In Pursuit of Silence (26 page)

This question has become more salient in recent years. While the vast majority of what I saw at Noise-Con 2008 amounted to riffs on materials and tactics developed early in the twentieth century, there are new products—better mousetraps—all the time.

Even Carlyle’s loathed Cochin China fowls might have lost their alarming power today, as I learned reading Super Soundproofing Community Forum, one of several blogs sponsored by soundproofing companies. When I read the query of a forum member who lived in a well soundproofed apartment, but fretted about the sound made by a noisy cockatiel that he himself had bought and didn’t want to cover with a sound-deadening blanket, I thought to myself surely this individual is doomed. But no. A fellow forum member informed this person about a birdcage company that made an entirely enclosed, transparent, sound-trapping cage. Turns out that there are dozens of almost completely soundproof acrylic models on the market, and they’re hypoallergenic to boot.

Noisy neighbors remain more of a problem. Often one or the other of you has to basically agree to go into a cage. But here as well there are surprising new possibilities. Super Soundproofing Community Forum lists suggestions for soundproofing a backyard by constructing high, specially treated walls around the space, and for quieting a barking dog by playing “laughing dog tapes” at it—sounds that supposedly are the canine equivalent of
laughter and have been shown to soothe dogs. The saddest posting I read came from someone asking whether anyone knew of a soundproof mask or helmet that he could buy. But even this desperate individual was helpfully informed by a moderator:
“You can make your own
out of Super Soundproofing Mat—closed cell vinyl nitrile acoustic foam. It’s kind of like making a ‘Policy Hat’—encloses the entire head and has only a mouth and eye holes.” A site administrator added in a separate posting that Super Soundproofing technology was “secretly working on such headwear,” and that if the original poster was serious they’d like him to come in to test “some of our creations.”

Beyond product proliferation, a few new technologies are changing the parameters of what’s possible in soundproofing. Noise-cancellation technology is the most commercially relevant of these at present. And researchers have been working to extend its application beyond headphones to devices like the
already patented Silence Machine
, which is designed to be fired at any troublesome noise source, such as construction sites and nightclubs. By generating a counter sound wave exactly out of phase with the incoming noise, it creates a “personal sound shadow” for the user. At the far edge of the technological pursuit of silence, scientists are even working on an “acoustic cloak” using something called sonic crystals (artificial composites of “meta-materials”) that would operate like dense clusters of very tiny cylinders to deflect all sound from around an object in the same way, scientists say, that “water flows around a rock in a river.”

But even if the acoustic cloak should one day prove possible,
would we
really
want to snuggle into this garment? When I think of the cloak of silence, I can’t help thinking of the Cone of Silence from the 1960s television series
Get Smart
. Whenever agent Maxwell Smart has a piece of top-secret information to impart to his superior, Chief, Smart insists that they enter the Cone of Silence. But the technology is faulty. The only effect of the Cone of Silence is to make Smart and the Chief completely inaudible to each other, while everyone outside the cone can hear their every word with crystalline clarity.

If we have learned one thing about the pursuit of total soundproofing it is that whatever degree of blessed silence we achieve, we will not be satisfied.

This reminds me of a story I heard not long ago.

One afternoon, I was standing in the park at the end of my street with Andy Pollack, an architect, watching our children hurl themselves with great crows of delight into a heap of dirt. Pollack is a big, friendly guy with a wide smile who looks as though he’s just slightly outgrown his body. In an effort to distract ourselves from the likely ingredients of the particulate matter that our boys were dive-bombing face-first, he began telling me about his experience of the soundproofing business from an architect’s perspective. One of his war stories concerned a client with unlimited funds who was building, in Pollack’s words,
“a very, very, very large
house” (14,000 square feet) on a high vantage point in prime Long Island.

It was to be, he went on, not only large but also “an exceedingly
well built house, and my client was a stickler for quiet. He said to me, ‘I want you to hire whatever consultants necessary, buy whatever materials you need, do whatever you have to do, so I can have
the most
quiet house.’” Pollack embraced the challenge. “We took it upon ourselves—the contractor and myself—to make the quietest house in the world.”

They hired a top consultant who could give them specifications beyond what they already knew. It’s difficult to decide where to begin describing the steps taken to silence that house. Soundproofing extras on top of the rigorous noise-abatement measures Pollack’s firm incorporates into all its work ultimately ran in excess of $100,000. To keep sound from transmitting between walls, Pollack and his team built in such a way that no stud had a wall on both sides of it. Every other stud attaches to the wall opposite, so that each wall is isolated. That’s not unheard of, but on top of this they stapled a rubber sound blanket to each stud to further dampen sound waves. They insulated every cement board that went onto the studs with a special mineral fiber. In the basement, where the client wanted a media room, they built a room within a room completely separate from the structure that held the house up. Not only did this room not touch the ceiling, it didn’t touch the
floor
because its underside sat on little rubber isolating feet. “You can sit in there and watch
Star Wars
with THX sound and no one in the kitchen above would even know,” Pollack said.

Another thing that’s always a problem in this kind of house is that ducts will transmit sound. So in addition to having special dampers put on each duct, they built in such a way that no room in the gigantic compound was connected to another by ductwork.
They added special “door details” to keep sound from leaking under the sill. All the windows were, he said, “double insulated,
very
custom windows, very, very well made—completely soundproof.” He did all this and much more and when it was through, “the house could not have been quieter,” Pollack said. “The house almost feels like it’s pulling the sound out of your ears.”

The great day came when the client was to walk through the front door of his completed, absolutely soundproof home for the first time. As it happened, the front door opened onto a kind of enclosed porch. The client walked through this door and—froze. “Andy, I hear a hum,” he said. “I hear a hum! I thought I said no noise.” Pollack pointed out that it was a very faint hum and that you left it behind the moment you entered the house proper. The client held his ground. “It’s the front door, and I hear a sound.”

Deep underneath this house is a mechanical room. The house has a geothermal heating system. All the air-conditioning for 14,000 square feet comes from cold water that gets pumped out of the ground, heated, then put back into the ground. This translates into thousands of gallons of water going from the ground up and back. That’s a lot of infrastructure, and, by using extras like a sound-isolated Sheetrock ceiling for the room, Pollack had managed to reduce what would otherwise have been a low roar to a barely perceptible hum. But you still needed a motor sucking air from outside so the room could breathe, and when you walked into the front door you could just make out the sound of that motor through a vent. Here was the thing: the house was on a bluff known for its windiness. There were almost constant breezes. Even a light wind, he said, would have been
plenty to mask the sound of that hum; but since no sound at all was getting through from the outside, there was no natural, atmospheric cover for even the tiniest sound.

“Now we’ve got a situation,” Pollack went on, “where everything else is so quiet that a pin drop is noise. In the dead silence, you could hear
everything
.” A guest came to visit and brought a small baby. The client placed them in the wing of the house at the farthest point from his own bedroom—but because the whole house was so quiet, he could hear the baby crying from thousands of feet away. He called Pollack to complain. Pollack tried to explain that it was audible not only because baby wails were designed to cut through anything but also because there was
nothing else to hear
.

The worst moment came when the client called to say that he heard a hum in his office—designated the inner sanctum of silence. This room was situated far, far away from the mechanical room. Everything possible had been done to ensure that here, at least, in this contained space, no noise from anything else in the house could conceivably leak through.

“Are you sure you hear a hum?” Pollack asked.

“I’m sitting in the office now,” the client said, “hearing it.”

“Are you sure it couldn’t be the fan of your computer?” Pollack asked.

“No,” the client said. “Impossible.” The computer—no doubt the quietest model on the market to begin with—had been completely isolated. “It’s a deliberate hum,” the client concluded. “You have to come out here and figure it out.”

Weighed down by a sense that he’d been defeated at last, Pollack drove out to Long Island. He got to the house and trudged
through room after room into the inner sanctum, and shut the door behind him. He heard the hum. The computer was not in use, and its central processing unit, or cpu, was nowhere visible; it had been, as the client declared, “completely isolated.” And yetthe hum sounded like a fan. Distinctly like a fan. Pollack approached the gigantic, thick antique desk in which the cpu had been sequestered. He opened up the desk and there, he recalled, “was this cpu just
wailing
.” It had been so thoroughly enclosed within the massive piece of furniture that it couldn’t breathe and the fan was running desperately all the time. Moreover, the client was used to working in an office where ordinary background noise would have masked the machine’s efforts to self-ventilate. Now, for the first time, he was hearing the sound of a device that he used all day.

The poor little computer hard drive panting away in the desk of Pollack’s client is an allegory for what happens when we try to create complete soundproofing: somebody ends up getting smothered. Their gasps for air will grow louder and louder until we surrender the fantasy of total noise control. Because, in the end, we are born into this world screaming as loud as our tiny lungs can howl, yet simultaneously terrified of loud sounds and demanding silence in order to sleep. Because we are human and hardwired at the deepest strata of our reptilian brain to detect noise, and failing to detect it, miss it, and call whatever we do hear noise nonetheless.