Silence truly has a sound of its own, it appears, as experiments conducted by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggest that silence can indeed be perceived and heard.
The findings, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, contradict what the JHU researchers said is "the traditional sound-only view of audition" – that "the experience of silence is merely the cognitive accompaniment of an absence of experience and not considered a form of hearing."
Instead, after 1,000 people took part in seven experiments, during which "subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions," the researchers concluded that their subjects "can genuinely perceive silence, rather than just cognitively infer it."
"In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds," the team discovered.
The counter–intuitive findings – "that the human auditory system treats both sounds and moments of silence similarly" – suggest the methodology could also provide "a strategy to examine other forms of absence perception, including other senses," according to the researchers.
