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A garden scene. Image. — © Tim Sandle
What does silence sound like? This may seem an odd question, but research indicates that silence is something that can ‘be heard’ and that people perceive silence in different ways. This is drawn from a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people’s perception of time.
The findings consider the debate as to whether people can hear more than sounds. This is a conundrum that has long puzzled philosophers.
According to lead researcher Rui Zhe Goh, while hearing is generally considered to be the sense of hearing and thus associated with sounds, silence, whatever it is, is not a sound.
The researchers adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was.
Auditory illusions can make people hear periods of time as being longer or shorter than they actually are. One example is where one long beep seems longer than two short consecutive beeps even when the two sequences are equally long.
Based on this concept, the research used 1,000 participants, where the researchers re-working auditory illusions into what they described as the one-silence-is-more illusion. Here, people thought one long moment of silence was longer than two short moments of silence. Other silence illusions yielded the same outcomes as sound illusions.
To test this, the participants were asked to listen to soundscapes that simulated the din of busy restaurants, markets, and train stations. They then listened for periods within those audio tracks when all sound stopped abruptly, creating brief silences.
With the silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was. The silence-based illusions produced the same results as sound-based ones. This led the researchers to conclude that people hear silence in a similar way to hearing sounds.
This is based on our brains treating silences the way they treat sounds. This means there is at least one thing that we hear that is not a sound, and that is the silence that occurs when sounds go away.
The research provides the basis for additional studies into the perception of absence. As well as sound this will extend to visual disappearances and other examples of things people can perceive as being absent.
The research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “The perception of silence”.
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