Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence

'I' is used too often in this book.

Foy realizes at a crossroads -- a four-track train station -- that his life in a small Manhattan apartment with three other people is too loud, and the train stations are worse. He trots through being told that common sound-scapes are loud enough to cause considerable damage to people who have to live in them, but most of the book is a litterateur's travel guide to various places on earth that are almost completely silent (acoustic test chambers, deep mines, etc). He never finds perfect silence, though he does spend a chapter or two worrying that he has tinnitus and will therefore be forever deprived of it.

In the last few pages, he grants that having a relatively quiet life, with the voices of his show more family, will be what he has to settle for; this keeps him from seeming completely inane; but I didn't notice anything in the whole in which he considered the noise he inflicted on other people. show less

Volume #3, for me, of the current flurry of books on the modern scourge of noise pollution. The third one, too, featuring some kind of idiosyncratic personal odyssey of the author. A highlight of this one is a visit to an anechoic chamber rated at minus 9.4 dB. I wish my auditory system included an on/off switch I could use at will to achieve the effect of such a chamber.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127294078

This is the link from the review I heard on NPR. It is an interesting concept to think of a world with no sound. The idea of absolute silence in this world where there is so much chatter. I really appreciate noise all through my day. I may relish periods of silence but that silence is not absolute. I prefer to cook, do household chores, and even practice cello with some background radio program or even a TV drama. The concept of silence and the need for our bodies to find this in the absolute sense is intriquing. The author has experienced absolute silence in an anechoic chamber and finds that this is related to a stronger unfilled need that probably has larger implications. show more Polly McMahon show less