The illusion of silence: Why researchers say you can hear the sound of nothing

Listen closely!

Silence can actually be heard according to a new study that puts sounds, or rather lack of sounds, to the test with auditory illusions.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University gathered 1,000 people to listen to several audio illusions that included sequences of audibly loud scenarios followed by a few seconds of silence. These auditory illusions were used to make the participants hear periods of time to be longer or shorter than they actually are.

Instead of testing different sounds, the study authors input sequences of silence between sequences of loud scenarios like being at a busy restaurant. However, one of the sequences of silence was clipped shorter before going back to the louder sequence and back again to silence. The participants then had to determine which sequence of silence was shorter or longer when in actuality they were both the same length.

“Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sound,” study author Chaz Firestone said in a news release on Monday.

“If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all,” he continued.

In their findings, most participants thought one long moment of silence was longer than two short moments of silence.

Previous similar studies have used these auditory illusions to make people think certain sounds are longer or shorter than they actually are but researchers in this study were able to determine people can experience the same thing when sounds are replaced with periods of silence.

“There’s at least one thing that we hear that isn’t a sound, and that’s the silence that happens when sounds go away,” study author Ian Phillips said in a news release. “The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too.”