In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  Considering the fate of Babbage, Carlyle might have been merely being prudent when he damped down his public activism against noise and focused on pursuing silence in his own home. In danger, he claimed, of being driven mad by itinerant musicians (along with the songs of a neighbor’s “Demon Fowls”—Cochin China roosters), he decided to soundproof his study on the top floor of his home. At first, he was all excitement, writing a friend, “We are again building in Cheyne Row: a perfectly soundproof apartment this time; deaf utterly, did you even fire cannon beside it, and perfect in ventilation; such is the program—calculated to be the envy of surrounding ‘enraged musicians,’ and an invaluable conquest to me henceforth, if it prosper!”

  “If it prosper,” indeed. Quickly, the noise of the soundproof operation itself became a wretched commotion: “Irish laborers fetching and carrying, tearing and rending, our house once more a mere dust-cloud and chaos come again.” Carlyle fled the operation—and the house—leaving both to the directorship of his wife, who was relieved to be free of her husband’s oppressive noise consciousness. “Now that I feel the noise and dirt and disorder with my own senses, and not through his as well, it is amazing how little I care about it,” she wrote.

  Before the dust had even settled, it became clear that, despite the use of sound-mitigation strategies that would be perfectly respectable today (such as double walls and a specially designed slate roof with sound-deadening air chambers beneath), the project was a fiasco. Carlyle characterized the efforts as “totally futile.” Ultimately, he declared the room to be by far the noisiest place in the entire house. Even its vaunted perfect ventilation was a bust. Shortly after its completion, Carlyle climbed to the study and shut himself up inside to smoke a pipe in mournful contemplation of his ruined dreams. Fortunately, his absence was noticed before much time had passed. A housemaid found Carlyle splayed unconscious on his study floor, overcome by smoke fumes.

  Worst of all, the whole experience had darkened his view of human nature. His fantasy of a soundproof room, Carlyle now realized, “was a flattering delusion of an ingenious needy builder.” In combination with shoddy building and crippling expenses, the moral depravity evidenced in the work of his soundproofers made the room “a kind of infernal ‘miracle’” to him, his “first view of the Satan’s invisible world that prevails in that department as in others.” It was a fate fit for a Greek myth. Carlyle’s dream of a soundless room left him with both the noisiest room in his domain and an embittering recognition that corruption thrives even at the heart of man’s noblest calling: the pursuit of silence.

  And still, despite Carlyle’s failure, the rise of so-called brainwork went hand in hand with the refinement of soundproofing technology. Even earplugs got better. The old problems of irritation from beeswax and the skanky decomposition of sheep tallow were overcome by composite plugs mixed with cotton wool. Franz Kafka grew reliant on a new line of such plugs to muffle daytime noises and had them specially sent from Berlin—though he lamented to his fiancée that they were still rather messy and wished that the tiny steel “sleeping balls” a Strindberg hero slipped into his ears could be found outside the author’s imagination. By the early twentieth century, Carlyle’s fantasy of a room that would be impervious to sound even if a cannon were fired beside it was closer to becoming a reality.

  Floyd Watson, author of a pioneering 1922 work on soundproofing techniques, reported that during the First World War a room was built to insulate the sounds of machine guns being tested. It was a room inside a room, actually: four inches of ground cork lined its wooden walls; a double layer of flax boards padded the ceiling. Bullets were shot into a big heap of absorptive sand. The insulation worked well enough that neighbors across the street had no idea what was happening inside the building until one of the gunners forgot to shut the double-pane windows after opening them to fan out the billowing clouds of powder smoke.

  Exciting developments in soundproofing were happening around the world. Scientists in Utrecht, Holland, claimed to have built a room so free of noise that a person could hear his own heartbeat. When Shepherd Ivory Franz of the George Washington University Government Hospital for the Insane went to check it out (psychological investigations were to take place there, among other experiments), he was elated. Diagrams of the room Franz published in the journal Science depict what appears to be a box made of multiple frames resting on a fat plank. Lines radiate out from a list of materials in the middle of the box indicating the wall-within-a-wall layers of soundproofing each frame represents: korkstein, wood, lead, trichpiése (some kind of woven horsehair), porous stone, and air space. That’s not even to start on the sheet-lead-and-carpet buried floor. Franz confirmed that while it was true you might also be able to hear your own heartbeat in certain rooms that were not noiseless, this would only occur after “very violent exercise,” while in the Utrecht chamber all it took were “a few swings of the leg or arm” to make “heart sounds quite distinct.” So quiet was the room, he reported, that “one hears a subjective buzzing similar to but of less intensity than the buzzing produced by large doses of quinine.” (That buzzing was probably the same tinnitus-type noise that John Cage mistook for the sound of his nervous system more than forty years later when he made his famous visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber, a special soundproof room designed to suppress all reverberation. “There is always something to see, something to hear,” Cage wrote after this experience.) The lesson of the Utrecht room seemed straightforward: given sufficient layering and distance, you can kill any sound. But the pursuit of silence through soundproofing wasn’t only about piling one deadening material on top of another. There was also the quest for the one all-purpose, ideal soundproofing technique: the elixir of noiselessness.

  At the close of the nineteenth century, Samuel Cabot, a Boston manufacturer, had discovered the power of cured eelgrass packed between thick paper sheets to stop sound by creating a “thick, elastic cushion of dead-air spaces.” Using the trademark name Cabot’s Quilt, he was soon boasting of the substance as the Green Glue of its day. “Every Hotel, Flat, Lodge, Hospital, School, Auditorium or similar building should be sound-proofed,” proclaimed one advertisement Cabot placed in a 1918 issue of the journal Western Architect & Engineer. “If it isn’t sound-proof it’s a failure. Cabot’s Quilt has made more buildings really soundproof than all other deadening materials combined.” In 1929 British engineers rediscovered Cabot’s product as their own invention. (The history of soundproofing is littered with instances of convenient forgetting.) A captain affiliated with the sound locators of the London Territorial Air Defence Brigades got credit in the London Times for realizing the soundproofing potential of this fireproof, nonverminous seaweed. Imported to Great Britain from Nova Scotia in the form of mats that were attached to ceilings and walls, it became the definitive sound absorbent for the quintessential silent institution: the English bank.

  At a London trade show in 1930, Trystan Edwards, a town planner and architectural critic, exhibited a model for an entirely “silent house.” The house boasted a miracle door that could “even be slammed silently.” (Begging the question of the dangerous rage that might be provoked absent the satisfaction of that argument-closing clap.) Sir Banister Fletcher, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, lauded the idea and called for architects to consider it as they built near the loud, crowded thoroughfares of London.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, anxiety about metropolitan population explosions helped drive the soundproofing renaissance. Even the stolid United States Bureau of Standards, concerned by studies that forecast a spike in the density of urban dwellings, jumped on the bandwagon of experimenters trying to devise a truly silent apartment. The bureau’s exhaustive tests of acoustic properties of different building materials led to the official proclamation that air space between the two halves of a compound partition was the most effective sound snuffer in the world.

  Along with private homes and financial institutions, courtrooms, hospitals,
and prisons were early beneficiaries of the advances in soundproofing. In the latter, soundproofing was brought in as a humane gesture to protect quieter inmates from noisier ones, as well as to cultivate religion. Not religion through silence, however. A new chapel at Sing Sing featured a breakthrough rolling soundproof partition that enabled it to simultaneously host two religious services, one Catholic and one Presbyterian.

  From the turn of the century on up to the Second World War, optimism about the capacity of soundproofing technology to meet the challenges of the new, machine-driven din abounded. In a spring fever, the New York Times tied the prospect of new soundproof spaces to amatory bliss: “We don’t need any more faculties for divorce. What we do need are a few old abandoned telephone booths large enough to accommodate two, fitted up with a rustic seat and sound-proof, where the city lover can sit undisturbed and repeat the old, old story that no age has been able to supplant.” More sober authorities, such as R. V. Parsons, an acoustical engineer with the New York City Noise Abatement Commission, which was established by the city health commissioner in 1929 and was the first such body in the nation, announced that “Preventing noise at its source and insulating against it are both possible now—not in some Utopian future.”

  A few unfortunate members of the commission were tasked with measuring the efficacy of a soundproof room that had been developed in collaboration with Bell Laboratories against a biblical checklist of urban noise plagues. All day long, day after day, the experts huddled in this special chamber, blasted by one noise type after the next, gauging how well the room performed. Most wracking of all was a sound replicating the roar of heavy traffic “punctuated by the penetrating discord of sirens and automobile horns.” After health commissioner Shirley Wynne visited the room—bluntly labeled a “torture chamber” by one of those present—he left visibly shaken, deeming himself “a martyr to the cause of humanity” for having agreed to participate in the research.

  Health benefits of soundproof buildings were being studied around the world just as the construction of such buildings was becoming logistically feasible. Sometimes the results of this research were surprising. The most curious finding emerged from a test begun in 1930 by scientists from the Tokyo Hygienic Laboratory. Doctors Fujimaki and Arimoto compared the physical condition of numerous sets of white rats, half of which were raised in rooms protected from loud noises and half of which were raised in a noisy environment. In their first experiment, involving two groups of 20 rats, they discovered that rats raised under an elevated railroad over which 1,283 trains passed each day were more nervous, grew less, had higher infant mortality rates, lower fertility, and ate more frequently than their noise-proofed cousins. However, there’s a twist: nasty and brutish the lives of the noise-battered rats certainly were—but they were not especially short. At least not by white rat standards. In fact, the rats raised beneath the elevated lived a full 53 days longer in aggregate than those shielded from sound. Given that you’re talking a three-to four-year life cycle on average, an extra 53 days is nothing to wrinkle your whiskers at.

  Fujimaki and Arimoto were startled and redid their experiment with other sets of rats, subjecting the noise-nurtured packs to other types of clamor. They raised one group of twenty white rats in the pressroom of the Nichi Nichi, a Tokyo daily, while housing the other set in a soundproof room. Another time, the noise rats went into a room where a bell buzzed continuously. On each occasion, the results were the same: the rats raised in noise were nervous wrecks with all sorts of collateral health problems—but they also lived considerably longer than their quiet-cradled kin.

  What does this mean? Might it really be the case, as some present-day healers claim, that sound waves contain juvenating vibrational powers? God knows, but it raises the old question: At what price longevity? An extra 53 days or 1,283 trains per day overhead for your whole life? I’d opt for early checkout. Still, the Tokyo experiment presented the researchers with a quandary. Perhaps there could be such a thing as too much soundproofing.

  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.

  THE QUIETEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD

  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 ingredie
nts 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.