Zero Decibels
The Quest for Absolute Silence
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal—or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man’s quest to find the grail of total quiet.---
“ I don’t know at what point noise became intolerable for me,” George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city’s noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered.
Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most—the subway, the local café, different rooms of his apartment—as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer’s “silent vault,” the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable.
Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What is the relationship between noise and space? What are the implications of silence and our need for it—physically, mentally, emotionally, politically? Does absolute silence
actually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today’s digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. In this respect, Foy’s quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question “How can we live saner, healthier lives today?”
Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Overwhelmed by the savage but routine overdose of noise in New York City, NYU creative writing instructor Foy zealously sought out silence in its various incarnations. But absolute silence eluded him: underwater in his bathtub the roaring metropolis was amplified by the denser medium of water; in Paris's catacombs a distant hum persisted among the stacked skulls and bones; and in his family home on Cape Cod the absence of excessive sound, rather than soothing him, made him conscious of the absence of his recently deceased mother. Yet in a Minneapolis anechoic chamber, he felt rested, relaxed, and triumphant, becoming the first person to stay in the dark and silent chamber alone for 45 minutes. Along the way, Foy met a man with cochlear implants who actually hears something when the implants are disabled even though his cochlea were destroyed by meningitis; and Foy recounts how in 1996 a Greek islander shot to death a neighbor who blasted music on her radio every evening. The author's quixotic quest is quirky, inventive, and alluring, and readers everywhere whose auditory nerves are rattled by the shriek of car horns or babies will readily identify.
