DailyDirt: Listening To The Sounds of Silence (And Other Noises)
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Temporary hearing loss is not an uncommon experience after going to a loud music concert. It can almost be funny when you’re talking too loud because you can’t hear yourself, and thankfully, the ringing in your ears after a loud show usually goes away. People sometimes take their ability to hear for granted, but it’s an important sense, and here are just a few interesting links on listening that you might want to check out before you need a hearing aid.
- The world’s quietest room (AKA an anechoic chamber) is so quiet that it can cause people to start hallucinating and become disoriented by the lack of auditory feedback. Your brain is accustomed to a fair amount of background noise, so when it’s deprived of nearly all ambient sounds, you’ll find that peace and quiet are not as related as you might think. [url]
- MRI scans can measure how annoying some sounds are, and surprisingly “nails on a chalkboard” isn’t the worst. If you want to listen to “knife on a bottle” to hear the most annoying sound (out of the 74 sounds that were tested), be prepared to cringe. [url]
- People with Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) really like to listen to people whispering and making soft scratching noises. When the experience is triggered, it’s reported to feel like a “brain tingle” — and there are a bunch of YouTube channels that cater to these folks. [url]
- According to some researchers, the shape of your skull might actually influence your musical preferences. The effect is subtle, but the resonant structure around the cochlea can affect the perception of sounds. (Remember that the next time you’re thinking about buying really expensive headphones…?) [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: anechoic chamber, asmr, autonomous sensory meridian response, hearing, music, noise, quiet, senses, skull, sounds
Comments on “DailyDirt: Listening To The Sounds of Silence (And Other Noises)”
Who knew that complete silence could cause one to hallucinate? I didn’t.
Pretty interesting stuff.
Re: Re:
Technically, it’s not complete silence.. it’s the absence of any echoes… and you CAN still hear stuff like your own bodily noises, like your heart beating and breathing.
If it were complete silence, every deaf person would be insane….
Re: Re: Re:
Um, no, not ‘every’ deaf person.
Deafness doesn’t mean silence, it means not hearing, or hearing poorly. Often, being deaf means noise – constant, 24 hour a day noise.
Tinnitus can make you deaf, hard of hearing. It can isolate you, wrapped in a blanket of noise.
bad knowledge
A) come live here at 7am the Quaker oats factory over 2000 feet away has a press go off for 1.5 hrs that’s so loud i can put in ear plugs that dampen 25 db and it wont work
try the opposite having noise constantly and you will find you become a retard for lack a sleep and it will kill you
B) im just gonna move cause you need a bit of quiet
Re: bad knowledge
You do know that you can soundproof your ears right?
And if you do it right you can even sleep with them, is cheaper than soundproofing the house, plus it can go with you anywhere, no more noise problems ever.
Here is an idea.
Get this design and mold some silicon gel in that form, cover it with some textile and some foam and you are gold.
https://dutchindianblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ear-muffs1.jpg
You wouldn’t hear a bomb go off.
Foam year plugs need to be inserted deep into the ear canal, that is why manufacturers tell you to insert and hold your finger for 20 seconds until it expands inside, else they don’t work so great, I know I use them everyday and it hurts my right ear, silicon ones are great they dampen a lot of the noise, but only if they go around the whole ear, but to be comfortable for sleeping you need it to kind of be the size of your face so it feels like a pillow
Ear defenders (ear mufflers but with sound properties) are constructed using normal building noise reduction materials(foam mostly), any tech for sound proof can be made into an ear muffler the secret is to have it go around your whole head so it is comfortable.
You could experiment with the designs, I mostly use one that is inside a Jayne’s hat, I can’t hear a thing, but you can go for a Master Chief helmet.
Aside from that there are sound proof curtains and walls, the walls are placed directly in the path of the sound and the curtains which are basically 2″ cloth, foam, composites helps attenuate harsh sounds.
Don’t be a retard anymore, soundproof your ears today.
Most annoying sounds
Numbers 1 and 2 actually give Fran Drescher a decent run for the money. Who’da thunk it?
OMG, I didnt know that complete silence could cause hallucinations in sane individuals!!!
Nails on a blackboard. For me it was the worst of all 5 sounds. I’m sure there’s some sort of torture method involving that.
As for the silent room I’d like to try it for a while. Should be an interesting experience.
Awful Sounds
None of those sounds bothered me. I wonder if I am very strange.
Re: Awful Sounds
Same here … we must be ‘special’ o_0
noise
cant we all just get along!
What’s the price and mailing address and shipping for the ear things that block noise so you can sleep at night