate this apparent lack.

Is it possible that humans can never find silence because their brains and/or their nervous systems, conditioned by a long history of hearing, expect some kind of sound and therefore, when sounds are absent, make up their own?

In those ancient pullulating seas, the otolith hooked up with the swim bladder via a bone not unlike the ossicles linking our inner and outer hearing membranes. Finally the ensemble of bladder and otolith became, in certain species, a functioning ear, picking up and analyzing vibrations that the bladder received from mechanical motions of water outside the fish’s body.

An International Whaling Commission survey found that underwater noise levels have doubled every ten years over the past six decades in some areas of the world’s oceans. A survey off Point Sur in California showed a 15 dB, or thirty-two-fold, increase in ocean noise between 1950 and 1975.

Various surveys have measured the near-field power of such events and they are huge: a large tanker generates up to 200 dB, active sonar hits 180, dredging and drilling 185. Research by Linda Weilgart of Dalhousie University in Canada estimates that active naval sonar in the Pacific affects 3.9 million square miles of ocean.

There are roughly 30 million hearing-impaired people in the United States, including a third of those over sixty-five. A third of the total blame excessive noise for the problem, according to the American Tinnitus Association. The number of Americans with tinnitus, according to the ATA, tops 50 million, of which 10 to 12 million suffer so badly they must seek medical help.

The Cypriots responded with silence. The Egyptian took this as assent, or at worst ambivalence, and landed. Cypriot soldiers attacked the commandos, killing fifteen of them.

In sum, Apaches turn silent when the situation is ambiguous, unpredictable, potentially dangerous even.

A study by the anthropologist Keith Basso of Apache subjects lists the circumstances wherein participants routinely adopt silent behavior. They include meeting strangers, early stages of courtship, being with “someone for whom you sing,” sitting with the bereaved, and greeting children just returned from Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools. Insults too are met with silence. In sum, Apaches turn silent when the situation is ambiguous, unpredictable, potentially dangerous even.

But slaughter and disaster, generally speaking, are not normal. They are even, in theory, avoidable, and every voice connected with them might have something to teach us, could we but hear it.

It is the quiet of the exploited: of slaves, of indentured children, of women shackled and abused by custom; the silence of those rendered helpless and unable to express themselves because of poverty and hunger, homelessness and despair.

The LRAD, for Long Range Acoustic Device, looks like a large, six-sided drum set on its edge. It’s a tremendously powerful megaphone, designed to deliver 150 dB of sound, fifty times the pain threshold, along a tightly focused and directable beam.

During five days in September 2005, the Israeli air force, flying over Gaza, triggered twenty-nine sonic booms so powerful that they smashed windows, cracked walls, and once even shook up people in Tel Aviv, almost fifty miles away.

Nothing else was left. Sound squeezed out every other sense impression. He found himself cowering on hands and knees, hands over his ears, unable to think or do anything but scream because of it. When the explosions finally stopped, he found he had soiled himself.

For another form of hostile sound exists, the volume of which is not necessarily high, but that is pervasive as household dust. It is the noise of useless information.

Two hours of prime-time TV on the NBC affiliate in Boston, between 6 and 8 p.m., include on average 130 discrete news and also commercial story lines

Robert Putnam in his account of solitude in America, Bowling Alone, correlated the rise in TV viewing particularly with a massive drop, sometimes on the order of 50 percent, in community activities and civic participation.

Because overload works in favor of the commercial interests that in practical terms control such societies. This is a teleological argument, based on the good fit between interest, on one hand, and outcome on the other. It is not a conspiracy theory, because the concurrent rise of both info overload and the electronic information society happened in organic fashion, as a matter of expediency, without anyone planning or even being aware of it.

Most significantly, information overload must deteriorate independent thought itself.

Man makes stories and thinks creatively via a three-part process, the first element of which is a strong silence, similar to the silence before the curtain lifts on a stage, which for a shard of a second eliminates prejudices and preceding notions and allows the coming together of concepts that prior to this instant did not exist, in the mind of the thinker at least.

Most significantly, information overload must deteriorate independent thought itself. That’s because of the factor I came to grips with in reference to making stories, or music, and also in the context of SNOLAB researchers, for this factor has a hand in crafting scientific theories. Man makes stories and thinks creatively via a three-part process, the first element of which is a strong silence, similar to the silence before the curtain lifts on a stage, which for a shard of a second eliminates prejudices and preceding notions and allows the coming together of concepts that prior to this instant did not exist, in the mind of the thinker at least.

If silence is the prerequisite to the three-step process of independent thought, one might think it would be prized for this reason alone, but it is not. The reason for this is simple: thinking independently and creatively is perilous. Once you start to cast aside old ways of thought and leave yourself fully open to new perceptions and new ideas, you shun also and by definition the habits and beliefs on which you have so far built your life. And there is no guarantee that what you come up with now will reconfirm the validity of previous assumptions.

The nothing of silence, of utter darkness, scares the bejesus out of people, precisely because it is no respecter of preexisting worldviews; even the educated professionals who excoriate noise in their daily lives seldom if ever go much further to shun it than by insulating their offices, playing relaxation music, holidaying on Mount Desert.

The anechoic chamber in this building is rated to minus 9.4 decibels, A-weighted, 69,000 times lower in intensity than the quiet of the conference room and eight times lower than zero decibels. Orfield reminds me that zero decibels is not an absolute measurement but simply the point below which a person with unimpaired hearing no longer perceives sound.

Some who have spent time in less extreme chambers than Orfield’s have reported feelings of panic, disorientation, dizziness, and nausea; the last two being further indication of the tight connection between balance and hearing. Others who have gone in alone and in darkness to experience the chamber as a form of sensory deprivation environment have demanded to be let out after only a short time inside.

The overall feeling is one of great potential because the underlying fact is darkness, an absence of visual input; something that, despite the pyrotechnics in my eyelids, I can fill with what I want. My body will fill it with the colors and motions of its own and singular life.

I find that, far from getting more anxious, I grow steadily happier with this silence of the anechoic chamber. After all, this may be as close as I will ever get to perfect silence. It feels soft and comforting.

I am rested and relaxed in a way that I was not after the isolation tank, for example, although that was the effect the tank was supposed to have. I really would have liked to stay longer in Orfield’s chamber. My research is not yet over, but somehow I know already that nothing in my life will ever be as quiet again.

The Georgian philosopher Sergi Avaliani has suggested that in the absence of objective absolutes, humans have invented what he terms “pseudoabsolutes,” which we think of as be-alls and end-alls to measure other stuff against even though they are not in fact total.

Everyone’s auditory system, apparently, makes noise, but the question remains, is it always audible to oneself? If so—if the auditory faculty comes down to a version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, whereby the act of hearing in itself changes what can be heard—then my search is over. Silence cannot be because within the instruments through which I must measure it, a total absence of sound cannot exist.

It’s tough to speculate that silence, absolute silence, might not exist if in “the quietest place on earth” as certified by the Guinness organization I hear my own auditory system. Or some damn thing. Everyone’s auditory system, apparently, makes noise, but the question remains, is it always audible to oneself? If so—if the auditory faculty comes down to a version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, whereby the act of hearing in itself changes what can be heard—then my search is over. Silence cannot be because within the instruments through which I must measure it, a total absence of sound cannot exist.

It follows, I have noted this before, that silence is how we reset meters, and timing, and all the rhythms and measurements that flow from such notions. Without such absolutes, without the idea of an absolute at which measurement ends, we would have no starting point for nor end to our philosophies. No dropping back to zero, no de-clutching of our geared structures, no end to gauging, no reboot of madly cycling programs.

Max Picard, the Catholic philosopher, had a point when he said that perfect silence, which equals infinity, which equals the absolute, is the necessary precondition for understanding existence. In that sense, then—as crucial concept—full silence is solid and real, something that both antedates and bookends our metered selves.

As Melcher and her MEEI colleagues see it, the hearing system is not so much a linear, objective perceptual tool as it is a complex planet that certainly accepts information from outside, but that spends at least as much time modulating and filtering data, and processing them once they are perceived.

There are more [neural] pathways going down [from the brain] than up,” Melcher tells me. “It’s very different from the visual.”

One should also note that if the single rank is destroyed, but the feedback rank remains intact, total deafness results, whereas if the reverse happens, the subject is still able to hear, after a fashion, although his ability to do so is reduced by a factor of one hundred.

It seems to follow from the very blueprint of our auditory system that much of what we call “hearing” has to do with the internal bureaucracy of the auditory planet.

It seems to follow from the very blueprint of our auditory system that much of what we call “hearing” has to do with the internal bureaucracy of the auditory planet. The structure of our hearing equipment to some extent already fashions the sounds we hear.

Hearing loss and tinnitus have a high correlation,” Melcher adds. “Less coming in causes gains in amplitude inside, which continue to increase to the point that normal neuronal firing is amplified.”

It’s a classic study, carried out in the 1950s by Swedish researchers on eighty university students who did not suffer from tinnitus. They were placed individually in a soundproof room and, on coming out, asked if they heard anything. Ninety-three percent of them proved to have tinnitus in that environment.

If you can only hear it in an anechoic chamber,” she said firmly, “it’s not tinnitus.

If the bucket dredge was the actual pumping system of my heart, I reflect, then what I heard, in the most perfect silence I have sampled to date, was the engine of my own life: the thump and rhythm that are me, my very speed and timing.

Pure, untouched silence has never existed, and never will.

It would not be silence because even if we could flee or cancel out our noisome outside environment, we must always carry that environment inside us; and that environment is rich in sound. Our veins and arteries and heart are filled with blood that is of the same salinity as the seas in which our aquatic ancestors floated, and those internal waterways pound and surge like surf on the beach, and we are hardwired to pick up these liquid sounds and frequencies, sounds like my bucket dredge, precisely because we once were fish.

This would not be silence, however. It would not be silence because even if we could flee or cancel out our noisome outside environment, we must always carry that environment inside us; and that environment is rich in sound. Our veins and arteries and heart are filled with blood that is of the same salinity as the seas in which our aquatic ancestors floated, and those internal waterways pound and surge like surf on the beach, and we are hardwired to pick up these liquid sounds and frequencies, sounds like my bucket dredge, precisely because we once were fish.

We listen so hard, in fact, that our brain no longer allows for the possibility of silence.

This is the implication of what Buran and Melcher said. For the brain, there cannot be an environment without danger or prey, or void of the sound that flags them. In the absence of objective outside sound, therefore, the brain turns up the gain on its own amplification system until the buzz of our organic capacitors fills the wiring and gives our auditory sensors the input they crave.

To be perfectly silent is to be perfectly dead.

Absent the idea of absolute silence to strive toward we have no way to measure, and therefore to fight against, the torrent of noise of all descriptions with which the mass-media/consumer system floods our sensory organs. If we don’t fight against that torrent, however, we cannot think clearly. And if we cannot think clearly, we lose control over our lives.