Diary: (1) John Oakes on Silence
Anechoic Chamber at Orfield Laboratories. Photo by Julian Walter
If you’ve ever been stuck in an elevator with someone for an extended period, you’ll know that to begin a conversation is obligatory. To refrain from talking to another person when you’re in unexpectedly close proximity for more than a few minutes is just about impossible, particularly in a potentially perilous situation. It wouldn’t be sensible, it wouldn’t be polite, it would be perceived as hostile and strange. Silence threatens because it evokes nonexistence.
During the third week of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, police in Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, and Rostov-on-Don arrested anti-war activists who held up blank pieces of paper. Protesters held empty signs in Hong Kong in 2020 and in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities in 2022. If critical words are forbidden, there is nothing to say. And yet saying nothing becomes unacceptable, and an empty sign instantly conveys the substance of an absence.
One of the quietest places on earth is in the middle of the United States in Minneapolis, in the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs, an acoustical consulting laboratory. At one point, it held the Guinness record for the quietest place on the planet. The room has a sound level of negative thirteen decibels. By comparison, normal hearing starts at zero decibels. The sound of breathing is about ten decibels, and the rustle of leaves is about a hundred times as loud, twenty decibels. The room in Minneapolis is so thoroughly sound absorbent that if someone turns away while speaking to you the high frequencies are stripped out of their voice. Sound waves can’t travel around their head. Your balance is thrown off due to the inability of your senses to calibrate the evenness of the floors and the distance of the walls.
The room was built to test the sound levels of various commercial products, and it still is used to test, say, the noisiness of a certain dishwasher. As word of its existence leaked out, the lab had so many inquiries that Steve Orfield, the owner, eventually opened it up to tours. “You experience all sensations at once,” he says of visiting the anechoic chamber. “What happens when people become minimally exposed to their world?,” he asks. “Outside of our human perception all we have are dreams.”
The building was once the home of Studio 80, one of the great recording studios of the Midwest. Bob Dylan recorded part of the album Blood on the Tracks here, and Prince and Cat Stevens also recorded in the studio. The 1980 disco classic “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc. was crafted here. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Now it is best known for its prodigious output of silence. Orfield tells me that the longest anyone has stayed in the room is two hours. In an arbitrary bit of goal setting, I opt to match the record. It seems hubris to try to outdo this span. It is an odd sort of record in any case—a kind of resolute nonachievement.
The anechoic chamber is located deep within the laboratory. The specially constructed bunker-within-a-bunker is windowless, not quite bare, but bizarre, unlike any room I’ve seen before. It doesn’t seem large, about eight by ten by twelve feet, but the thickness of its walls, floor, and ceiling nearly doubles its interior volume. Three tractor trailers were required to move the heavy walls and door, insulation, springs, and related padding to this spot. Thick fiberglass foam wedges on the walls trap sound waves. A plain metal desk chair sits at the center; bare bulbs hang from the ceiling. Wooden particleboard suspended on airline cables serves as the floor. It bounces slightly as I walk across it, as though I’m traversing a stiff trampoline. The combined effect is destabilizing in the extreme.
Mike Role, the pony-tailed laboratory manager, shows me how to open the massive, three-foot-thick door, “in case you panic.” Why would I panic? He tells me he plans to turn off the lights—not something I’d considered. It will be as complete a sensory fast as I can imagine. I practice opening the metal-lined door, which requires bracing myself against the floor and pulling with both hands. I focus on remembering the exit’s position relative to the chair so that when the moment of panic comes, before the dark thoroughly digests me, I can shoot straight for the door. I settle myself in the chair and Role says, “See you in a couple of hours.” He swings the door shut (it makes no sound that I can hear) and the lights go out.
At first there is a big smile on my face. At last I am traveling on the highway to emptiness. My second thought is that I won’t make it. I’ve seen too many scary movies, and I fear hallucinating. A phantom hand on my shoulder, something brushing against my leg. What if I get a cramp? It is pitch black, so black I can’t see my hand an inch from my face, so black there is no difference between eyes open and eyes closed. After a few minutes, the numbers on my watch start to glow faintly—something I’d never before noticed that they did—and I remove it from my wrist and place it face down on the floor.
I feel a light pressure blanketing my body. The air itself seems heavier. Of course, there is no pressure—we experience sound pressure as loudness, and there is none, less than none. What I perceive is what my mind tells me I should be perceiving. The iconoclastic composer, poet, and mycologist John Cage, who also spent time in an anechoic chamber, wrote that sounds occur whether or not we purposefully create them, but it is only in conscious silence that we discover our connection to everything around us.
Read Part Two, coming soon!
John Oakes is publisher of The Evergreen Review and co-founder and editor-at-large for OR Books. This post is drawn from his new book, The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without, to be published later this month.
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I think I read about this room, many many years ago. It captivated me. I think I read that somebody had spent time in it and began to be aware of a strange high-pitched electrical sound, which he guessed was his nervous system.
I'm looking forward to seeing if you felt it too!