Actually, the experiments and findings reported in that paper were carried out by academics dealing with psychological and brain sciences and not from the perspective of sound recording engineers.
Or from the perspective of physicists, acousticians, audiologists, psychoacousticians and various other types of engineers and professions.
It appears to be a thoroughly bizarre paper, it’s titled “
The Perception of Silence” but not one of the experiments actually even presented the test subjects with any silence, let alone investigated the perception of it! They effectively define “silence” as audible noise! They investigate the perceptual impact of the presence and absence of specific sounds in addition to this audible noise and then discuss/conclude on the basis that the absence of the specific sounds is “silence”, which of course is completely fallacious because they’re ignoring the audible noise. This quote typifies the problem:
“
Our approach speaks first and foremost to the perception of particular, contrastive silences—that is, silences corresponding to the temporary absence of specific environmental sounds, such as a conversation, a musical performance, or the noise of a restaurant.” - Here they spell out their definition of silence as the “absence of specific environmental sounds”, which of course isn’t silence. Silence is the absence of BOTH specific and non-specific (audible) sounds! For example, pauses in a conversation does NOT result in silence, it results in whatever specific and non-specific sounds exist in the environment where the conversation is taking place. Even in an anechoic chamber, you’re not left with silence, you’re left with at least the movement and breathing sounds of the participants in the conversation. Same with “a musical performance”, you’re left with all the environmental sounds of the audience and performance venue. In a restaurant, removing the specific environmental sounds of the restaurant leaves you with non-specific environmental sounds of the restaurant plus extraneous environmental sounds, such as traffic noise, weather, other nearby leisure establishments, etc. And, they spell out this interpretation:
“These are the silences we meet with in ordinary life, and they are also among the silences deemed impossible to perceive by the philosophical tradition which motivated our work.” - We don’t meet silences in ordinary life, “ordinary life” is not living in an anechoic chamber, it’s virtually always at least an audible noise floor.
Elsewhere they detail exactly what they tested, which was actually two forms of “silence” (neither of which were actually silence!):
1. “Embedded Silence” - Which is a deliberately audible noise floor embedded in the test files, constructed from “ambience” sound samples downloaded from an online sound effects library.
2. “Pure Silence” - Which is the absence of the added ambience above in the audio files, EG. Digital silence.
It should be noted that as far as I can see, this was an online experiment/test, the subjects performing the tests in their own homes/environments. Therefore, even the “Pure Silence” tests were not actually silence, it was whatever noise/noise floor existed in the subjects own listening environments and I would hazard a guess that not a single one of them was a very well constructed anechoic chamber!
The answer to all these seemingly bizarre definitions and non-science is that this is NOT a Scientific Paper! The second part of the last quote above indicates this is a Philosophical Paper, not a Scientific Paper. The “
philosophical tradition” might deem these audible silences to be “
impossible to perceive” but science certainly doesn’t, a relatively simple controlled blind test would easily prove it. Not to mention countless tens of thousands of film and TV engineers over the course of 90 odd years who’ve been manufacturing and tweaking these “silences” (room tones and ambiences) that apparently were impossible for them to perceive!?
G
