Do we only hear sounds? Or can we also hear silence? These questions are the subject of a centuries-old philosophical debate between two camps: the perceptual view (we literally hear silence), and the cognitive view (we only judge or infer silence). Here, we take an empirical approach to resolve this theoretical controversy. We show that silences can “substitute” for sounds in event-based auditory illusions.
I don’t have access to the full paper (I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway), but the idea that we can “hear” silence is pretty mind-blowing to me.
I’m not sure I get it. I mean maybe it’s how we define the word silence?
I don’t think it’s possible to be in complete silence (as a human), because we have a moving body following us around. I’ve been in a soundproofed booth and you can hear your blood pumping in your ear canals. Any small movement or humming or whirring or gurgling becomes amplified by the absence around, but between these things there is nothing to hear.
If silence is defined as the absence of movement on the frequencies detected by our ears, then I don’t see how we would be supposed to “hear” nothing. Our brain can filter that absence (actually, it filters every second of every day in our lives), and it can substitute things too - so at a minimim we have unreliable machinery.
It’s an interesting concept, but one I have a hard time grasping how people could be in the perceptual view.
There’s an article about it in the New York Times which apparently goes into much more detail, but I don’t have a subscription- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/science/silence-sound-hear.html
It is excerpted in this Slashdot post, however, and that may give you enough information to understand it better: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2343221/silence-is-a-sound-you-hear-study-suggests
To sum up, it’s not about total silence, it’s about perceiving gaps in louder sounds as “sound” rather than the lack of sound.