Unexplainable - A show about nothing

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

A few months ago, we put out an episode about what silence sounds like, and it caught the attention of Rob Rosenthal, who hosts a podcast called Sound School about the craft of audio storytelling. So he called up host Noam Hassenfeld to ask him a question he couldn't stop thinking about: How do you make something that sounds like nothing?Host: Rob Rosenthal, host of Sound School PodcastGuest: Noam Hassenfeld For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Joanna Salataroff, fancy seeing you here. Sally Helm. Top of the morning to you. Top of the morning to you. You and I are here, Joanna, for a specific reason, not just a chat with each other,

which is the episode that we're airing today on the show, you and I both have a special personal connection to one of the voices that our listeners are about to hear. It's true. So I'm so excited to share that our episode on Silence, which was part of our sound barrier series that Noam hosted. And that you edited. And that I edited was featured on Rob Rosenthal's podcast called Sound School, which really digs into the craft of audio storytelling. And today's episode, he dials way, way, way, way,

into the complexities of silence in storytelling with Noam. Yeah. But also, you and I were both students of Rob's. And so it's just like, feels like a little full circle moment to have our work on his show. A little family reunion, if you will. Yeah, Rob is, I mean, I would go so far as to say he is maybe the central teacher in the world of podcasting, like not just you and I, but many, many producers have come through his classes at the Transom Story Workshop, previously at Salt in Maine, and he's just like a huge behind-the-scenes force in the world of podcasting. Like many, many shows have been affected by his teaching and the way that he sees the craft. So I am so excited to hear him talk to Noam because this episode about silence, it really is an interesting audience.

audio storytelling puzzle. And yeah, I just think it's going to be amazing to hear Rob and Noam talk about how it was made. So yeah, should you let people hear it, Joanna? I think so. Okay. Support for this show comes from the Futurology podcast. With so much changing every minute, it can feel useless to think more than a few days into the future. But exploring what could happen in the weeks, years, even decades after tomorrow can completely reshape how we approach today, which is exactly what Futurology is for. This new

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I live in sound. In my house, music is always on. or the news. In my car or on the bus, I listen to podcasts. When I'm outside, here on Cape Cod, the wind, the waves, bells ringing on the channel buoys, there's foghorns, and all the birds. So many birds. Cape Cod is a waypoint on the Atlantic flyway. So lots of migrating birds here in the spring. Also in the spring, there's these guys, little frogs, peepers. I love the dissonance. So even though I'm very sound-centric, give me some silence, and I'm just as happy. In fact, I sometimes crave silence. No talking, no radio, no music, no podcasts.

And by silence, I guess I mean quiet, since it's hard to achieve absolute silence. There's always something making sound. As proof, listen to this. I'm trying to be a little tricky here. I didn't play any sound. So what you heard, that's the sound where you are. I'm guessing it's not absolute silence. But hopefully, it's quiet enough so that I'm coming through loud and clear, even the silent parts. Given how much I appreciate quiet, I was surprised to learn this last fall comes from an episode of Unexplanable, the science podcast from Vox. Erin Westgate used to be an optimist.

When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop well-being interventions to actually make people's lives happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh, my goodness, I'm so busy. I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think. So Erin recruited a whole bunch of people,

and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence. And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better. They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was going to try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead.

So like someone throwing up, nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, etc., rather than simply sit in silence. Is that you? Are you that person? Definitely not. This is Noam Hassanfeld. He's the host of Unexplainable. I wouldn't say I love silence.

So I identify with some of the people in that research and that I often find silence uncomfortable and making this episode was in part kind of a desire to get more comfortable with silence. What about silence makes you uncomfortable? I guess the same thing that makes everyone uncomfortable is that it's an unstructured space. It can be difficult, right, to have to. to structure your entire experience on your own and not be listening to something, be listening to music, be talking to someone, have something structured your thoughts like art or movies or a book. You know, to be fully on your own, fully autonomous.

You know, it asks a lot of you. To be sure, Noam says he loves a good long hike up a mountain, getting to the top and taking it all in, the view and the quiet. But mostly he likes to fill his ears with music. He's a musician and plays drums. plus he composes music for unexplainable. So silence isn't the first sound he's looking for. But wait, is silence a sound?

So one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt like when I was at a symphony, and the symphony was working up to a kind of crescendo, and right when it hit the crescendo, it ended. And the moment before the applause, it was just kind of like hit by this experience. And I definitely felt silence, like, hit me across the face. Raja Go is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. And that experience that he had at the symphony,

it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing, like the absence of sound. But he felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling? So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence.

Whereas other people argue that silence is just the absence of experience. It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions. Like, what is silence? This episode on silence was part of a four-part series gnome in the crew at Unexplanable called The Sound Barrier. They explored hearing problems like tinnitus, which I always thought was pronounced tinnitus, but either way, it's a debilitating ringing in the ears. Another episode dove into audio allusions, sort of like optical illusions, when you hear one thing, but it's really something else.

Another episode explored the sound of space, and of course, the episode on silence. In a show about silence, it makes sense to have some silence, right? If you're producing a show about the clash, you'd play songs from the clash, of course. If you're producing a story on whale song, you'd want listeners to hear whale song in the piece. Problem is, silence is an anathema in a sound story. Include too much silence, and a listener might think they accidentally hit the pause button, or maybe the file is corrupt, or the producers goofed somehow. Most radio stations have alarms that go off when there's dead air.

Back when I worked in radio stations, people used to say, dead air is bad juju. Noam was aware of the problem with silence, but he not only wanted to have moments of silence in that episode, he wanted to lean into it. I actually had a goal, which is that I wanted people to have the feeling that I think I often get when walking around.

Oh my God, all of these sounds are awesome. Just listen to all of these sounds. And it's difficult. I don't want to say like I'm sort of, Like I can go out and just like listen to the cars drive by and feel excited by it. But I really wanted people to get to the end of the episode. And I wanted them to hear my silence and their silence together, like the ambient sound of my studio and the ambient sound of their kitchen or their porch or their yard or their street, wherever they are. And just have this idea of, oh, there are tons of sounds in this space.

And they're layered in interesting ways. Noam understood that he couldn't throw listeners into the deep end of silence like today on unexplainable silence and then toss in a long stretch of silence instead he did what I've been doing easing into the silence by sprinkling bits and bobs of silence here and there throughout the episode and the other thing I was thinking of while I was doing it

what I need a score with is silence there was obviously some music in the episode but I started thinking about scoring with silence. So often where maybe I would have music come in and you'd have a little bit of like a little post of music. Here we had sort of a post of silence. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, et cetera,

rather than simply sit in silence. At this point, Erin was just morbidly curious. That was the first moment of silence in the episode, about four to five seconds worth, which is kind of long, considering how infrequent silence is heard in an audio story. As the episode went on, a post of silence would sometimes get longer, like the next moment in the story, where there's five to six seconds of silence. So if silence is a real thing we can hear, what does it sound like? To find out, I decided to go

to one of the quietest places on Earth. By that, Noam means an anechoic chamber. It's a room designed by sound engineers to be completely quiet. No sound, zero. Noam was certainly not the first person to make a pilgrimage to an anechoic chamber. John Cage most famously did so in 51. Side note here, I've listened to several stories about silence over the years. Almost all of them referenced the story about John Cage's experience in one of these chambers. It's legendary, mostly because it led to one of the most pivotal moments in music composition, truly revolutionary. Cage was an avant-garde composer, and one time he saw Robert Rochenberg's work called White Painting. And the painting is just that.

Three canvases painted white. And at first it seemed to Cage that there was nothing there. But looking closer, he could see texture and flecks of paint and the little shadows cast by those flecks. In the nothingness, there was something. And Cage wondered, and I'm paraphrasing here, is that true for sound? That's when Cage got permission to stand in the anechoic chamber

at Harvard University. I heard in that room two sounds. one was high and one was low and I thought there was something wrong with the room. Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was his circulatory system. There's no way to stop the reception of sound.

If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside. From that experience, Cage concluded there's no such thing as silence. There's always sound. And that led him to that revolutionary composition, four minutes and 33 seconds. That's the name of the piece. Four minutes and 33 seconds. Oh, and by the way, it's four minutes and 33 seconds long. The performer does nothing. The audience sits in silence. Whatever sound is made during those four and a half minutes is the composition. Noam first heard four minutes and 33 seconds, or maybe I should say,

experienced 433 when he too was at Harvard, a freshman taking a class called sound, noise, and music. His teacher told the class, we're going to perform the piece together. And there they sat, listening. Noam was not impressed. Obviously, this is stupid, like modern art is dumb. And then you kind of realize what he's trying to do. And it does really shift your perspective on what sound can. be. And if you can find something interesting in silence, I mean, come on, then you can find something

interesting in anything. Please welcome our soloist, William Marks. In one recording, I found, an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bowtie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys. He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with a this kind of conductor-style flourish, presses go, and just sits there for four minutes and 33 seconds. Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s. That, by the way, was the longest stretch of silence up until that point in the episode. Nearly 14 seconds. That is an eternity in podcasting and radio. Nome figured that the first 20 minutes or so of the episode would be setting the table

for a long swath of silence. The question was, how long could that silence be? It was something that made me very nervous. I was very worried that people would either think there's a glitch or they would roll their eyes. At first, Gnome thought, well, maybe I'll just put in a minute of silence. And it was always going to be, you know, some amount of room tone running, like it wasn't just going to be digital zero.

And that felt way too long to me. Then Nome had a conversation with his editor, Jorge Just. He was just like, however much silence you're going to put at the end of this episode, I'm going to say, put more at the end of this episode. Like I kept thinking, oh, it's too much silence. He's like, more silence. Just put a lot. And then Joanna Salatara, who also edited the episode, was like, oh, maybe you should just do four minutes and 33 seconds. Right now, I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet. It's pretty still. But whatever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient

sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room, or the idling traffic as you cross the street, or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent light. So, I don't know, maybe this is weird, but what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're going to have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm going to have mine. But yeah, let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear. Well, in the four minutes and 33 seconds of recorded silence, there's a rustle of pages, there's a sniffle, a cough, a breath, a sniffle, a shift in the chair, exhale, there's some movement and an exhale, a sniffle, a knock.

Someone opens and closes the door. Somebody else says, not right now, I suppose that's you. There's a mic adjustment, an adjustment in the seat, maybe a pencil on paper, I'm not sure. A movement and some sort of clicking possibly right at the very end. I'm not sure what that was. Did you purposefully add those sounds? Yeah, so some of them were purposeful. Some of them were just kind of normally sitting there.

And I wanted it to be almost indistinguishable from what a person might hear if they were in their own room. So I just envisioned someone listening to it in a relatively quiet space and then hearing a rustle or a click or a cough or a knock on the door and wondering whether it was in their space. And then having that moment of, oh, I'm in a space and I'm listening to someone else's space. and our spaces have different levels of slight ambient noise. Isn't that interesting? And how does that impact everything I listen to? Well, I have a weird thought for you. I wondered if you included some sounds in the silence

in order for people to recognize the silence. Yes. Like when I started this, I was like, oh, maybe I should just make four minutes and 33 seconds of digital zero, right? then people will purely hear the four minutes and 33 seconds in their own space, right? They'll just be listening to their space. But I wanted, I don't know, I wanted them to, exactly, have sort of some idea of the texture of silence. It reflects back on the silence.

Like, Digital Zero is not interesting. That was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. And this was the third episode of our series, the sound barrier. We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. What did it sound like? What did you hear? As soon as I finished the whole series, I went outside and I just stood on my back porch of my apartment here in Somerville in Massachusetts. And I just listened.

I actually, honestly, I went outside and I was listening to a podcast, which is I'm like always listening to podcasts. And then I was like, dude, you just did this thing. on silence like what are you doing? Why are you filling all this space with podcasts? And so I was listening to this podcast. I took off my headphones and I just sort of stood there and listened. And I don't know. I was like really astounded by all the different things I could hear and also at different levels. I remember hearing the wind, my neighbor across the way smoking a cigarette, the leaves blowing in the wind. And then I heard footsteps walking through the leaves that felt like a little bit further away.

And then, you know, you have these sort of moments where the traffic is going and then the traffic stopping as the lights turn red. And it's just like, I closed my eyes and it's almost I could, I could like map my neighborhood in sound. It was a very cool experience. My last thought is I was just in Provincetown for a little winter break. And whenever I'm up there, I always visit the. Provincetown Art Museum. And there was a piece there called Piano Sketch Number One, Shimmer,

by an artist named Tess Oldfield. And basically it was just, it was a piano. And basically it was timed to start playing every 30 minutes. Why I'm telling you this is because there was a poem on the piano and there was a line in the poem that I wanted to run by you just to see what you had to say. silence is not absence. Yeah. I mean, I think that is a very succinct way to put it. Like, that's sort of our superpower as humans, that we can fill the space or we can imbue meaning

into spaces that just seem empty, that everything has something to tell us. Thanks to Noam Hassanfeld of the Unexplanable podcast for talking all things silence. Heads up, people. There is a Transom Festival on the horizon. Ira Glass, Al Leadsen, Erica Heilman, Jay Allison, Bianca Gaver, all those folks and many others are descending on Woods Hole, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts,

to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Transom. Think of it as a big radio podcasting, audio storytelling party. The Transom Festival is happening this September, the 17th through the 19th, to be exact. You'll fill your days with listening sessions, master class, workshops, performances, and hopefully a swim or two in the ocean. Yes, the water is still warm then. Rumor has it, I might even lead a bike trip on the Shining Sea Bikeway. So keep it in the eye peeled on Transom.org for ticket and lodging information.

Of course, I'll keep you updated here too. This is Sound School. My production partners are PRX and Transom. My fellow travelers and radio are Genevieve sponsor, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Jarrett. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thank you very much for listening. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes.

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