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The perception of silence (www.pnas.org)

submitted 2 years ago by FlyingSquid@mander.xyz to c/science@mander.xyz

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Do we only hear sounds? Or can we also hear silence? These questions are the subject of a centuries-old philosophical debate between two camps: the perceptual view (we literally hear silence), and the cognitive view (we only judge or infer silence). Here, we take an empirical approach to resolve this theoretical controversy. We show that silences can “substitute” for sounds in event-based auditory illusions.

I don’t have access to the full paper (I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway), but the idea that we can “hear” silence is pretty mind-blowing to me.

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[–] FlyingSquid@mander.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

There's an article about it in the New York Times which apparently goes into much more detail, but I don't have a subscription- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/science/silence-sound-hear.html

It is excerpted in this Slashdot post, however, and that may give you enough information to understand it better: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2343221/silence-is-a-sound-you-hear-study-suggests

To sum up, it's not about total silence, it's about perceiving gaps in louder sounds as "sound" rather than the lack of sound.