TED Radio Hour - Sound And Silence

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Original broadcast date: October 16, 2020. Sound surrounds us, from cacophony even to silence. But depending on how we hear, the world can be a different auditory experience for each of us. This hour, TED speakers explore the science of sound. Guests on the show include NPR All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly, neuroscientist Jim Hudspeth, writer Rebecca Knill, and sound designer Dallas Taylor.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. What if your job depended on listening, but you had trouble hearing? It's, I guess, one of the biggest ironies from the Department of You Could Not Make This Up, that, yes, my job is to ask people questions and then listen, like, really, really listen to the answers. and I can't really hear. This is Mary Louise Kelly. You might recognize her voice because she is one of the hosts of NPR's All Things Considered.

It's All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Sasha Fiver. And I'm Mary Louise Kelly coming up in Louisville protests. Yet another prominent conservative is urging Republicans to cross party on the street here in Atlanta covering the protests when a young woman approached. She's covered everything from the Trump-Pooten Summit in Helsinki, to life in North Korea.

Do you remember when you started losing your hearing? I don't know exactly when I started to have hearing loss. It's a funny thing. I think it's a little more complicated than realizing you don't have the same eyesight you did when you were 16 and you need glasses. With hearing, it's more nuanced. You don't know if you're not hearing everything that somebody else is. In my case, I had, you know, a moment where it became undeniable. I was 42.

I had just published a book. I was on book tour. And it became apparent at event after event. I couldn't hear the questions. It felt like everybody was mumbling all the time. And you can ask people to repeat or speak up or, you know, I would ask. If I had a friend in the front road, to kind of relay things, but after a while it just becomes embarrassing, and I realized I,

I should go get this checked out. And I did. It was humbling, in part because I still, to this day, can pass with flying colors the little minimal hearing test that we all get with an annual physical where they say, you know, raise your hand if you hear the beep. I can hear the beep. What I can't do is distinguish between consonants. No matter how loud the volume is, I can't make out words anymore. And when I went to the full workup at the audiologist, they did a test with me. And they said, I'm going to say a word, just repeat the word. I said, okay.

And it would be park bench. And I would say park bench. I would say skateboard. And I would say skateboard. And I would say purple and I would say purple. It was fine. I didn't do great. But I think I got something like seven or eight out of ten.

And then they repeated it the same test. Park bench. Park bench. But holding just a piece of printer paper. Skateboard. Skateboard. Up in front of their lips so that I could not see the audiologist's lips move. Purple.

Purple. And I think I got three out of ten. And I realized. how much without even realizing it, I had come to rely on being able to see somebody's face, being able to see their lips move. And when I can't do that, I really can't hear. And they told me I had severe to profound hearing loss, particularly at higher frequencies, which means I was missing an awful lot. I got hearing aids. And that was a revelation. The first day I got them, everything was so loud in ways good and bad.

Good ways. I'd kind of forgotten pop music had words and I was bopping along singing and thinking, I haven't actually heard what they were saying. And I don't know how long, but it's been a while. I realized I was driving my kids around just doing school carpool back in the days when they actually had carpool and went to school on campus. And I realized they're chattering away my children in the back seat. and it had just been this hum for years.

I hadn't been able to hear what they were saying, and now I could listen to them. I mean, what a moment of joy. On the flip side, I remember the first time I walked into Starbucks with hearing aids, and I burst into tears and had to walk right back out because it was so loud. I hadn't heard the coffee grinders in their full glory for years, and they're really, really, really, And so there's an adjustment as your brain re-learns how to process all of those sounds and help you make sense of them.

It takes a little bit longer than just putting on a pair of glasses and suddenly being able to see. Sound surrounds us. Some sounds inundate us and invade our ears. Others we choose to seek out. From total cacophony to the beauty of complete silence, depending on how we hear, the world can be a totally different auditory experience for each of us. And so today on the show, ideas about how we experience sound and why we also need silence to make sense of it all. And for Mary Louise, her hearing aids were a huge help. But now she's dealing with some new hurdles.

When you have hearing loss, it's a nightmare for a couple of reasons. One is the social distancing. I'm used to being able to lean in. If I can't hear you, I'm going to get closer so that I can see your lips so that you're louder, so that you're right in my face. And when you have to stay at least six feet away from somebody, you can't do it. Then there's the terrible double whamming of masks. And I should say, for the record, I'm all for masks.

I wear them. I hope everyone wears them. However, they muffle your voice, any of them. and they prevent me from seeing your lips. And those two things together conspire to make it so, so, so much harder to engage in just casual conversation, or in my case to go out and interview somebody on the street in the field and have any idea what you're telling me. I had a moment where it dawned on me just how difficult this was going to be. This was that period for me in D.C.

where we were passed full lockdown. I could contemplate going to the local CVS. But I had to pick up a prescription from my youngest son. So I masked up. I brought my hand sanitizer. I had the prescription. I was all set to go just in and out. And obstacle number one, there's plexiglass everywhere,

but separating me from the pharmacist. So, okay, there's a sound barrier right there, hard to hear. and then we're both wearing masks. And the most simple transaction, you know, two blocks from my house became so difficult. I come in, I tell him I'm here to pick up a refill for my son, and he looks at me and says, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, or at least that's what I'm hearing. And I'm thinking, okay, logically, he's probably asking for my son's name and birth date. So I tell him that.

And the pharmacist, I can see his eyes and he's giving me this kind of weird look and he mumbles again. And I think, okay, what else would he need? And I pull my insurance card from my wallet, hold it up. He gives me another weird look. He starts speaking more slowly. He gets the bored look that a lot of people who are hard of hearing are familiar with. And I get it. It's frustrating to talk when the other person isn't understanding you.

And I can't decipher a single word. And we go through this, I know, pantomime for a few minutes. And finally he leans back and says, what is the phone number on file for your son? And I say, oh, and I gave him the phone number. And, you know, five minutes later, I left. I got the medicine. It's all fine.

I just remember going out, standing on the sidewalk and feeling scared and defeated. and thinking, I cannot manage to pick up a prescription refill at our neighborhood drugstore. How am I going to do my job? It was a moment that gave me a great pause. And, you know, you can stand there and feel sorry for yourself for a little while and then you figure out, okay, how do I still do this? Where are you on answering that question? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I find ways to do it. I anchor a national news show, despite the fact that I have significant hearing loss and I'm doing it with hearing age.

You find ways to make it work. I have never, as an anchor, as a host on NPR, found my hearing a handicap, just doing daily interviews for the show. And I think one reason for that is context is everything when you're only catching every second or third word. It helps to know what I'm talking about. And, you know, none of it is easy, but there's always a way, or at least I hope so. That's the plan. That's Mary Louise Kelly. You can hear her almost every day on NPR's All Things Considered.

And Mary Louise's hearing loss is actually pretty common. In our society, about 10% of the populace, that's 30 million people, have significant. hearing problems. At the time that we're on the order of 70 years old, about a quarter of us have significant hearing loss. And by 80, it's more than half. This is Jim Hudspeth. I'm a professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, and I'm a neuroscience researcher. So I work particularly on hearing. And Jim says to understand why hearing loss is so common, we need to understand how the ear works. Oh, yeah. So here we go. sound is of course a vibration in the air and that's really obvious when a jet plane for example

rattles a window there's energy or power flowing through the air sound energy hits the ear drum it moves three little bones in the middle ear and finally it causes pressures to change in the spiraling cochlea that's our organ of hearing the cochlea is about the size of a chickpea

a garbanzo bean it's a little thing there's one in each ear. And within the cochlea, there are 16,000 sensory receptors. Wow. They're called hair cells. Jim continues his explanation from the TED stage. Now, these hair cells are unfortunately named because they have nothing at all to do with the kind of hair of which I have less and less.

These cells were originally named that by early microscopists who noticed that emanating from one end of the cell was a little clobar. of bristles. With modern electron microscopy, we can see much better the nature of the special feature that gives the hair cell its name. That's the hair bundle. It's this cluster of 20 to several hundred fine cylindrical rods that stand upright at the top end of the cell. And this apparatus is what is responsible for your hearing me right this instant. In a minute, Jim Hudspeth, on how over time we lose those tiny hair cells in our ears and why chickens don't. On the show today, ideas about sound and silence.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zomerode. And we were just hearing from neuroscientist Jim Hudspeth describing the sensory receptors in our ears, hundreds of microscopic hair cells that make up the hair bundle. Now, I must say that I'm somewhat in love with these cells. I've spent 45 years in their company. And part of the reason is that they're really beautiful.

There's an aesthetic component to it. Hair cells are found all the way down to the most primitive of fishes, and those of reptiles often have this really beautiful, almost crystalline order. But above and beyond its beauty, the hair bundle, is a machine for converting sound vibrations into electrical responses that the brain can then interpret. Those little bristles get tickled or moved by the sound energy,

and when that happens, the cell develops an electrical response that it then communicates to the brain. So that's all the brain knows. These 16,000 cells each send information about a particular sound that flows into the brain, and the brain then says, okay, I heard a middle C, I heard whatever tone it happens to be.

Is it fair to say that these little hairs are antennas, or are they more like little amplifiers? Yeah, well, now you've just exactly hit on the head what I've been doing for the last 40 years. It turns out that the hair cells, and indeed the hairs, are not just passive recipients of sound. Instead, each of them is a little amplifier that enhances the signals going in. Let me tell you how it works. First of all, the active process amplifies sound. So you can hear, at threshold, sounds that move the hair bundle by a distance of only about three-tenths of anatomy. That's the diameter of one water molecule.

Why do we need this amplification? The amplification in ancient times was useful because it was valuable for us to hear the tiger before the tiger could hear us. These days, it's essential as a distant early warning system. It's valuable to be able to hear fire alarms, or contemporary dangers such as police cars or the like. This active process also enhances our frequency selectivity. Even an untrained individual can distinguish two tones that differ

by only two-tenths of a percent, which is one-thirtieth of the difference between two piano notes. And a trained musician can do even better. This fine discrimination is useful in our ability to distinguish different voices and to understand the nuances of speech. When the amplification fails, our hearing's sensitivity plummets. And so what exactly is happening in Mary Louise's year, for example, in all our years, when we hear and then when we lose our hearing?

The answer is that that amplifier begins to burn out. Basically, any noise that's loud enough to be uncomfortable to make your ears hurt is doing some damage to the cells of the ear. The little hairs no longer actively amplify the incoming sound and therefore hearing becomes harder and harder, particularly in places where sound is very faint or in crowded circumstances where sound is very, confusing. Consonants, for example. So the difference between b and pah and things like that is somewhat

subtle. And the high frequencies that are necessary to convey that information are the first thing to go. And so one begins to have trouble understanding speech, and then as lower and lower frequencies are affected, the difficulties become greater and greater. So there is technology that can give people the choice as to whether or not they can resolve their deafness, cochlear implants, correct? Exactly right. The idea of the implant is to replace the hair cells that have died. And I should say that when hair cells die in our ears, they are not replaced by cell division. So they're unlike the skin or the liver or other organs. When they're gone, they're not replaced. And that, of course, leads to cumulative damage. It all adds up. And this is also true for daily listening.

People who listen for hours and hours a day continuously are quite likely to damage their ears. You get one shot, basically. You get one shot as it stands. Of course, we're interested in trying to change that. And this isn't totally ridiculous because mammals have the problem of no regeneration. but fish and amphibians, reptiles, all can regenerate their hair cells. In fact, some of these animals are losing them all the time and continuously growing new ones just as we grow new skin. What about birds? Birds can do it 100%.

In fact, this is where it was first observed. People noticed in pigeons and then in chickens that they could take them to, say, heavy metal concert, blast the ears really to oblivion. And then within days, new hair cells would be able to. began to sprout, and within a few weeks, hearing was more or less back to normal. It's really extraordinary. How would you explain why evolution would Grant's amphibians and reptiles, you said, and birds, this quite extraordinary power? Well, I think it's not the question

so much of why they have it as why we've lost it. Because if you look at more primitive vertebrates, the earliest are fishes, then amphibians, then reptiles. Each of them has it. Somewhere along the line, mammals lost it. And there is no certainty why we have lost that capacity. It's true of many forms of regeneration. We can't grow our hearts back. We can't grow nerve cells back.

Part of the issue may simply be that we live longer. If you have cells that can readily regenerate, you also have cells that can more readily become cancerous because they have the chance to grow. So if you're a fish that's going to live two years, you may not spend much time worrying about cancer. But if you're a radio announcer who hopes to live 95 years, you have to take it into consideration. As someone who understands how sound and hearing works more intimately than 99.9% of the rest of the population, What have you observed about your own hearing over the years?

Well, the principal thing as I've observed is I was stupid in the 1960s, but then so was everybody. So I spent much too much time at loud concerts or with my head between two speakers turned all the way up. And I'm paying some of the price of that now. That was you in the 60s. I'm thinking of me in the late 80s going, sitting front row at Guns and Roses concert and having that ringing in my ears for three days afterwards. And big mistake. Yeah, it's worth it to hear slash.

But I agree. You know, if that's the last thing you hear, you might rue the experience. That's neuroscientist Jim Hudspeth. You can watch his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about sound and silence and technology, because the way devices can help us hear now, it's almost like science fiction. Hello.

My name is Rebecca and I am a cyborg. Okay, so maybe not that kind of cyborg. But Rebecca Nill does think of herself as part robot. So a cyborg is somebody who has both organic or natural body parts as well as like biomechanical body parts. plus a computer interface which relies on some sort of feedback. So with a cochlear implant, which is what I have, I do have computer chips inside my head, which basically rebuild my sense of hearing

because I have no natural hearing. Rebecca describes how she became a cyborg from the TED stage. The good news is I come for your technology and not for your human life forms. Actually, I've never seen an episode of Star Trek. But there's a reason for that. Television wasn't in close captioned when I was a kid. I grew up profoundly deaf.

I went to regular schools, and I had to the lip-breed. I didn't meet another deaf person until I was 20. Electronics were mostly audio back then. My alarm clock was my sister Barbara, who would set her alarm and then throw something at me to wake up. My hearing aids were industrial strength, sledgehammer, volume, but they help me more than they help most people. With them, I could hear music and the sound of my own voice.

Did you know that hearing occurs in the brain? In your ear is a small organ called the cochlea, and the cochlea is lined with thousands of receptors called hair cells. My hair cells were damaged before I was even born. my mother was exposed to German measles when she was pregnant with me. With a cochlear implant, computer chips do the job for the damaged hair cells. Imagine a box of 16 crayons, and those 16 crayons, in combination, have to make all of the colors in the universe. Same with a cochlear implant.

I have 16 electrodes in each of my cochleos. Those 16 electrodes, in combination, send signals to my brain representing all of the sounds in the universe. I have electronics inside and outside of my head to make that happen, including magnets inside my skull and a rechargeable power source. Radio waves transmit sound through the magnets. The number one question that I get about the cochlear implant when people hear about the magnets is whether my head sticks to the refrigerator. No, it says not.

I know this because I try. Before we talk more about your implant, just tell us a little bit more about what it was like growing up death. It really wasn't that different. I mean, I didn't have anything to compare it against. I was raised orally. the oral method is basically lip reading and speaking versus signing and not using speech at all. And it was very controversial back then because deaf children were forced to be raised orally.

And I think over time people have come into the perspective of the total communication of, you know, letting kids sign as well as speak, or maybe they won't speak at all. It's just an individual type of thing with what a kid is comfortable with. And really, how much hearing you have and how were you raised? Were you raised in a deaf family, which I was not. I'm not culturally deaf. But there are many deaf kids who were. And sign language is their primary, their first language.

But for me, I am a very, very good lip reader. I probably functioned more like a hard-of-hearing person. Even though on paper, the scores were just horrible. I mean, they were profoundly deaf. And my family was very, it wasn't something we ever talked about. Really? I don't think I ever once had a conversation with my parents about hearing loss. It was just what we did.

It was just what was there. It was what it was. We just went on with life. How would you describe your relationship with sound growing up? I feel like that would be a really weird question. to ask someone with typical hearing capabilities, but as someone who had atypical hearing capabilities, do you think that you related to sound differently?

I do. I did, and I do. I would say I'm neutral on sound. Huh. I think that people with people, I don't dislike sound, but I do think that people who would be considered to be hearing people are very pro-sound and they romanticize it and have very common. complex emotions about sound, and I'm neutral.

I personally couldn't care less whether I experienced the world through audio or visual. Frankly, I prefer visual because that's just less work for me. And I'm used to that. That's normal to me. So I really, I am just neutral on the concept of sound. I am anti-noise, but sound in general is it's not something. that I feel a longing for or really care about in any way. Hearing people assume that the deaf live in a perpetual state of wanting to hear

because I can't imagine any other way. But I've never once wished to be hearing. I just wanted to be part of a community like me. I think that sense of belonging is what ultimately connects our stories and mine felt incomplete. When cochlear implants first got going back in the 80s, the operation was Frankenstein monster, scary. By 2001, the procedure had evolved considerably,

but it still wiped out any natural hearing that you had. The success rate then for speech comprehension was low, maybe 50%. So if it didn't work, you couldn't go back. At that time, implants were also controversial in the deaf culture. Basically, it was considered the equivalent of changing the color of your skin. I held off for a while, but my hearing was going downhill fast, and hearing aids were no longer helping. So in 2003, I made the tough decision to have the cochlear implant.

I just needed to stop that soul-sucking skin. cycle of loss, regardless of whether the operation worked, and I really didn't think that it would. I saw it as one last box to check off before I made the transition to being completely deaf, which a part of me wanted. Can you explain that? You know, for me, it wasn't so much about hearing, but it was about authenticity. I felt like I was getting to the point where, you know, my hearing, loss really had eroded so much. And to be honest, it was much easier to live as a deaf person, at least at my job. I felt I was more my authentic self as I stopped using the voice telephone and stopped having to work so hard to hear. The possibility of being completely deaf was not

threatening. It wasn't again anti-hearing or not wanting it to work, but it was just the idea of that I could be myself. Complete silence is very addictive. Maybe you've spent time in a sensory deprivation tank, and you know what I mean. Silence has mind expanding capabilities. In silence, I see sound. When I watch a music video without sound, I can hear music. In the absence of sound, my brain fills in the gaps based on the movement I see. My mind is no longer competing with the destruction of sound. It's freed up to think more creatively. I'm so intrigued by this idea that you sometimes prefer to be in complete silence.

And I know you can switch your device off. whenever you want, right? Yes, that's the beauty of it. And I turn it off a lot. I call it being unplugged. And it's something I look forward to, and I even crave it, like an addiction to chocolate. I keep it on for work and when I go out. But my favorite part of the day is turning it off and home and just enjoying the silence.

And again, when I travel, you know, there's always a screaming baby on the plane, and I would turn it off for that. Or the work is too noisy when we were in. at the office, I would turn it off for that. And I would put a little sign in front of my desk that just said unplug so that people would know. And it's the best of both worlds, I think. In a moment, we'll hear more from Rebecca Nill on her cochlear implant and why she says the way people perceive deafness is outdated. On the show today, ideas about sound and silence.

I'm Manusse Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Hey, before we get back to the show, I just want to let you know our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus is out soon. It's more of my conversation with evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten. Shane is so cool. He's a Princeton professor, and he researches how human behavior speeds up evolution in other species, like city-dwelling lizards that are adapting to urbanization in Puerto Rico.

So that is coming out Wednesday. If you're not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter yet, please join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and all our episodes sponsor free. Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Somerodi. And just before the break, we were hearing from Rebecca Nill on her decision to get a cochlear implant. And Rebecca says that today her device allows her to do just about anything a hearing person can, with a few added benefits. With the cochlear implant, I can stream music from my iPod into my head without earbuds.

Recently, I went to a friend's long, tedious concert. And unknown to anyone else, I listened to the Beatles for three hours instead. But technology has come so far, so fast. The biggest obstacle I face as a deaf person is no longer a physical barrier. It's the way that people respond to my deafness, the outdated way people respond to my deafness. Pity, patronization, even anger.

Because that just cancels out the human connection that technology achieves. You might know a play later in a movie called Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff. That play, that title, actually comes from a poem by Alfred Tennyson. And I interpret both the play and title to say that humans who are perceived as defective were made by a lesser God and live in inferior existence, while those made by the real God are a superior class

because God doesn't make mistakes. In World War II, an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities were murdered in special death camps because they didn't fit Hitler's vision of a superior race. Hitler said that he was inspired by the United States, which had enacted involuntary sterilization laws for the unfit in the early 19th century. That practice continued in more than 30 states until the 70s, with the last law finally repealed in 2003. So the world is not that far removed from Tennyson's poem. That tendency to make assumptions about people based on ability comes out in sentences like,

you're so special, I couldn't live like that. or thank God that's not me. Rebecca, you talk about how people presume that someone like you won't have a full life without being able to hear. And I can imagine that that's pretty upsetting to you. Right. But it's true. People do make that assumption. And, you know, it kind of annoys me, I have to say, because I think it betrays a little bit of a sense of entitlement.

that their state of being was better than mine. The reality is every function in life can be performed multiple ways, but people get very narrow-minded. I think 40, even 20 years ago, people had a very specific impression of deafness as being, you know, a lesser way of life, being maybe not as smart, not having opportunities. when you talk to parents who have newborns who are deaf,

the first thought is, oh, my child won't have any opportunities. And all that, none of that is true anymore because you have so much technology that can bridge those gaps. So I am on a mission now. As a consumer of technology, I want visual options whenever there's audio. It doesn't matter whether I'm deaf or don't want to wake the baby. Both are equally valid.

Apple did this recently. On my iPhone, it automatically displays a visual transcript of my voicemail right next to the audio button. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted you. You know what else? Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, no longer say, closed caption for the hearing impaired. They say subtitles, on or off,

with a list of languages underneath, including English. Technology has come so far. Our mindset just needs to catch up. Resistance is fertile. Thank you. That's Rebecca Nill. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Today on the show, sound and silence.

So a lot of what I do in sound design is like try to elicit the emotion off of the visuals in order to sell it more. Now it's something you probably don't ever notice which is great about sound design is that you don't really ever think about it. Like we do like a lot of car commercials and you'd think that the engine in the car commercial was just the engine they recorded right there when they shot the commercial

but it just doesn't work like that to make an engine sound incredible. Sometimes we have to re-record that or borrow from a similar car that's been recorded well in order to fake it. Anything that's not dialogue is completely rebuilt 98% of the time in sound design. This is Dallas Taylor.

I'm a sound designer and the host of 20,000 Hertz. Which is a podcast all about sound. And the car you were just hearing, that was from an accurate commercial that Dallas made with the company he founded in 2009, de facto sound. Really with the goal of bringing like, cinematic, super high-end sound design to short content like advertising and trailers. A lot of these things on the sound front go so much deeper than just the music score or the dialogue, but people are building entire worlds from scratch through sound effects and recording.

And these sound effects could sway people emotionally. Like you can make wind sound eerie or you can make wind sound comforting. And I became really fascinated with this whole idea of building worlds in a way that you could also help tell stories with. And so how did that lead you to start a podcast, which is about how sound works? It was a slow process. But it started with my career in like the visual world where to tell a story, the only two human senses that we have in that world is our. sense of sight and our sense of hearing. And even in that world, it was always, it's always been kind of shocking how little people would think about the, the sound aspect of something. But I was

thinking if, if my entire industry where we only have two senses to work with creatively, still undercuts and diminishes our sense of hearing and the impact that it can have, I can only imagine what the rest of the world thinks about sound. And so I got to thinking about that more and I started thinking, well, let's think about like the five senses we have. And in reality, we have like 20 senses. But for our purposes, like what we learned in school is like, you know, sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. And so as humans, we're incredibly visual creatures. And that's amazing.

You know, we have art galleries. We have beautiful images, photography. You know, we design our homes in a specific way to match our style. With touch, you know, we curate our clothes. We curate our furniture, our shoes, our HVAC. If we hurt, we take ibuprofen, a sense of taste. You know, all day. I'm thinking about food. Yeah, all day. And then finally, before hearing, our sense of smell. There's a whole fragrance industry. There's some. soaps, there's sewage. But when it comes to hearing, we've really made that about music. And music is amazing. But music is only a small part of the sonic world. And I'd love for people to start to curate that sense and be more critical of that sense in their everyday lives, just like they do with sight, touch, taste, and smell. I love the idea that we can more carefully curate the sounds around us better if we just start to pay more attention. But, you know, it's interesting. We were just

talking to Rebecca Nill, who has a cochlear implant, and she talks about looking forward to turning it off and just being in complete silence. And I guess I'm wondering, you know, for the rest of us, do you think it's actually rare to experience pure silence? Yeah. So a lot of times when we think about silence as humans, we're just thinking of quiet. But none of this. None of us with our sense of hearing have experienced true silence. And when I went into the anechoic chamber, my perception of what sound is, the definition of quiet, the definition of silence, all of those terms changed in my mind. So an anechoic chamber's design is to reduce the amount of sound to just as absolute close to absolute zero as possible. and it's used for scientific testing to see if components vibrate or if they can catch things that maybe they couldn't hear or in a noisier environment.

But I was fascinated with it because I really wanted to go in and just have all of the sound of life just completely sucked away to see what that would be like. And so I went down to the Georgia Tech Research Institute and they had this big anechoic chamber where they could put me like on a lift in the middle of this giant, room that has like, I don't know, five layers of wall and then this giant door that's terrifying to close, especially when you're in there alone. And then these huge, like, pyramid foam-shaped things in every direction. And so they put me in there and you hear noise, whatever. As soon as you shut the door, it's just like the entire world of sound just disappears. And it is more terrifying than anything. Now, I've spent most of my professional career in recording studios, so I'm a little bit more accustomed to the quietness. But for many people, it's kind of like a shocking feeling to just

take all sound away. And just to realize that even in your most quiet moments, how much sound is actually there. But in the chamber, what was really fascinating is that about 20 to 30 seconds in, I started to hear my blood pushing through my body and I heard my digestion and I heard a very light like tenetous ring in my ears, things I've never heard before. And so that, in that moment, I could really truly hear the earth and its movement go away. And so I really became interested in what John Cage was talking about with 433. 433, if you haven't heard of it, is a piece by composer John Cage, and Dallas tells the story in his TED Talk.

This piece is actually not very typical of John Cage's writing. He's more known for his innovations and avant-garde techniques. But despite his reputation, no one was prepared for what he did in 1952 when he created the most daring piece of his career. It was called Four Minutes. and 33 seconds, and it was a piece that some critics even refused to call music. Because for the entire duration of the piece, the performer plays nothing at all. Well, to be technical, the performer is actually playing rest,

but to the audience, it looks like nothing's happening. John Cage's 433 was performed for the first time in the summer of 1952 by renowned pianist David Tudor. It was at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. This is a beautiful wooden building with huge openings to the outdoors. So David Tudor walked out on stage, sat down at the piano, then closed the piano lid. He then sat in silence, only moving to open and close the piano lid between each of the three movements. After the time was up, he got up and walked off the stage.

I mean, Dallas, four minutes and 33 seconds is a long time to sit in silence. If you're not in, like, church or meditating, I can only assume that people felt extremely uncomfortable. I would suspect that as well. A lot of people thought he was throwing away his career for a stunt. He got letters, family members saying, what are you doing? But what John Cage's 433 does is it forces you to listen to what's happening around you. In one of the most brilliant ways I could imagine, and that's being like in a classical, music setup where someone comes out and they sit down. And there's generally a couple reactions to

it. One, oh, this is a joke. You know, why am I, why somebody coming out, sitting down and doing nothing? But on the other side, it's a, it's a powerful experience to really feel your ears vibrating and feel the world interacting with your ears. John Cage realized that creating an environment with no distractions wasn't about creating silence. It wasn't even about controlling noise. It was about the sounds that were already there, but you suddenly hear for the first time when you're really ready to listen. That's what's so often misunderstood about 433. It sounds different everywhere you play it, and that's the point. What John Cage really wanted us to hear is the beauty of the sonic world around us. Our ears are incredibly special.

Because even from like a universal aspect, light can travel from one point in the universe all the way to the other point, another point in the universe. You know, we have light hitting our eyes, photons hitting our eyes that are billions of years old. But sound, you just travel up a few miles and it's gone, like forever the way that we perceive it. I mean, sure, you could fall into Jupiter and have a moment of sonic, you know, understanding, but the gases are going to be different. So even if we interacted with like another living organism, they're not going to really hear like we have. They may have a completely different sense. But I think that's important to understand that like our ears are so in tune with our atmosphere right here on Earth. And I think that's why it's special.

And I think John Cage was trying to get people to really open up that sense and curate it and understand that like everything can be music if you think of it that way. Everything can sound beautiful. And if we curate our world, there's so many things that we can make sound better. That sound designer Dallas Taylor, you can find his full talk at TED.com. He also hosts the podcast 20,000 Hertz, which explores really fascinating stories all about sound. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about sound and silence. To learn more about the people who were on it, go to ted.npr.org. and to see hundreds more TED Talks,

check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz-Meshkampur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, and Matthew Cloutier with help from Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Farah, Safari,

and special thanks this week to DeFacto Sound. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, and Michelle Quint. I'm Manus Samarodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.