In the following months, during trips he sought to undertake as consecutively as possible, the same experience played out in the jungles of Brazil, the forests of Alaska and at a polar station a long way south of Patagonia, leading him to the conclusion that silence does not in fat exist in nature; rather it’s a fantasy fabricated by our culture, a concept we’ve simply dreamed up. And this was something my friend couldn’t understand. Or, he understood it, but he refused to accept it. The last I heard, his search for a piece of silence on Earth was still ongoing.
The Things We’ve Seen – Agustin Fernández Mallo
>silence does not in fat exist in nature; rather it’s a fantasy fabricated by our culture, a concept we’ve simply dreamed up.
And really …. REALLY quiet places are completely man made:
https://news.microsoft.com/stories/building87/audio-lab.php
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/orfield-labs-quiet-chamber
Have you been inside a quiet room? I remember standing in a small one at the WDR station in Köln. They built this silent room for some kind of testing. No sound, super dead space. And yet it is not really quiet. You hear a low pitch, which is the sound of your blood circulating, and a high pitch, which is the sound of your nervous system. So again, not really silent… and if it was silent you’d be dead.
Yeah. The company I worked for from 1983-2003 had an extremely quiet (probably around ~15dBA) anechoic chamber in a separate building for testing noise profiles of certain of their equipment.
Personally, I hated the experience of being in there: it was, as you say, low frequency blood and high frequency nervous system, but also it seemed as if there was actually _pressure_ in my ears. Fairly strong too. Very off putting.
That company also had an anechoic chamber for testing RF compliance for same equipment.