Wednesday, January 27, 2010

In That Easy Silence That You Make For Me




The quietest place in the world? The anechoic chamber of Orfield Labs in Minneapolis. It's a room within a room within a room - a six-sided steel-insulated chamber on springs, surrounded by a five-sided steel-insulated chamber, surrounded by a larger room with 12-inch walls made out of concrete. (And the smallest room is also filled with wedges made out of fiberglass.) So: enter the space, and you hear -9.4 dB. Or rather: you don't hear, because the low threshold of human hearing is around 0 dB.

That's a quiet room - but not without a certain music of its own?

John Cage says:
"Going into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, I expected to hear no sound at all, because it was a room made as silent as possible. But in that room I heard two sounds. And I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge … and said, There’s something wrong, there’re two sounds in that room, and he said describe them, and I did, one was high and one was low, and he said, the high one was my nervous system … and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that … I was making music unintentionally continuously.”

1 comment:

  1. THIS IS AWESOME. Do they let the unwashed public go in there? Because I want in.

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