The question of whether people can actually hear silence has occupied philosophers for a long time. A scientific study is now providing initial clues.
can we hear silence Three researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore investigated this question. The result: Apparently, people process the absence of noise in a similar way to audible noise itself. For the philosopher Rui Zhe Goh and his two colleagues, this means that we can actually hear silence. Their study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
Experiments with acoustic perception
For the study, the three scientists used experiments to evoke acoustic perceptions. Chaz Firestone, psychologist and head of the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory, explains the idea in a press release: “If silence can produce the same illusions as sound, then this could provide evidence that we actually hear silence.” .
For the experiment, short audio recordings were played to 1,000 subjects. They heard everyday noises such as the sounds of crowded restaurants, markets or train stations.
In order to test how the participants processed silence, sequences with silence were built into the audio recordings. In the first attempt, the noise pause came very suddenly. In the second attempt there were two interruptions in quick succession.
Both pauses in noise lasted the same length overall. But the test persons felt that the one pause was longer than the two short, consecutive interruptions.
Silence is also an auditory event
In 2019, researchers investigated a similar phenomenon. They had first played one long and then two short beeps in succession to their test subjects – here too, the continuous tone seemed longer to the test subjects. Their study was published in the journal ScienceDirect.
It was not previously known that such distortions in perception can also occur in silence. Until now, researchers had assumed that only noise could trigger such an illusion.
The three researchers interpret their results as proof that silence is also an auditory event. They assume that our auditory system processes silence in the same way as acoustic signals.
Further research planned
Firestone explains the motivation for the interdisciplinary research: “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can actually hear. However, there was no scientific study that directly addressed this question.”
Next, the research team from Johns Hopkins University wants to investigate whether subjects can hear silence even if they don’t hear other sounds first. Because the scientists are aware that the silence may only have become “audible” because it interrupts the previous noises and is also replaced by subsequent tones. The question of whether silence itself is audible therefore remains unanswered for the time being.
Sources used: PNAS, ScienceDirect, Johns Hopkins University press release
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