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The Sound of Silence? Researchers Prove We Can Hear It
Silence might not be deafening, but it's something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people's perception of time.
The findings address the debate of whether people can hear more than sounds, which has puzzled philosophers for centuries.
"We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound—it's the absence of sound," said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in philosophy and psychology. "Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear."
The team 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. In the team's new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was.
The fact that these silence-based illusions produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence just as they hear sounds, the researchers said.
[...] "There's at least one thing that we hear that isn't a sound, and that's the silence that happens when sounds go away," said co-author Ian Phillips, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. "The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too."
The findings establish a new way to study the perception of absence, the team said.
Includes a two-minute video [youtu.be] with a brief explanation and demonstration for your ears.
Journal Reference:
Rui Zhe Goh, Ian B. Phillips, and Chaz Firestone, The perception of silence, PNAS, July 10, 2023, 120 (29) e2301463120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301463120 [doi.org]
