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[Saturnman]

You know, when you're in a room and there's absolutely no sound around. It's silence which allows you to hear some kind of background noise that's always there. I know other people hear it too, but I've never known what the noise is.

Is it something physical with the inner ear, how it interacts with ambient air? Is it some kind of low feedback from the ear nerves? Something else?

Just curious.

 

[Dilbert]

You know, when you're in a room and there's absolutely no sound around. It's silence which allows you to hear some kind of background noise that's always there. I know other people hear it too, but I've never known what the noise is.

I can never hear that sound over the din of the voices urging me to kill them all...but YMMV.

 

[Saturnman]

= Jinx

I knew it.

 

[Fresh Prince]

Titannus(sp?)?

 

[Dilbert]

= Jinx

I knew it.

I'd prefer to be Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, but oh well.

 

[B'z-chan]

YMMV is the next damn thing to get the axe. I hear that noise sometimes even when there is sound around me. I dont know what it is. But i have swimers ear a lot so maybe thats it. But that noise can get very freaky. I want to know more about it too.

 

[Star Power]

tinnitus

 

[Hitokage]

When in a zero-noise environment, there is still a pretty constant source of sound next to your ears: your circulatory system.

 

[Saturnman]

So there's a term for it. But based on a quick Web search, looks like some people really suffer from it. To me, it's just something that's always been there, faint, but there.

 

[Loki]

Hitokage nailed it.


Though it could also be due to the ear's phenomenal sensitivity to changes in pressure/rarefaction-- I'm pretty sure that the ear can detect the movement of 1 molecule of air in every 10^6 molecules, maybe even 1 ppb (part per billion). It's been a while, though, so I forget. The point is that there could be many sources of ambient "noise" that you don't detect as explicit "sounds", but which get lumped together somehow into a generic "humming" background noise (perhaps unless a certain excitation threshold is reached, a sound is perceived but not distinguishable? I dunno).


I'm gonna reread my physiology text during winter break, so I'll get back to you on that.

 

[LakeEarth]

Everyone has that voice in the back of their head telling them to kill. They just need to drown it out...

(I've been working on a railroad, all the live long dayyyyy, I've been working....)

 

[The Shadow]

When in a zero-noise environment, there is still a pretty constant source of sound next to your ears: your circulatory system.

I think it's also an affect of just having a particular set of neurons that have a residual firing after all sound is eliminated because they've been sensitized to fire in the presence of sound.

It's like getting a picture taken and you quickly close your eyes right after the flash. Immediately after you can see an after image of the moment of the flash but eventually it fades and you only see the bright spots. Those bright spots can stay for a minute or more in my experience.

 

[Loki]

I think it's also an affect of just having a particular set of neurons that have a residual firing after all sound is eliminated because they've been sensitized to fire in the presence of sound.

It's like getting a picture taken and you quickly close your eyes right after the flash. Immediately after you can see an after image of the moment of the flash but eventually it fades and you only see the bright spots. Those bright spots can stay for a minute or more in my experience.

This is also a plausible hypothesis. Good work, young man. Pretty sure it's mostly what Hito said and not what you or I have said, though, since I've read that before.

 

[drohne]

rarefaction

i learned a new word

now i just have to come up with some pretext to use it.

 

[Loki]

i learned a new word

now i just have to come up with some pretext to use it.

Oh come off it lol. You of all people have certainly heard of that word before.


Where did you think the phrase "rarefied air" came from? Same root. "Rarefied" refers something very high (as in "high in the atmosphere"-- it's usually used figuratively, though, as I'm sure you're aware); up at these heights, the pressure (i.e., force exerted by the molecular density per unit area, iirc) is lower and the air is "thin". One of the meanings of "rarefy" is "to make less dense", which is precisely what occurs during "rarefaction" with respect to air molecules.


I still say you've at least seen that word before, even if you didn't know what it meant. You throw out words that I've never seen sometimes, which is saying something , and besides, "rarefaction" is a pretty common word, though mostly in the sciences I would imagine.

 

[drohne]

i didn't immediately make the correction to rarefy. i'm sleepy, and the definition of rarefaction as particularly the reduction of pressure in the wake of a soundwave made it sound very novel. i'm sure i have seen it somewhere, though if you asked me for the word for the process by which things are rarefied, i probably would have said...rarefication. :/

 

[Loki]

i didn't immediately make the correction to rarefy. i'm sleepy, and the definition of rarefaction as particularly the reduction of pressure in the wake of a soundwave made it sound very novel. i'm sure i have seen it somewhere, though if you asked me for the word for the process by which things are rarefied, i probably would have said...rarefication. :/

That would have been as good a guess as any. I was just shocked that YOU had either never heard of the word or not heard it in that context before, since I was reasonably certain that you knew every definition of every word known to man.


EDIT: And I can tell that both you and I are very tired, since you typed "correction" in place of "connection" AND I read it as "connection" twice.

 

[drohne]

actually i've never taken a physics class. missed physics when i skipped the ninth grade...and then avoided it in college. i'm half-educated at best. i'm just very scrupulous about looking up words i don't know when i see them in books.

edit: doh. right, no more typing until i've had some sleep.

 

[Loki]

i'm half-educated at best. i'm just very scrupulous about looking up words i don't know when i see them in books.

You give yourself far too little credit; you have a gift for writing.


Anyway, that about wraps up this love-fest lol. Back to lab work. : /

 

[MrPing1000]

I'd prefer to be Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, but oh well.

what. Dead?

 

[Saturnman]

When in a zero-noise environment, there is still a pretty constant source of sound next to your ears: your circulatory system.

If that is the case then why is the sound constant and not rythmic?

 

[OmniGamer]

I've seen a term that describes it, though it's usually used in a different manner...simply "Deafening silence"