The Sound Barrier #3: What does silence sound like?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Unexplainable — The Sound Barrier #3: What Does Silence Sound Like?

Date: November 10, 2025
Host: Noam Hassenfeld (Vox)
Guests:

• Erin Westgate (Psychologist, University of Florida)
• Raja Goh (PhD student, Johns Hopkins)
• Melody Baglione (Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Cooper Union)
• William Marx (John Cage’s 4'33'' performer, via archival audio)

---

Overview

This episode investigates the mystery of silence—how something that, on the surface, is “nothing” can have powerful, complicated effects on our minds and perceptions. Through psychological experiments, philosophical debate, audio illusions, and a journey into an anechoic chamber (one of the quietest rooms on earth), host Noam Hassenfeld and guests illuminate how silence is processed by the mind, how it can be deeply unsettling or intensely meaningful, and whether we ever truly experience “pure” silence.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Is Silence So Uncomfortable?

[01:25–03:41]

• Erin Westgate’s Research:
  • Intention: Initially aimed to create well-being by giving people quiet time for reflection.
  • Outcome: Most people disliked sitting alone in silence. “They said things like brushing their teeth was better.” — Erin Westgate [02:00]
  • Follow-up: Given options between silence and unpleasant stimuli (vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, etc.), people overwhelmingly preferred the unpleasant sounds.
  • Escalation: In another study, participants could shock themselves instead of sitting in silence. Nearly half did.
  • “People actually do something that's painful rather than simply sit in silence.” — Erin Westgate [03:34]

2. The Paradoxes and Powers of Silence

[03:41–05:06]

• Despite its discomfort, silence and sensory deprivation have been shown to reduce anxiety and even foster brain growth—in mice, exposure to silence increased new neurons.

• Noam introduces the main enigma: “How can something that's nothing do so much?” [03:41]

3. Is Silence Just an Absence, or a Real Experience?

[05:06–06:06]

• Raja Goh’s Symphonic Experience:
  • Being hit by palpable silence after a symphony’s crescendo led him to question whether silence is simply ‘nothing,’ or something we actively, consciously experience.
  • Philosophical debate: Is silence an experience unto itself, or just the lack of sound?
  • “There is a genuine experience of silence … there's something it's like to experience silence.” — Raja Goh [05:53]

4. The ‘One Is More’ Illusion, Sound vs. Silence

[06:19–11:21]

• Auditory Illusions:

  • “One Is More” Illusion: When playing two short boops vs. one long boop of equal duration, listeners perceive the single boop as longer.
  • “That's why it's called the One is More Illusion. One sound seems longer than two.” — Noam Hassenfeld [06:45]

• Applying the Illusion to Silence:

  • Raja ran experiments where restaurant background noise was punctuated by either two short silences or one long silence (of equal length).
  • Result: The single silence was perceived as longer, paralleling the original auditory illusion.
  • "It definitely does seem like exactly the same mechanism is at play." — Raja Goh [10:43]
  • Suggests our brains process silences as real, positive inputs, not merely absences.

5. Entering the Quietest Room — The Anechoic Chamber

[13:59–16:59]

• Visit with Melody Baglione, Cooper Union:

  • Description: The anechoic chamber is engineered to eliminate echo, covered with fiberglass wedges, with a suspended catwalk to avoid contact with sound-absorbing floors.
  • Urban legends: Time in anechoic chambers reportedly causes nausea or hallucinations, but no clear evidence.
  • Personal experience: Noam describes the silence as “thick, like I’m wading into jello,” with the absorption of all echoes leading to a surreal lack of auditory feedback.
  • “I'm screaming in a room, and it's really quiet. That's really weird. That's so weird.” — Noam Hassenfeld [16:59]

• Physiological Effects:

  • Adaptive response: Just as eyes adjust in darkness, ears begin to pick up internal sounds—breathing, heartbeat, high-pitched tinnitus.
  • Noam confesses: “I feel like I can hear noises from my own head and I can’t tell if I’m making them up or not. ... like reverse seashell.” [17:32]

6. John Cage, 4’33’’, and the Artistry of Silence

[18:42–22:52]

• Composer John Cage’s Revelation:

  • In an anechoic chamber, Cage realized he could not eliminate all sound—what remained were internal bodily noises.
  • “There’s no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.” — John Cage [19:01]

• Cage’s 4’33’’:

  • Performance consists of a pianist not playing for 4’33”; the “music” becomes all ambient noise.
  • Audience experiences: Hearing the breeze, raindrops, and eventually the murmurs of people talking becomes the performance.
  • “There is no such thing as silence.” — William Marx [22:52]

• Personal anecdote: Noam’s own 4’33’’ experience reoriented how he heard background noises, transforming them into meaningful “notes.”

7. Silence Is Full, Not Empty

[22:52–24:47]

• When people conceive of silence as a void, they may fill it with anxious thoughts.
• Silence, as revealed by both experiments and art, is a positive sensory experience—“not nothingness. It’s full of noise.”
• “There can be beautiful silences. There can be awkward silences. There can be really powerful silences.” — Raja Goh [23:56]
• “Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world… they’re beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them.” — Erin Westgate [24:15]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “They said things like brushing their teeth was better.” — Erin Westgate [02:00], on how participants disliked pure silence
• “People actually do something that’s painful rather than simply sit in silence.” — Erin Westgate [03:34]
• “How can something that’s nothing do so much?” — Noam Hassenfeld [03:41]
• “There is a genuine experience of silence … there’s something it’s like to experience silence.” — Raja Goh [05:53]
• “That just felt good, right? It’s the same exact feeling. Like the single silence feels way longer than the other two.” — Noam Hassenfeld [10:03], on experiencing the silence illusion
• “Our brain isn’t just editing sounds. It’s editing silence.” — Noam Hassenfeld [11:06]
• “I'm screaming in a room, and it's really quiet. That's really weird.” — Noam Hassenfeld [16:59], inside the anechoic chamber
• “There’s no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.” — John Cage [19:01]
• “There is no such thing as silence.” — William Marx [22:52]
• “There can be beautiful silences. There can be awkward silences. There can be really powerful silences.” — Raja Goh [23:56]
• “Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world…they’re beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them.” — Erin Westgate [24:15]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:25] - Erin Westgate explains her original silence experiment
• [02:23] - Participants opt for unpleasant sounds over silence
• [02:56] - People choose mild electric shocks over silence
• [05:06] - Raja Goh describes the “palpable” silence at the symphony
• [06:19] - Introduction to the “One Is More” auditory illusion
• [08:58] - Raja applies the illusion to silence
• [10:03] - Noam’s firsthand reaction to the “silence illusion”
• [13:59] - Noam visits Cooper Union’s anechoic chamber
• [16:12] - Description of the chamber’s “thick” silence and adaptation
• [18:42] - John Cage’s anechoic revelation
• [19:18] - Performance and impact of Cage’s 4’33’’
• [22:52] - “There is no such thing as silence”
• [23:56] - The varieties and emotional weight of different silences
• [24:15] - Erin Westgate on appreciating silence as valuable

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Closing Reflections

The episode reframes silence as not an empty void but an active, potent presence that we “hear” just as much as sound. Silence can feel oppressive, healing, awkward, or beautiful. Our brain detects and processes silence in complicated ways, and even our deepest experiences of “nothing” are full—if not with external noise, then with the unignorable sounds of our own bodies and minds. As John Cage’s 4’33’’ shows, the meaning and texture of silence are shaped by context, intention, and attention.

Noam invites listeners to practice their own “4’33’’”: to simply listen to the unique silence around them—wherever, whenever. “Let’s listen to the silence and see what we can hear.” [25:07]

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Next episode teaser:
“How a blind astronomer learned to listen to space.” [31:18]

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If you enjoyed this summary or the themes of the episode, consider recording your ‘local’ silence and sending it to the Unexplainable team!

Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

Support for the show comes from the Audible Original the Downloaded Ghosts in the Machine Earth's final days are near and the clock is ticking for members of the Phoenix colony. All they need to do is upload their minds back into the quantum computer. Simple enough. But their plan is disrupted by digital duplicates of their own minds that could destroy their stored consciousness forever. Listen to Oscar winner Brendan Fraser reprise his role as Roscoe Kadulian in this follow up to the Audible hit sci fi thriller the Downloaded by Canada's most decorated sci fi author, Robert J. Sawyer. What are you willing to lose to save the ones you love? Find out in the thought provoking sequel the downloaded Two Ghosts in the Machine, available now only from Audible. Erin Westgate used to be an optimist.

[Erin Westgate]

When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop well being interventions to actually make people's lives better, happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh my goodness, I'm so busy. I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So Erin recruited a whole bunch of people and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence.

[Erin Westgate]

And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was going to try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead.

[Erin Westgate]

So, like someone throwing up nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking, and sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, et cetera, rather than simply sit in silence.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

At this point, Erin was just morbidly curious. Did people hate silence so much that they'd actually prefer pain? Like, what if she put people in an ankle cuff and and gave them the option to shock themselves?

[Erin Westgate]

It is not pleasant it hurts a little bit. I always liken it to the feeling of like a cat sort of jumping out and scratching you. It's sort of like, ah, you know, shocking, but it's not actually harmful. And so we set this hall up and we just sort of waited. And the first few participants, we just sort of were like, are they gonna do it? Are they actually going to shock themselves? But we saw very early on that people were indeed shocking themselves. Yeah, I know. So it's like, why? Why would you do that?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Almost half the participants gave themselves an electric shock. They couldn't even make it 15 minutes.

[Erin Westgate]

People actually do something that's painful rather than simply sit in silence.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

The more you think about it, silence is a really good, strange thing. On the one hand, it's so uncomfortable that people would rather shock themselves than sit through it at the same time. Silence and other forms of sensory deprivation, they've been shown to reduce anxiety and ptsd. There's this one experiment I love where mice were exposed to silence and their brains actually got new neurons, like, more neurons than when they were exposed to any other sounds just from listening to silence. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is episode three of the Sound Barrier, a series from Unexplainable about the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through. Today on the show. How can something that's nothing do so much? Sam?

[Raja Goh]

So one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt is, like, when I was at a symphony, and the symphony was working up to a kind of crescendo, and, like, right when it hit the crescendo, it ended. And the moment before the applause, you're just kind of, like, hit by this experience. And I definitely felt silence, like, hit me across the face.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Raja goh is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. And that experience that he had at the symphony, it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing like the absence of sound, but he'd felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling?

[Raja Goh]

So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence. Whereas other people argue that some silence is just the absence of experience.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions, like, what is silence? But Raja wanted an actual answer, which would mean he'd have to do an experiment.

[Raja Goh]

So at that point, when I was thinking of the experiment, I was actually kind of fascinated by this illusion, Something.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Called the One is More Illusion.

[Raja Goh]

And you'll see in a moment why it's called the One is More Illusion. Okay, suppose I play you two sounds. I play you boop boop, and then I play you a single sound. The two sounds and the single sound take up the exact same amount of time. But you will hear the single sound is longer.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That's why it's called the One is More Illusion. One sound seems longer than two.

[Raja Goh]

Yeah. One of the great things about auditory illusions is that you can experience it for yourself.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Is there a website I can go to now to check it out?

[Raja Goh]

Sure. Let me just send it to you.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Okay.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

One.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Two. Oh, that sounded way longer.

[Raja Goh]

Right, Right. It's exactly the same length.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That didn't even sound close.

[Raja Goh]

Exactly.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Audio illusions like this one are great ways to learn about how our brain processes sound. They. They seem like glitches, but they really just show us how our brain is constantly editing the world we hear. Like when we're in a room and our voice is bouncing off all the walls and hitting our ears at slightly different times, the brain cancels out the echoes so that we only hear a single voice. When there are sounds that are muffled or distorted, the brain can fill them in without us noticing. For some people with a cochlear implant, the brain can recreate almost the entire world they hear. And scientists think this particular glitch, the One Is More Illusion. It tells us something pretty fundamental about how our hearing works.

[Raja Goh]

If you look at the sound waves that enter our ears and you visualize it on the screen, it's going to be a bit of a mess.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Think about what a waveform looks like. It's just a blobby thing. But the world doesn't sound like a blobby thing. We hear different individual sounds.

[Raja Goh]

If you're at a park and you're talking to a friend and you hear a dog barking in the background, you don't hear a continuous jumble of noise. You hear discrete words.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This is the big insight from the One is More Illusion. Our brain is always on the lookout for discrete sounds. It's why we're able to pull out individual sounds from a noisy background. And it's why the one boop sounds longer than the two boops. But Raja wanted to see if our brain would do the same thing to silence.

[Raja Goh]

My idea was to try to create a silence version of this auditory illusion.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Raja replaced the boop boop with silence silence. His idea was that if these silences caused the same glitch it would show that our brain is processing silences just like it processes sounds that in a pretty literal sense, we're hearing silence.

[Raja Goh]

So what we did was in our experiment, our subjects had to wear headphones, and we immersed our subjects in the ambient noise of a restaurant. There would be people talking, plates clinking, people walking around. And then when the trial starts, they would hear a sequence of two silences and then a one silence sequence. And subjects are just asked which one was longer? Was the 1 silence longer or was the 2 silence longer?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And you have an example of this too, right?

[Raja Goh]

Yep. I think if you play that, you should be able to hear it.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So I'm in the restaurant.

[Raja Goh]

Yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That's nuts. Okay, that's. That again. That just felt good, right? It's the same exact feeling. Like the single silence feels way longer than the other two, which is basically the same thing as those notes.

[Raja Goh]

Yeah. Yeah. So, like, it does definitely feel like it's exactly the same thing happening.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This one might be a little bit harder to hear the first time through, so I just want to play it one more time. Notice how much longer the uninterrupted silence feels compared to the two short ones, even though they're the same amount of time.

[Raja Goh]

And when we ran this experiment with subjects, we actually found the exact same proportion of subjects felt that one silence sequences are longer than the two silences sequence. So it definitely does seem like exactly the same mechanism is at play.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Wow. And did you try this illusion on yourself? Did it work for you?

[Raja Goh]

It definitely did work for me. When I created this illusion and played it to myself for the first time, I was like, wow, it works.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Our brain isn't just editing sounds. It's editing silence.

[Raja Goh]

Silence is not something out there in the world, and yet we can have an experience of it.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I mean, your results seem to say that we are hearing the silence, we're not just not hearing anything.

[Raja Goh]

Yeah. It tells us that, like, the auditory system treats silences the same way as it treats sounds.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So if silence is a real thing, we can hear, what does it sound like? To find out, I decided to go to one of the quietest places on earth. Loud noises. That's in a minute.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

Consider what you're about to do. Paul Atreides Silence A couple months ago I hopped on the subway and I headed to Cooper Union, this tiny private college in Manhattan. Is it okay if I, like, hang out here for a bit to talk with a wonderfully named expert? Unsound hello.

[Erin Westgate]

Hi, Melody Baglione, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cooper Union.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Can you just tell me a little bit about where we are right now?

[Erin Westgate]

So we're in the Vibration and Acoustics laboratory, and we also have the only Anacoi Chamber in New York City.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

An anechoic chamber is designed to be absurdly quiet. It's got double doors, it's got padding all over the walls. It's this place where you're supposed to be able to get as close to complete silence as possible. And anechoic chambers, they're pretty weird. There are all these stories about what they'll do to you if you spend too much time in there. Stories of people feeling nauseous or starting to hallucinate. Or this one Violinist who apparently started pounding on the door immediately to get out. It's not exactly clear how much these are urban legends and how much of them are actual, real events. But it isn't hard to find all kinds of people who've heard these stories and then wrote articles or made videos, being like, I survived the quietest room on Earth.

[Erin Westgate]

It's a whole thing, you know, I've never done really studies to show you can spend this much time here before you go crazy, because I'm always so busy that I don't have time to sit there. But there are many people that are interested in that question, and I'm asked that a lot, but I haven't done it myself.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Can we go inside?

[Raja Goh]

Sure.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah.

[Erin Westgate]

All right.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

As soon as I walk into the chamber, my ears feel different. Okay. That feels really, really weird. The only word I can think of to describe the silence is thick, like I'm wading into jello or something. And the whole place is covered with these wedges.

[Erin Westgate]

So you don't want to touch these wedges because they're fiberglass.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

They're on the walls. They're covering the door. They're on the ceiling. They're even on the floor. I'm actually standing on a catwalk suspended from the wall, so we don't touch the fiberglass floor wedges. And those wedges are what make the room sound so weird. When you're in a normal room, your voice is bouncing off all the walls and the ceiling and the floor. You're hearing your voice come out of your mouth, but you're also hearing it reflected off all the other walls and then hitting your ear. That's how we're used to hearing sounds. But in an anechoic chamber, the wedges absorb so much of the sound that there aren't echoes. That's why it's called anechoic, as in without echo. And it sounds really strange.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Hello.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I'm screaming in a. In a room, and it's really quiet. That's really weird. That's so weird. To be honest, it's hard to describe how surreal this all felt. It was almost like yelling into a black hole, like the sound was being sucked into nothingness. The weirdness doesn't exactly translate on a micro, but here's what it sounded like outside the chamber. Whoop. Whoop. And here's what it sounded like inside. Whoop.

[Erin Westgate]

Whoop.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Hey, hey, Hoop.

[Raja Goh]

Ha.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

But the longer I stayed there, the more my ears started to adapt to the silence, Just like your eyes might adapt slowly in a dark Room. It's extremely, extremely quiet in here. And after a couple minutes, I started hearing things. Every noise felt like the volume was just jacked up. My own breathing started to feel loud. I heard my own heartbeat. I feel like I can hear noises from my own head and I can't tell if I'm making them up or not. Like there's this high pitch, there's this kind of swirling, almost like I'm putting like a seashell up to my ear, but like reverse. Does that make any sense? Like reverse seashell. That was just 20 minutes in, as my head was swirling in the chamber, I was thinking about this story of one of my favorite composers, John Cage, who also once visited an anechoic chamber of on his own quest for complete silence.

[William Marx]

I heard in that room two sounds. One was high and one was low. And I thought there was something wrong with the room.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer, who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was his circulatory system.

[William Marx]

There's no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And now a performance of John Cage's 433. If you've ever heard of John Cage, it's probably because of this piece, 433. Please welcome our soloist, William Marx. In one recording I found, an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bow tie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys. He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor style flourish, presses go. And just sits there for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s, but it still goes viral all the time. Like, this particular performance has almost 10 million views on YouTube. And yeah, it might be because people think it's some kind of stunt. And the comments are kind of hilarious. Like, I once didn't speak for five minutes and this guy sued me for copyright. Or I set this song as my ringtone and nobody called me. And I felt the same way when I first heard it. I was in a music class in college and my professor told us we were going to perform it in class. So we pulled up the sheet music. It's basically a whole bunch of nothing divided into three movements of nothing. And my professor signaled us to start. For a moment it was silent, and then I started to notice little things like a cough, a chair creaking when someone adjusted their position, this low murmur of voices coming from the hallway outside. My own breath. And because I had the sheet music in front of me, I started hearing all these noises, almost like they were intentional. I heard them interacting. I heard them layering on top of each other. I heard them getting louder and softer. And I started imagining them as if someone had composed them, you know, written them like notes into the sheet music, notes that would be different wherever 433 gets performed.

[William Marx]

The first performance, you could hear the breeze in the trees. And then, miraculously, when the second movement began, there were drops of rain that you could hear coming on the roof. And do you know what happened in the third movement? People began talking because they realized that David Tudor wasn't going to make any sounds. So the sound of people talking was in the third movement.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Cage was okay with people laughing sometimes. He had a sense of humor. But 433 wasn't a joke. And I do hope that at least some of the people behind those 10 million views on YouTube understood what Cage was doing here. He was reframing what silence is and what it can be.

[William Marx]

It doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in an anechoic chamber or outdoors on the street, there always are sounds to hear. There is no such thing as silence.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This is where we finally get back to that original mystery from the electric shock experiment. Erin, the researcher behind the study, she says when she told people not to pay attention to anything around them and just focus on their own thoughts, they spun out pretty quickly.

[Erin Westgate]

People's. I don't think their goal is to fill it with anxiety, but it's actually a giant, you know, stress induction.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

When people thought of silence as just this empty box, they filled it with their own anxieties. But silence isn't empty. Rage's experiment tells us silence is something we can hear. And Cage's piece shows us what it sounds like. It's not nothingness. It's full of noise. There's a texture almost like the particles of air in a room that seems empty.

[Raja Goh]

There can be beautiful silences. There can be awkward silences. There can be really powerful silences. Like, I think often an infective speaker makes powerful uses of silence. Right when they pause, you kind of feel the weight of their words.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Silence is something worth paying attention to on its own terms.

[Erin Westgate]

Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world. You know, in the same way that what is the value in the Grand Canyon or What is the value in Mount Everest like? The value is that they're there. And so I think that when we think about things like the value of silence or the value of boredom or the value of grief, they're beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And sometimes you get a clock chiming right through.

[Raja Goh]

Yes.

[Erin Westgate]

This is what happens when you inherit your grandparents grandfather clock after they die and then actually hang it up and let it do its thing.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

In the last couple weeks, I've started thinking about silence as turning up the volume knob on my perception. Like right now I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet, it's pretty still. But wherever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room, or the idling traffic as you cross the street, or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent light. So I don't know, maybe this is weird, but what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're going to have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm going to have mine. But yeah, let's. Let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear. Not right now. That was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. And this was the third episode of our series, the Sound Barrier. We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. What did it sound like? What did you hear? Or if you want to record a voice memo of silence wherever you are and email it to us@ unexplainableox.com we'd love to hear it too. On the next episode of the Sound Barrier. How a blind astronomer Learned to listen to Space.

[Erin Westgate]

I thought those sounds were bothersome and ugly and at that moment everything transformed into beauty.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That's next time. As for this episode, it was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. I also wrote the music. It was edited by Joanna Solotarov with help from Jorge Just Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact checking from Melissa Hirsch and silent support from Sally Helm. Meredith Hodinot runs the show. Julia Longoria is our editorial director and Bird Pinkerton ran towards the wooden carriage as the octopus army stampeded onto the Runway. She hoisted the doctopus onto her shoulders and she turned to face the chaos. Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks to Robert Liu. Thanks as always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show along with me and Bird and and if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're@ unexplainableox.com you can also leave us a review or a rating. Wherever you listen really helps us out. And if you're really into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.commembers to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back with the final episode of the Sound Barrier on Wednesday.

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