Silence Is Not Neutral: What Happens in a Too-Quiet Room

I'm one of the people who can't work in silence. I wanted to know whether that is a real thing or an excuse, so I went looking.

Quiet makes small sounds bigger

Hearing works by contrast. In a café you don't hear a spoon drop. In a silent flat you hear the fridge switch on two rooms away. The fridge was always there. Silence took away everything that used to hide it.

So a silent room is rarely silent. It is a room where every creak, footstep and car door reaches you at full strength.

Why those small sounds cost so much

They come without warning. A large review of noise and performance found that stop-start noise does somewhat more damage than steady noise. That matches everyday experience: a dripping tap is worse than a humming fan, though the fan is louder.

Each small sound is a tiny question, "what was that?", and answering it takes you out of what you were doing.

A low floor instead of nothing

The fix is modest. Put something steady and quiet in the room, so the small sounds have something to disappear into. It doesn't need to be interesting. It should be the opposite: even, low and easy to forget.

A fan does it. So does soft pink or brown noise, or slow ambient sound with nothing in it to follow. I compared those in Brown Noise vs Ambient Sound.

This is what I use my own project for. Ambient Sound Online makes a slow, low background that never repeats, and I keep it just loud enough to stop hearing the room.

When silence is the right call

Some people do their best work in silence, and I'm not going to argue with them. A review of 65 studies found that any background sound, noise included, has a small cost for reading. If your room is quiet and stays quiet, and you settle into it easily, leave it alone. The floor is for rooms that keep interrupting you.

Sources

• Szalma and Hancock, 2011: review of noise and human performance
• Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele, 2018: review of 65 studies on background sound and reading