Medics define tinnitus as perceiving sound when there is no external source. It was barely audible, but I worried that I might be experiencing tinnitus-that is, ringing in the ears, perhaps evidence of hearing damage caused by my excessively loud saxophone playing. On the dunes, I could hear a high-pitched sound. Instead, it would just hear the hiss generated by the thermal agitation of the eardrum, the stapes bone of the middle ear, and the hair cells in the cochlea. If the human ear were any more sensitive, it would not hear more sounds from outside. These constant movements have nothing to do with sound they stem from random molecular motion.
Even in silence, tiny vibrations of molecules move different parts of the auditory apparatus. When perceiving the quietest murmur, the tiny bones of the middle ear, which transmit sound from the eardrum to the inner ear, vibrate by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Overnight I heard the silence being interrupted only once, when a pack of nearby coyotes howled like ghostly babies.Įarly on the second morning, while I was waiting for Diane to set up some recording equipment, I had a chance to contemplate real silence. Much of the day there was a great deal of wind, but at twilight and early in the morning the winds calmed down and the quiet revealed itself. Virtually no planes flew overhead, and only very occasionally did a distant car or freight train create noise. We camped at the foot of Kelso Dunes, in a barren, scrubby valley with dramatic granite hills behind us. Most of the time my recording companion, Diane Hope, and I were on our own. The scorching summer heat kept visitors away. While I was on an expedition to record singing sand dunes, I experienced something quite rare: complete silence. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.) (Excerpted from The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World by Trevor Cox.
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