THE LONDON SOUND SURVEY BLOG | COMMENTS
Occasional posts on subjects like field recording, London sounds past and present, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.
Occasional posts on subjects like field recording, London sounds past and present, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.
Posted by IMR on 04 April 2012
AN ARTICLE IN yesterday’s Daily Mail reported on an anechoic chamber owned by a company in South Minneapolis, and it’s got some choice quotes:
The chamber is lined with wedge-shaped baffles to absorb virtually all the energy from any sound waves produced inside. Uses include hiring it out to manufacturers striving to design the sounds their products make. It also allows sensory-deprivation training for astronauts, hence the article’s exciting sub-head Visitors see hallucinations after a short while. Being blindfolded and suspended in a tank of warm water probably helps. You can read the whole article here.
The quietest place I’ve been to in London was Chislehurst limestone caves, where this recording was made:
That’s only in one part of the cave system, where a shaft extends upwards to just beneath someone’s back-garden pond, hence the water dripping down. Elsewhere it’s deathly quiet. The owners of Chislehurst caves used to run an annual competition which challenged anyone to spend the night inside alone. Like the astronauts in the anechoic chamber, some contestants ended up having hallucinations and fleeing before dawn.
One reported how he saw a white spectral figure rush towards him. Sensory deprivation seems to produce visual hallucinations over auditory ones. A policeman won the contest in the 1950s, but a later attempt ended in someone else knocking himself out on a low beam as he tried escaping from an imagined horror. The cave challenge was stopped after that.
The National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in south-west London has its own anechoic chamber for hire, as well as other intriguing acoustic environments, including a reverberation room and a listening room done up like a domestic living room.
Chiselhurst caves was our favourite childhood haunt!
It is an amazing complex of caves and I remember how - as kids - me and my brothers loved the gory details of the Druid caves; the eerie areas which were used as bomb-shelters during WW2; and the scary dalek which I seem to remember was displayed somewhere in the caves. I hope they are stil doing the tours with paraffin lamps and telling the chilling tale of the lady who haunts the lake.
All much more interesting and fun I reckon than an anechoic chamber - though I would like to visit one just to see what it’s like in a space designed to have no acoustic of its own…
Posted by Felicity Ford on 10 April 2012
In 1951, [John] Cage visited the aeichonc chamber at Harvard University. An aeichonc chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.”—This became the inspiration for the infamous 4’33” of silence. The piece isn’t supposed to be a joke, the point is that there is no such thing as silence.
Posted by Faston on 27 April 2012
You’ve painted such a weird experience, it’s very enticing! I think this cave will be first on my list of things to visit when I’m next in England. Nice recording by the way.
Posted by JD Lopez on 29 April 2012