To probe whether we actually “hear” silence, the researchers adapted a series of well-established auditory illusions used by experimental psychologists to show that the mind reacts to silence in similar ways as it does to sound. If silence isn’t really a sound, and yet it turns out that we can hear it, then hearing is more than just sound.” And yet it often feels like we can hear it. “Silence, whatever it is, is not a sound,” says Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins and co-author of the paper. Vision is the light that reaches our eyes touch is about what comes into contact with our body and hearing has to do with sound. ![]() The conundrum the group took on relates more generally to the question of how sensory perception works-and what happens in its absence-which has long bothered philosophers and psychologists. A group of interdisciplinary researchers at Johns Hopkins University set up an experiment that shows that, indeed, our brain actively perceives silence in the same way it hears sound. ![]() The challenge reduces to just a few questions: Does the brain actually “hear” silence as an input processed by its auditory system in the same way it does a car horn? Or does the organ instead infer these empty spaces by inserting place markers between sounds that are then perceived as the silent bits?Ī study published on July 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA figured out a way to answer those questions. The term “deafening silence” is even a common figure of speech.ĭisentangling the way we perceive silence is like a Zen koan for neuroscientists-they must literally confront the sound of one hand clapping. Silence is integral to our everyday experience: the awkward pause in a conversation, the second after a thunderclap, the moment after a piece of music ends before the applause begins. But those sounds are inevitably punctuated with silent pauses that mark an absence of acoustic waves. The way we traditionally think of listening is that we hear a noise, a song, our friend’s voice, a car honking. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” “There is always something to see, something to hear. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” Cage later said. ![]() Then he bowed and left the stage.Īs Cage put it, 4'33″ was a “silent piece.” The composer wanted to push the audience members to listen to the other sounds that surrounded them. He opened and shut the lid before sitting for another two minutes and 40 seconds and then did so again for a final interval of one minute and 20 seconds. Tudor set a stopwatch for 33 seconds and sat in front of the piano without touching the keys. Most people could play the piece with equal skill. Doing so did not require enormous jumps with the right hand. At a concert hall near Woodstock, N.Y., in August 1952, the pianist David Tudor played John Cage’s three-movement composition 4'33″.
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