Silence Is Worth Your Time

Theme Music
This is Sound School. The podcast with the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom. I’m Rob Rosenthal. 

I live in sound. In my house, music is always on. Or the news. 

In the car or on the bus, it’s podcasts. Same with planes. 

When I’m outside, here on Cape Cod, the wind, the waves, bells ringing on the channel buoys, fog horns, and all the birds. Cape Cod is a waypoint on the Atlantic Flyway so lots of migrating birds here in the spring. 

Sound of peepers fades in.

Also, in the spring, there’s these guys. Little frogs. Peepers.  I love the dissonance. 

Peepers – Ends cold. 

Even though I’m very “sound centric,” give me some silence and I’m just as happy. In fact, I sometimes crave silence.  No talking. No radio. No music. No podcasts. And by silence I guess I mean “quiet” since it’s hard to achieve absolute silence. There’s always something making sound. As proof, listen to this. 

Silence for a few seconds

I’m being a little tricky. I didn’t play any sound. So, what you heard, that’s the sound where you are. I’m guessing it’s not absolute silence but hopefully it’s quiet enough so that I’m coming through loud and clear. Even the silent parts. 

Silence for a few seconds

Given how much I appreciate quiet, I was surprised to learn this last fall in an episode of Unexplainable, the science podcast from Vox. 

Clip - Noam – Erin Westgate used to be an optimist. 

Erin - When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop wellbeing interventions to actually make people's lives happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh my goodness, I'm so busy. I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think. 

Noam - So Erin recruited a whole bunch of people, and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence. 

Erin - And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better. 

Noam - They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was gonna try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead. 

Erin - So like someone throwing up, nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to the sounds of people vomiting, nails on the chalkboard et cetera, rather than simply sit in silence. 

Rob – Is that you? Are you that person? 

Noam – Ahhhhh. Definitely not. 

This is Noam Hassenfeld. He’s the host of Unexplainable. 

Noam - I wouldn't say I love silence. Uh, so I identify with some of the people in that research and that I often find silence uncomfortable and making this episode was in part kind of a desire to get more comfortable with silence.

Rob – What about silence makes you uncomfortable? 

Noam - I guess the same thing that makes everyone uncomfortable is that it's an unstructured space. And I think… it can be difficult to have to structure your entire experience on your own and not… be listening to something, be listening to music, be talking to someone, have something structure your thoughts like art or movies or a book, to be fully on your, fully autonomous. It asks a lot of you.

To be sure, Noam says he loves a good, long hike up a mountain, getting to the top, and taking it all in – the view AND the quiet but, mostly he likes to fill his ears with music – he’s a musician and plays drums. Plus he composes music for Unexplainable. So, silence isn’t the first sound he’s looking for. (music fades in) But wait, is silence a sound? 

Clip - Raja - So one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt is like when I was at a symphony and the symphony was working up to a kind of crescendo and like right when it hit the crescendo it ended. And the moment before the applause it just kind of like hit by this experience and I definitely felt silence like hit me across the face. 

Noam - Raja Goh is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. And that experience that he had at the symphony, it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing, like the absence of sound, but he felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling? 

Raja - So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence, whereas other people argue that silence is just the absence of experience. 

Noam - It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions, like what is silence?

This episode on silence was part of a four-part series Noam and the crew at Unexplainable called  “The Sound Barrier.” They explored hearing problems like tinnitus which I thought was pronounced tin-EYE-tus. Either way, it’s a debilitating ringing in the ears. 

Another episode dove into audio illusions. Sort of like optical illusions. When you hear one thing but it’s really something else. Another explored the sound of space. And, of course, silence. 

Silence for a few seconds

In a show about silence it makes sense to have some silence, right? If you’re producing a show about The Clash, you’d play songs from The Clash, of course. If you’re producing a story on whale song, you’d want listeners to hear whale song in the piece. 

Problem is, silence is an anathema in a sound story. A listener might think they accidentally hit the pause button. Or, maybe the file is corrupt or the producers goofed somehow. 

Most radio stations have alarms that go off when there’s “dead air.” Back when I worked at radio stations, people used to say “Dead air is bad juju.” 

Noam was aware of the problem with silence. But he not only wanted to have moments of silence in the episode, he wanted to lean into it. 

Noam - I actually had a goal, which is… I wanted people to have the feeling that I think often get when walking around. Which is that, which is just, oh my God, all of these sounds are awesome. Just listen to all of the sounds… And it's difficult. I don't want to say like I'm sort of like, I can go out and just like listen to the cars drive by and feel excited by it. But I really wanted people to get to the end of the episode and… I wanted them to hear my silence and their silence together. Like the ambient sound of my studio and the ambient of their kitchen or their porch or their yard or their street, wherever they are, and just have this idea of, oh, there are tons of sounds in this space and they're layered in interesting ways. 

Noam knew he couldn’t throw listeners into the deep end of silence. Like “Today on Unexplainable, silence.” And then toss in a long stretch of silence. 

Silence for a couple of seconds

Instead, he did what I’ve been doing. Easing into the silence by sprinkling bits and bobs of silence here and there throughout the episode. 

Noam - And the other thing I was thinking of while I was doing it…. What I need to score with is silence… There was obviously some music in the episode, but I started thinking about scoring with silence. So often where maybe I would have music come in and you'd have a little bit of, like a little post of music… here we had sort of a post of silence.

Erin - And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to the sounds of people vomiting, nails on the chalkboard et cetera, rather than simply sit in silence. 

Silence

Noam – At this point, Erin was just morbidly curious. 

That was the first moment of silence in the episode. About four to five seconds worth which is kinda long considering how infrequently silence is heard in an audio story. 

 As the episode progressed, the “post of silence” would sometimes get longer. Like the next moment in the story where there’s five to six seconds of silence. 

Clip – Noam – So, if silence is a real thing we can hear, what does it sound like? 

Silence for 5-6 seconds. 

Noam – To find out, I went to one of the quietest places on earth. 

By that he means an anechoic chamber. It’s a room designed by sound engineers to be completely quiet. No sound. Zero. 

Noam wasn’t the first person to make a pilgrimage to an anechoic chamber. John Cage most famously did so in 1951. 

Side note: I’ve listened to several stories about silence over the years. Almost all of them reference the story about John Cage’s experience in one of these chambers. It’s legendary. Mostly because it led to one of the most pivotal moments in music composition. Truly revolutionary.  

Cage was an avant-garde composer. One time he saw Robert Rauschenberg’s work called “White Painting.” And, the painting is just that. Three canvases painted white. And at first it seemed to Cage that there was nothing there. But upon closer look he could see texture and flecks of paint and the little shadows cast by those flecks. In the nothingness there was something. And he wondered, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Is that true for sound?” 

That’s when he got permission to stand in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. 

Clip – John Cage - I heard in that room two sounds, one was high and one was low, and I thought there was something wrong with the room. 

Noam - Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was a circulatory system. 

Cage – There’s no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside. 

That led Cage to conclude there’s no such thing as silence. There’s always sound. Which led him to that revolutionary composition. 4:33 – a piece four minutes and thirty three seconds long. 

The performer does nothing. The audience sits in silence. Whatever sound is made during those four and a half minutes is the composition. 

Noam first heard the piece – or maybe I should say – experienced the piece when he, too, was at Harvard. A freshman. Taking a class called “Sound, Noise, and Music.” His teacher told the class “we’re going to perform the piece together.” And there they sat. Listening. 

Noam wasn’t impressed. 

Noam - Obviously this is stupid like modern art is dumb. And then you kind of realize what he's trying to do. And it does really shift your perspective on what sound can be. And if you can find something interesting in silence, I mean c’mon, you can find something interesting in anything.

Clip – Announcer - Please welcome our soloist, William Marks. 

Applause

Noam - In one recording I found an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bow tie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys. 

Sound cover being close. 

Noam - He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor-style flourish, presses go, (beep) and just sits there for four minutes and 33 seconds. 

Sound of the room for 14 seconds

That, by the way, was the longest stretch of silence up until that point in the episode. Nearly 14 seconds. An eternity in podcasting and radio. 

Noam knew that the first 20 minutes or so of the episode would be setting the table for a long swath of silence. The question was, how long could that silence be?  

Noam - It was something that made me very nervous. I was very worried that people would either think there's a glitch or they would roll their eyes. 

At first Noam thought, maybe I’ll put in a minute of silence. 

Noam –I think when I first tracked my narration at the end I left like 45 seconds in the mic running. And it was always gonna be some amount of room tone running, like it wasn't just gonna be digital zero…. And that felt way too long to me… .

Then, Noam had a conversation with his editor, Jorge Just. (hore-hay and the j is hard like jump)

Noam - He was just like, “However much silence you're gonna put at the end of this episode, I'm gonna say, put more at the end of this episode”… Like I kept thinking “Oh, it’s too much silence” and he’s like “more silence. Just put a lot!”

And then Joanna Solotaroff, who also edited the episode, was like oh, maybe you should just do four minutes and 33 seconds.

Clip – Noam -  right now, I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet, it's pretty still, but wherever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room or the idling traffic as you cross the street or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent light. So, I don't know, maybe this is weird. But what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're gonna have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm gonna have mine. Let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear. 

Silence. The whole 4:33 will play but from time to time, Noam and I will chat. 

Rob (after 30 seconds of silence) – In the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of recorded silence, 

Noam – sniffle.

there’s a rustle of pages. There’s a sniffle. A cough. 

Noam – Cough

Rob – A breath. A sniffle. A shift in the chair. Exhale. There’s some movement and an exhale. A sniffle. A knock. Someone opens and closes the door. Somebody else says not right now. I suppose that’s you. There’s a mic adjustment. An adjustment in the seat. Maybe pencil on paper. I’m not sure. Movement. And some sort of clicking, possibly. Right at the very end. I’m not sure what that was. Did you purposefully add those sounds? 

Noam – Yeah. Some of them were purposeful. Some of them were normally sitting there. 

Noam – Shifting in chair. 

Noam – And I wanted it to be almost indistinguishable from what a person might hear if they were in their own room. So I just envisioned someone listening to it in a relatively quiet space and then hearing a rustle or a click or a cough or a sniffle or a knock on the door and wondering whether it was in their space and then having that moment of, “Oh. I'm in a space and I'm listening to someone else's space and our spaces have different levels of slight ambient noise. Isn't that interesting?”

Noam – Exhale

Noam - And how does that impact everything I listen to? How does the basic noise level of my space relate when I'm listening to music or a podcast? Is that part of the music or the podcast? Or is it something different? Or does it add together?

Noam – Silence. Shift in chair. Exhale 11 seconds of silence. Sniffle.

Rob – Well, I have a weird thought for you. I wondered if you included some sounds in the silence in order for people to recognize the silence. 

Noam – Yes! When I started this, I was like, oh, maybe I should just make four minutes and 33 seconds of digital zero, right? Then people will purely hear the four minutes and 33 second in their own space. They'll just be listening to their space. 

But I wanted, I don't know, I wanted them to exactly have sort of some idea of the texture of silence… it reflects back on the silence. Like, digital zero is not interesting. 

Clip – Silence. Knock. Door opens. Noam says “not right now.” Door closes. More silence for about 48 seconds. 

Outro Music starts. 

Noam – That was four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. And this was the third episode of our series, “The Sound Barrier.” We’d love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. (Fades under and fades out)

Noam - As soon as I finished the whole series, I went outside and I just stood on my back porch of my apartment here in Somerville in Massachusetts. And I just listened. I actually, honestly, I went inside and I was listening to a podcast, which is, I'm like always listening to podcasts. And then I was like, “dude, you just did this thing on silence. Like, what are you doing? Why are you filling all this space with podcasts?” 

And so I went out outside or I would, And so. I was listening to this podcast, I took off my headphones, and I just sort of stood there and listened. And I don't know, I was like really astounded by all the different things I could hear. And also at different levels, you know, like I could, I remember hearing the wind… my neighbor across the way smoking a cigarette… the leaves blowing in the wind, and then I heard footsteps, walking through the leaves that felt like a little bit further away. And then, you know, you have these sort of moments where the traffic is going, and then the traffic stopping as the lights turn red. And it just like you, I closed my eyes and it's almost I could, I could like map my neighborhood in sound… It was a very cool experience. 

Rob – Um, a last thought. I was just up in Provincetown for a little winter break. And, whenever I’m up there, I always visit the Provincetown Art Museum. And there was a piece there called “Piano Sketch Number One: Shimmer” by an artist named Tess Oldfield. And basically it was a piano... And basically it was timed to start playing every 30 minutes. Why I’m telling you this is because there was a poem on the piano. And there was a line in the poem that I wanted to run by you just to see what you had to say…. Silence is not absence. 

Noam - Yeah, I mean, I think that is a very succinct way to put it… it's.. just a reminder to be awed at the vastness and unexplainable-ness of the universe we don't understand. And it's also a metaphor for, I don't know, what we can do, that we can fill the space or that we make anything interesting. Like that's sort of our superpower as humans, that we can fill the space or we can imbue meaning into spaces that just seem empty, that everything has something to tell us.

10 seconds of silence. 

Theme music 

Thanks to Noam Hassenfeld of the Unexplainable podcast for talking all things silence. 

Heads up people. There is a Transom Festival on the horizon. Ira Glass, Al Letson, Erica Heilman, Jay Allison, Bianca Gaiever…. All and many others, are descending on Woods Hole to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Transom. Think of it as a big radio, podcasting, audio storytelling party. 

The Transom Festival happening this September. The 17th – 19th to be exact. You’ll fill your days with listening sessions, masterclass workshops, performances and hopefully a swim or two in the ocean. Yes. The water is still warm then. Rumor has it, I might even lead a bike trip on the Shining Sea Bikeway. 

Keep an eye peeled on Transom dot org for ticket and lodging information. Of course, I’ll keep you updated, too.

This is Sound School. My production partners are PRX and Transom. My fellow travelers in radio are Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Jerrett. 

I’m Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening.    

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