The Silence

What do you fear? Are you afraid of heights, as the wind streaks across you leaving you chilled and shaking as you stare down a fall from an daunting height. Or maybe you’re afraid of centipedes. A creepy crawly with, what some may say, too many legs as it slithers through your room right towards your bed. One fear though, is capable of shaking people to their core without a single sound. The sound of wind doesn’t exist here and neither does the light tapping of any bugs. I am talking about a room of pure tension, a room of silence. Designed in a laboratory by what seems like mad scientists. All this, in Minnesota. This chamber of unnerving quality, has been named the anechoic chamber. It is free of echo, and free of sound. If the understanding of this fear hasn’t sunk yet, imagine you’re trying to sleep. You normally have your fan on to have some noise in the room. The slight whirring creating a pathway of subtle noise for you to follow while you sleep. Then you hear it, the “uunnnnnnnn”, the gradual declining of noise as power shuts down. Your fan stops, motionless, and not even the ac makes a squeak. You are surrounded by silence, flanked but tension.  Discomfort sets in now, almost as thick as the blanket you set on top of you. Sleep is now out of range, out of your mind as paranoia sinks deeper into your thoughts. “What was that noise?!” you sling your head to face the direction, but its nothing. That is the fear of silence, the fear of the tension it brings, and that is what this room brings. At one point, a study was conducted on this room, to test the unintentional power it held like an overlord. The goal of this study was to see how long a person could last in the room before becoming too uncomfortable, before the tension became too great for their psyche. For some quick perspective, the sound decibel of this room is -9, while an average library sits at 30-40 decibels. While within this room, you will notice quite a few things after a few minutes. The first being that, there is no external sound. The car you hear on the street fly by, the sound of doors opening and close around you as they creek, the clicking and clacking as your co-workers type away for their next lecture. No, you hear none of that in this laboratory. The only thing you can hear is yourself, and then nothing. No click, no sound, but yet the lights turned off. Not only was your sound taken, but so was your sight. Then the paranoia comes as you get pulled under by it. Then you hear something, something not normally heard but can be felt in certain circumstances. Your heartbeat, without your vision and other sounds distracting you, your body is able to focus on your own sounds. Your heartbeat, the flow of your blood, and some other organs. The longest anyone has ever been able to stand being in the room was 45 minutes, with not even the owner of the lab lasting more than 30 minutes. This room builds fear, this room is tension.

Now, I chose to write this for my blog because I feel the concept is similar to what I want in my literacy narrative. Not the tension, and not the fear, but sound itself. Now the difference being this was about the absence of “normal” sound while I want to talk about the creation of “normal” sound, but I feel this was a good place to start. I now have a better understanding of what I want to do as I build the atmosphere of writing music through written text, and have a better understanding of how I should describe the feeling sound can give through writing.