What Is It Like To Hear Nothing?

This essay was first published in Volume 9. of The Examined Life Journal from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

If you are inclined to look for them, bats are easy to see. Even in English cities, far removed from terrestrial wilderness, you can spot them on any mild evening. Some trees will help your chances, as will a body of water, but all that is essential is the lingering twilight found between the spring and autumn equinoxes. Step outside just as the day falters and search against the gloaming for a tiny black shape rushing erratically around the air, constantly turning back on itself in crazed knots. Look for frantic wing-beating, faster than any garden birds. If they come close enough – which they probably will, to feed on the insects which swarm around you – look for their distinctive scimitar shape in silhouette against the dusk, that arched profile appropriated by heroes and monsters alike. When you have seen it once, when you have recognised those frenzied specks for what they are, you will begin to see them everywhere.

What is more difficult is to hear a bat. Those in the family Microchiroptera, which includes all found wild in Britain, are a rowdy lot who navigate their crepuscular world via echolocation; they make constant high-pitched calls which bounce back from surrounding surfaces and form a soundscape map of the area. The system is a marvel of the natural world, a form of sonar which predates the human technology by millions of years and is sophisticated enough to predict the trajectory of insects measuring just millimetres. But the sounds, of a frequency beyond the upper reaches of our hearing, are all but inaccessible to the naked human ear. Children can sometimes hear these sounds, our auditory range narrowing as we age; you may hear some part of them into your twenties, but they are less impressive than you might expect. The sound of bats’ remarkable capacity is to humans a distant squeak, like the frustrating whine of an unoiled hinge. To us, it is barely a sound at all, sitting right at the furthest reaches of our hearing and often slipping over the border into the infinite frequencies beyond.

I last heard a bat a year ago. I was twenty-seven, just getting past it in terms of high frequency hearing, but the world had been silenced by Covid-19. Against a new blank backdrop, a striking absence of traffic and bustle, it was possible even in central Manchester, leaning from a balcony, for me to make out the occasional squeaks of three pipistrelles hunting around the trees below. I noted the experience down in a journal, amazed that it should still be available to me. I had not heard that sound for many years. I have not heard it since, either, although nor has my world been so quiet. I have not heard the quiet shrieks of a bat for over a year, but in that time I have heard a lot of quiet shrieking.

Like bat calls, tinnitus are quasi-sounds, doubtful and uncertain, but not because they are inaudible. Tinnitus are nothing but audibility, are by definition sounds with no external source. For some they are akin to real sounds, like the reverberations of genuine experiences; W.S. Di Piero writes of ‘Mississippi mosquitoes’, power lines, cockroaches and hail. Mine, too, are plural, but also more basic, like the dismantled components of sounds. Some come and go in a moment like the popping of an ear or the whirr of an old-school camera flash, but behind and below these are three others that persist for weeks, months and lifetimes.

In the middle of the trio is the bat sound: a sustained, squeaking hiss right at the highest reach of my hearing. Something between an internal and external experience, located just inside my head beside each ear. Like genuine bat calls, this one should be difficult to make out, but it is not. At the time of writing, it has been almost continuous for a month, occurring often for a week straight before fading slowly away like a dying battery. Whether or not it ever ceases completely, I am not sure. Rather, I suspect that I am more sensitive to it at different times, that sometimes I can let it wash over me without ever actually being free of it.

Above that, somehow way above my hearing range, are the crystal bells. These sit deep inside my head at the top of my spine, almost entirely dissociated from my ears. They ring less often than the bats call, but they cannot be ignored. The closest point of aural comparison is the ringing of minute crystal bells, as though I am forever at the whim of some tiresome concierge, but I would not use sounds as my first point of reference. This is the sound of the taste of copper pennies, of my synapses firing and thoughts squeezing around my brain. This one I hate to the point of despair.

Below them both is the whoosh. Familiar and not unpleasant, like a genuine auditory experience the whoosh sits snug in the bowl of either ear, ringing like various forms of white noise: the roar of the sea in a conch shell, or an impossibly large plane passing infinitely far overhead. This is the background buzz of my being, the static between the frequencies of my thoughts. Sometimes I fancy that this one is not an auditory hallucination at all, but rather that my head and ears have, like analogue TV, tuned into the lingering echo of the big bang. This one has been around longer than I can remember. For many years, I did not recognise it as a sound at all.

In 1974, Thomas Nagel used bats’ capacity for echolocation to refute the ‘reductionist euphoria’ of materialistic philosophies of mind. That is, in standard English, to argue against the idea that the mind can be explained purely in terms of the physical operations of the brain. ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’ argues that bats – unlike, say, limpets – are sufficiently conscious that they have an experience of the world; there is ‘something it is like to be a bat,’ a ‘subjective character’ of bat experience. That character, however, is shaped by a ‘sensory apparatus so different from our own’ that we are incapable of approximating it in our mind. Try it. Try to imagine an understanding of your surroundings constructed from high-pitched shrieks rebounding from every surface. I can’t do it. When pressed, my brain attempts to fuse two senses and create a kind of image made from sound, a poor approximation of a completely different experience. Even that word imagination attests to our dependence on the visual sense, and the alienness of bats’ experience. As Nagel says, ‘our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited’.

To enter into a bat’s experience, it is not, claims Nagel, adequate to imagine oneself acting like a bat, hanging upside down, eating insects, etcetera. It is not enough, even, to imagine ourselves bestowed with a new capacity of echolocation – an ability which some blind people have, in fact, developed. A bat’s experience of the world is characterised by a life spent interacting with it through that innate capacity, and to gain an accurate idea of that experiential character requires living that life. But we do not deny the existence of that experience, and so we must concede that there are some things that cannot be comprehended by human beings: that there are some facts ‘beyond the reach of human concepts’. At a closer, less ‘exotic’ level, there are even elements of human experience that cannot readily be conveyed between us, such as explaining the phenomenon of sight or colour to someone blind from birth.

I cannot recall not experiencing tinnitus. I can remember a time before the glass bells and the bat sound, both of which began quite abruptly only a few months ago, but not a world without the whoosh. I do not suffer from depression or any stress beyond standard, two common causes of tinnitus, so I attribute my condition to auditory trauma. For that I blame Bob Dylan and MP3 technology. Like many of my generation, I had earphones before I had the nous to use them responsibly. Throughout my teenage years, my favourite album was Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, which opens with an almighty snap of a snare drum like the crack of a gavel, the jester opening court with audacious authority. I used to crank those first bars so loud that I would feel that beat ricochet through me, which cannot have been good for my hearing.

It was not, however, until about a year ago that I recognised the whoosh as a sound. Having lived my adult life with it ever-present, I believed that silence was the whoosh: that when auditory stimulation is absent, everyone hears such a buzz. I took it to be the rush of blood in my ears, or the atmosphere passing eternally over me like a breath of wind. There must have been a time before it, but that time is beyond the limits of my self. Spike Milligan, I think, once observed that children do not actually grow into adults but disappear entirely, deposed by another entity. The I that I am now reaches back to about seventeen or so, fifteen at the furthest, when I had already long been abusing cheap earphones.

Silence, therefore, is alien to me. I do not know the absence of sound. I cannot imagine it. I am the inversion of Nagel’s blind example; I have heard endlessly for as long as I can recall and now the whoosh is an inexorable trait of the subjective character of my experience. But while Nagel is insistent that the inaccessibility of certain facts does not negate their existence – that bats have experience, even if it is unknowable to us – regarding silence I am not convinced. This might come across as metaphysical sour grapes, might be what Nagel calls the ‘crudest form of cognitive dissonance’, but I don’t think that you can experience silence, either.

History’s most committed scholar of silence is arguably the avant-garde composer John Cage. He wrote an essay collection, Silence, on the subject, but his most famous work in the field is 4’33’’. The piece consists of three movements of varying length in which all the performer does, in the original iteration, is open and close a piano lid. Not a note is played. Often incorrectly known as 4’33’’ of Silence, the point is that in those four and a half minutes there is always noise. At the first performance, as Cage proudly reports, there was the noise of the audience muttering in disagreement, followed by the clatter of chairs being vacated and people shuffling out of the auditorium. At later, more receptive performances, there might be the clink of ice in cocktails or the whistling of birds beyond windows.

The insight of 4’33’’ is that what we call silence is really a dynamic mixture of unacknowledged noises. The piece frames these sounds as music. You can prove Cage’s point by simply sitting and really listening to the sounds around you. This current moment, writing while alone in the house, is among the quietest I regularly experience, but it is far from silent. Below the immediate quietude, separate from the perpetual hiss of tinnitus, are layers of background sound. Foremost I can hear the boiler, thrumming dutifully away. Below that, beyond the window, the wind shuffles through the trees while further on still is the whispered roar of the traffic. This sound, like the whoosh, I have to actively acknowledge. Having grown up almost on the banks of the M602, the static of traffic is as familiar and soothing to me as I imagine the sound of waves are to seafaring peoples.

Only in highly specialised spaces does the world approach silence. When research and curiosity demand it, huge sums of money must be spent in the construction of anechoic chambers. Walls must be insulated with intricate sound absorbing foam. Whole rooms must be suspended off the ground in perfect stillness so that passing lorries do not disturb them with tiny, noisy vibrations. Humans cannot stay long in these spaces. Anechoic chambers are distressing, prompting dizziness and sickness and compelling many visitors to leave almost immediately. It was a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard that prompted Cage’s reflections on silence; on entering the space, he talks of how he could, in this supposedly silent room, hear two sounds, ‘one high and one low’. These, he claims he was told by the attendant, were the sounds of the operation of his nervous system.

Others have since questioned Cage’s story. They have said that the attendant would not have told him he could hear the operation of his nervous system because, well, you can’t hear the operation of your nervous system. Some have suggested that Cage suffered from a thitherto unrecognised tinnitus. But whatever the prompt, Cage reached his conclusion: there is no such thing as silence. We live our lives in noise, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, but never absent. It is a conclusion that is hard to deny, and easy to carry further.

The famous thought experiment asks, ‘if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ The suggestion is that sound is more than a physical event: that the sound of a falling tree is not contained entirely within a tree falling, perhaps not at all within a tree falling, but in the interaction between the soundwaves thus produced and our faculty of hearing.

My question is, if a tree does not fall in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it stand in silence? Silence, like sound, is an auditory experience. The absence of sound is not sufficient for silence; that absence must also be experienced. But which of our senses can experience nothing? Touch is forever telling us at least which part of our body is in contact with the earth, or the machine keeping us off it, or the distressing speed with which we are approaching it. Seeing nothing is actually seeing the blood in our eyelids, or the deep black of pure darkness. If I focus on it, I can taste the slight metallic tang of my own saliva while my nose must simply disregard the smells that always surround me – the smell of my clothes and furniture – in much the same way that my eyes overlook the nose ever-present in my vision.

What is it like to hear nothing? I do not know. I cannot know. Even in anechoic chambers, we cannot escape the operations of our bodies, the gurgling of our intestines or the flow of blood around our head. Nor can we escape our faculty of hearing. There can be no subjective character of silence as to be equipped with a sense is to be condemned to constant experience – even those animals that lack the sense do not hear silence as they do not hear at all. Just as our eyes see the black of pitch darkness, perhaps those noises we hear when there is nothing else are the operations of that faculty itself. Perhaps Cage’s attendant was not so misinformed as his detractors suggest, and perhaps I was not wrong in thinking that the whoosh is the sound of silence. Perhaps it is those who think themselves free of tinnitus, who have not yet acknowledged that sound, that have the erroneous hearing.

This is at least what I, a sufferer of tinnitus, have come to convince myself. I am sure the above would rile audiologists and philosophers of mind and invite replies talking of brain states and cochleae. I will leave them to it, leave the specialised particulars of the phenomenology of silence to those who have some hope of experiencing them. I need to leave the subject alone. Convincing myself of the impossibility of silence is counterproductive – it merely emphasises the distressing sounds of my tinnitus. Dealing with tinnitus is much like the Sisyphean playground classic The Game where the only aim is to not think of The Game.[1] Tinnitus can only be alleviated through the Zen means of non-thought. Not, that is, by writing extensive essays on the subject.

In a way, tinnitus is existentially reassuring. It is my senses asserting their absolute dominion over my experience of the world, an affirmation of lovely comforting solipsism: proof undeniable that no matter how far the universe extends around me, my experience of it exists exclusively within my head, filtered through my human senses. Were I to climb Everest and find cover from the wind, or descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and shut off my submersible, I would hear that ceaseless shrieking. Were I spat naked out into the vacuum of space, in the moments before my skull exploded I could make out, if I really tried, that eternal whoosh.

In a much more real sense, however, that is utter bollocks. When I lie in bed at night, reading abandoned, that endless fucking whistling is sometimes enough to make me weep. No amount of Cage or Nagel, no rationalisation or metaphysical rebuttal, is substitute for the pleasure of sitting in what we colloquially know as silence. All I can do is close my eyes, calm myself down, and try desperately to believe that an enormous colony of bats is passing by just beyond my window, screeching endlessly as they go.

[1] You just lost The Game.

References

Cage, J. (1994) Silence: lectures and writings, Marion Boyars, London

Di Piero, W.S. (2020) 'Tinnitus', published in The Atlantic Quarterly, December 2020

Milligan, S. -- I remember with conviction hearing this line in a documentary about Spike Milligan aired in the early aughts, probably not long after his death; try as I might, however, I have not been able to find it again. If the quip is not Milligan’s, I will happily claim it as my own.

Nagel, T. (1979) ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’ in Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 165-180.

Ross, A. (2010) in ‘Searching for Silence,’ The New Yorker, October 4th, 2010