Sound surrounds us, even in the quietest moments. But depending on how we hear, the world can be a different auditory experience for each of us. This episode features four stories from the TED Radio Hour.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Gale by Migration
The Callow by Nursery
Tiny Putty by The Cabinetmaker

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

We sometimes go through life assuming other people experience sound the same way we do. But the truth is, the way you absorb and interpret the sonic world around you is dependent on sooo many unique factors—from variations in the tiny receptors in your inner ear, to the way you were taught to listen and communicate.   In this episode, you’ll hear four different stories about peoples’ relationship with sound—from a radio host with severe hearing loss, to a neuroscientist who studies hearing cells, to a self-proclaimed cyborg, to yours truly. These stories come from NPR’s TED Radio Hour. Here's host Manoush Zomorodi.

[music out]

[TRH music in]

What if your JOB depended on LISTENING… but you had trouble hearing?

Mary Louise Kelly: It's I guess one of the biggest ironies kind of from the department of you could not make this up that, yes. My job is to ask people questions and then listen, like really really listen to the answers. And I can't really hear. This is Mary Louise Kelly. You might recognize her voice … She’s one of the hosts of NPR’s All Things Considered. [TRH music out]

[SFX Clip: All Things Considered theme plus show clip]

She’s covered everything from the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki to life in North Korea.

RT: Do you remember when you started losing your hearing?

Mary Louise Kelly: I don't know exactly when I started to have hearing loss.

[TRH music in]

Mary Louise Kelly: It's a funny thing. I think it's a little more complicated than realizing you don't have the same eyesight you did when you were 16 and you need glasses. With hearing it's more nuanced. You don't know if you're not hearing everything that somebody else is.

Mary Louise Kelly: In my case I had a moment where it became undeniable. I was 42. I had just published a book. I was on book tour. And it became apparent at event after event I couldn't hear the questions. It felt like everybody was mumbling all the time. And you can ask people to repeat or speak up. Or you know I would ask, if I had a friend in the front row, to kind of relay things. But after a while it just becomes embarrassing.

Mary Louise Kelly: And I realized I should go get this checked out. And I did. It was humbling. In part because I still to this day can pass with flying colors the little minimal hearing tests that we all got with an annual physical where they say you know raise your hand if you hear the beep. I can hear the beep. What I can't do is distinguish between consonants.

Mary Louise Kelly: It's - no matter how loud the volume is, I can't make out words anymore. And when I went to the full workup at the audiologist, they did a test with me. And they said I'm gonna say a word. Just repeat the word. I said okay. And it would be park bench. And I would say park bench.

Mary Louise Kelly: They would say skateboard. And I would say skateboard. And they would say purple and I would say purple. It was fine. I didn't do great. But I think I got something likre seven or eight out of 10. And then they repeated it the same test but holding just a piece of printer paper up in front of their lips so that I could not see the audiologist’s lips move.

Mary Louise Kelly: And I think I got three out of ten. And I realized how much without even realizing it I had come to rely on being able to see somebody's face, being able to see their lips move. And when I can't do that, I really can't hear. And they told me I had severe to profound hearing loss, particularly at higher frequencies which means I was missing an awful lot.

And so you got hearing aids ...

Mary Louise Kelly: I got hearing aids. And that was a revelation. The first day I got them everything was so loud in ways good and bad. Good ways - I'd kind of forgotten pop music had words. And I was bopping along singing and thinking, I haven't actually heard what they were saying. And I don't know how long but it's been a while. I realized I was driving my kids around just during school carpool back in the days when they actually had to carpool and went to school on campus.

Mary Louise Kelly: And I realized they're chattering away, my children in the back seat. And it had just been this hum for years. I hadn't been able to hear what they were saying. And now I could listen to them. I mean what a moment of joy. On the flip side I remember the first time I walked into Starbucks with hearing aids. And I burst into tears and had to walk right back out because it was so loud. I hadn't heard the coffee grinders in their full glory for years. And they're really really loud and so there's an adjustment as your brain relearns how to process all of those sounds and help you make sense of them.

[TRH music in]

For Mary Louise …

Her hearing aids were a huge help …

But now she’s dealing with some new hurdles.

Mary Louise Kelly: When you have hearing loss it's a nightmare for a couple of reasons. One is the social distancing. I'm used to being able to lean in. Then there's the terrible double whammy of masks. And I should say, for the record, I'm all for masks. I wear them. I hope everyone wears them. However they muffle your voice, any of them. And they prevent me from seeing your lips. And those two things together conspire to make it so so so much harder to engage in just casual conversation or in my case to go out and interview somebody on the street in the field and have any idea what you're telling me.

style="color:rgb(127,44,202)">Mary Louise Kelly: I had a moment where it dawned on me just how difficult this was going to be. This was a late spring - that period for me in DC where we were past full lockdown, I could contemplate going to the local CVS, um but I had to pick a prescription for my youngest son. So I masked up, I brought my hand sanitizer, I had the prescription. I was all set to go just in and out. And obstacle number one - there's plexiglass everywhere separating me from the pharmacist. So, OK, there's a sound barrier right there, hard to hear. And then we're both wearing masks.

Mary Louise Kelly: And the most simple transaction, you know, two blocks from my house became so difficult. I come in. I tell him I'm here to pick up a refill for my son. And he looks at me and says mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble - or at least that's what I'm hearing. And I'm thinking, OK, logically he's probably asking for my son's name and birth date, so I tell him that. And the pharmacist - I can see his eyes and he's giving me this kind of weird look and he mumbles again. And I think, OK, what else would he need?

Mary Louise Kelly: And I pull my insurance card from my wallet, hold it up. He gives me another weird look. He starts speaking more slowly. He gets the bored look that a lot of people who are hard of hearing are familiar with. And I get it. It's frustrating to talk when the other person isn't understanding you and I can't decipher a single word. And we go through this, you know, pantomime for a few minutes and finally he leans back and says, what is the phone number on file for your son? And I say, oh, and I give him the phone number and, you know, five minutes later I left. I got the medicine. It's all fine.

Mary Louise Kelly: I just remember going out, standing on the sidewalk, and feeling scared and defeated and thinking, I cannot manage to pick up a prescription refill at our neighborhood drugstore, how am I going to do my job?

Mary Louise Kelly: It was a moment of great pause. And, you know, you can stand there and feel sorry for yourself for a little while and then you figure out, OK, how am I going to do this? And that has been the story of my summer - has been figuring out, how do I still do this?

Where are you on answering that question?

Mary Louise Kelly: I mean obviously I find ways to do it. I anchor a national news show despite the fact that I have significant hearing loss. And I'm doing it with hearing aids. You find ways to make it work. I have never as an anchor, as a host on NPR, found my hearing a handicap just doing daily interviews for the show. And I think one reason for that is context is everything when you're only catching every second or third word. It helps to know what I'm talking about.

Mary Louise Kelly: And, you know none of it is easy, but there's always a way - or at least I hope so. That's the plan.

That’s Mary Louise Kelly. You can hear her almost every day on NPR’s All Things Considered.

[TRH music out]

[TRH music in]

And Mary Louise’s hearing loss is actually pretty common.

Jim: In our society about 10 percent of the populace, that's 30 million people, have significant hearing problems. By the time that we're on the order of 70 years old about a quarter of us have significant hearing loss and by 80 it's more than half.

[TRH music out]

This is Jim Hudspeth.

Jim: I'm a professor at Rockefeller University in New York City and I'm a neuroscience researcher. So I work particularly on hearing.

And he says to understand why hearing loss is so common, we need to understand how the ear works.

Jim: Oh yea, so here we go.

[TRH music in]

Jim: Sound is of course a vibration in the air. And that's really obvious when a jet plane for example rattles a window.

Jim: There's energy or power flowing through the air. Sound energy hits the eardrum. It moves three little bones in the middle ear. And finally it causes pressures to change in the spiraling cochlea. That's our organ of hearing. The cochlea is about the size of a chickpea, a garbanzo bean. It's a little thing. There's one in each ear. And within the cochlea there are sixteen thousand sensory receptors. They're called hair cells. Jim continues his explanation from the TED stage:

Jim on the TED Stage: Now, these hair cells are unfortunately named, because they have nothing at all to do with the kind of hair of which I have less and less. These cells were originally named that by early microscopists, who noticed that emanating from one end of the cell was a little cluster of bristles. With modern electron microscopy, we can see much better the nature of the special feature that gives the hair cell its name. That's the hair bundle. It's this cluster of 20 to several hundred fine cylindrical rods that stand upright at the top end of the cell. And this apparatus is what is responsible for your hearing me right this instant.

[TRH music out]

[music in]

These bundles of cells are extremely delicate. In humans, once they’re damaged, they can’t be repaired. But in chickens… it’s another story altogether. That’s coming up, after the break.

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MIDROLL 1

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Our sense of hearing is dependent on thousands of microscopic receptors in our inner ear. Animals of all kinds rely on these cells to convert soundwaves into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain. Jim Hudspeth has spent decades exploring this complex relationship.

[music out]

Jim on the TED Stage: Now, I must say that I am somewhat in love with these cells. I've spent 45 years in their company, and part of the reason is that they're really beautiful, there’s an aesthetic component to it. Hair cells are found all the way down to the most primitive of fishes, and those of reptiles often have this really beautiful, almost crystalline, order. But above and beyond its beauty, the hair bundle is a machine for converting sound vibrations into electrical responses that the brain can then interpret.

[TRH music in]

Jim: Those little bristles get tickled or moved by the sound energy. And when that happens the cell develops an electrical response that it then communicates to the brain. So that's all the brain knows. These 16000 cells each send information about a particular sound that flows into the brain. And the brain then says OK. I heard a middle C. I heard whatever tone it happens to be.

[TRH music out]

Is it fair to say that these little hairs are antennas? Or are they more like little amplifiers?

Jim: Well now you’ve just hit on the head what I’ve been doing for the last forty years. It turns out that the hair cells and indeed the hairs are not just passive recipients of sound. Instead each of them is a little amplifier that enhances the signals going in.

Jim on the TED stage: Let me tell you how it works. First of all, the active process amplifies sound, so you can hear, at threshold, sounds that move the hair bundle by a distance of only about three-tenths of a nanometer. That's the diameter of one water molecule. Why do we need this amplification? The amplification, in ancient times, was useful because it was valuable for us to hear the tiger before the tiger could hear us. And these days, it's essential as a distant early warning system. It's valuable to be able to hear fire alarms or contemporary dangers such as police cars or the like. This active process also enhances our frequency selectivity. Even an untrained individual can distinguish two tones that differ by only two-tenths of a percent, which is one-thirtieth of the difference between two piano notes, and a trained musician can do even better. This fine discrimination is useful in our ability to distinguish different voices and to understand the nuances of speech. When the amplification fails, our hearing's sensitivity plummets.

[TRH music in]

And so what exactly is happening in those people's ears or in Mary Louise's ear for example in all our ears when we hear and then when we lose our hearing?

Jim: The answer is that that amplifier begins to burn out. Basically any noise that's loud enough to be uncomfortable to make your ears hurt is doing some damage to the cells of the ear. The little hairs no longer actively amplify the incoming sound and therefore hearing becomes harder and harder particularly in places that are very - where sound is very faint or in crowded circumstances where sound is very confusing. Consonants for example. So the difference between buh and puh and things like that is somewhat subtle. And the high frequencies that are necessary to convey that information are the first thing to go. And so one begins to have trouble understanding speech. And then as lower and lower frequencies are affected the difficulties become greater and greater.

[TRH music out]

So, there is technology that can give people the choice as to whether or not they can resolve their deafness. Cochlear implants, correct?

Jim: Exactly right. The idea of the implant is to replace the hair cells that have died. And I should say that when hair cells die in our ears, they are not replaced by cell division. So they're unlike the skin or the liver or other organs When they're gone, they're not replaced, and that, of course, leads to cumulative damage, it all adds up. And this is also true for daily listening. People who listen for hours and hours a day continuously are quite likely to damage their ears.

You get one shot, basically.

Jim: You get one shot, as it stands. Of course, we're interested in trying to change that [TRH music in]

Jim: And this isn't totally ridiculous because mammals have the problem with no regeneration, but fish and amphibians, reptiles, all can regenerate their hair cells. In fact, some of these animals are losing them all the time and continuously growing new ones just as we grow new skin.

What about birds?

Jim: Birds can do it 100%. In fact, this is where it was first observed. People noticed in pigeons and then in chickens that they could take them to, say, a heavy metal concert, blast the ears really to oblivion, and then, within days, new hair cells would begin to sprout. And within a few weeks, hearing was more or less back to normal. It's really extraordinary.

How would you explain why evolution would grant amphibians and reptiles, you said, and birds this quite extraordinary power?

Jim: Well, I think it's not the question so much of why they have it as why we've lost it. Because if you look, you know, at more primitive vertebrates, the earliest are fishes, then amphibians, then reptiles. Each of them has it. Somewhere along the line, mammals lost it, and there is no certainty why we have lost that capacity. It's true of many forms of regeneration. We can't grow our hearts back. We can't grow nerve cells back. Part of the issue may simply be that we live longer.

[TRH music out]

Jim: If you have cells that can readily regenerate, you also have cells that can more readily become cancerous, right? Because they have the chance to grow. So if you're a fish that's going to live two years, you may not spend much time worrying about cancer. But if you're a radio announcer who hopes to live 95 years, you have to take it into consideration.

As someone who understands how sound and hearing works more intimately than ninety nine point nine percent of the rest of the population, what have you observed about your own hearing over the years?

Jim: Well the principal thing as I've observed is I was stupid in the 1960s but then so was everybody. So I spent much too much time at loud concerts or with my head between two speakers turned all the way up. And I'm paying some of the price of that now.

Those of you in the '60s, I'm thinking of me in the late '80s going and sitting front row at a Guns and Roses concert and having that ringing in my ears for three days afterwards. And big mistake.

Jim: Yeah, It's worth it to hear Slash but I agree. You know if that's the last thing you hear you might rue the experience.

[TRH music in]

That’s neuroscientist Jim Hudspeth. You can watch his entire talk at ted-dot-com.

Thanks to researchers like Jim, the technologies that help people hear are improving all the time. Some of these devices can almost feel like science fiction.

Rebecca: Hello. My name is Rebecca and I am a cyborg.

[SFX Clip: STAR TREK TAPE “WE ARE THE BORG. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.”]

Okay so maybe not thaaaat kind of cyborg, but Rebecca Knill does think of herself as... part-robot.

Rebecca: So a cyborg is somebody who has both organic or natural body parts as well as, like, biomechanical body parts plus a computer interface which relies on some sort of feedback. So with a cochlear implant, which is what I have, I do have computer chips inside my head which basically rebuild my sense of hearing. Because I have no natural hearing.

Rebecca describes how she became a cyborg from the TED Stage.

Rebecca’s TED TALK: The good news is I come for your technology and not for your human life-forms. Actually, I've never seen an episode of Star Trek.

But there's a reason for that: television wasn't closed-captioned when I was a kid. I grew up profoundly deaf. I went to regular schools, and I had to lip-read. I didn't meet another deaf person until I was 20. Electronics were mostly audio back then. My alarm clock was my sister Barbara, who would set her alarm and then throw something at me to wake up.

My hearing aids were industrial-strength, sledgehammer volume, but they helped me more than they helped most people. With them, I could hear music and the sound of my own voice.

Did you know that hearing occurs in the brain? In your ear is a small organ called the cochlea, and the cochlea is lined with thousands of receptors called hair cells. My hair cells were damaged before I was even born. My mother was exposed to German measles when she was pregnant with me.

With a cochlear implant, computer chips do the job for the damaged hair cells. Imagine a box of 16 crayons, and those 16 crayons, in combination, have to make all of the colors in the universe. Same with the cochlear implant. I have 16 electrodes in each of my cochleas. Those 16 electrodes, in combination, send signals to my brain, representing all of the sounds in the universe. I have electronics inside and outside of my head to make that happen, including magnets inside my skull and a rechargeable power source. Radio waves transmit sound through the magnets. The number one question that I get about the cochlear implant when people hear about the magnets is whether my head sticks to the refrigerator.

No, it does not. I know this, because I tried.

Before we talk more about your implant, just tell us a little more about what it was like growing up deaf?

Rebecca: It really wasn't that different. I mean, I didn't have anything to compare it against. I was raised orally -- the oral method is basically lip reading and speaking versus signing and not using speech at all. And it was very controversial back then because deaf children were forced to be raised orally. And I think over time, people have come into the perspective that total communication of, you know, letting kids sign as well as speak or maybe they won't speak at all. It's just an individual type of thing with what a kid is comfortable with and really how much hearing you have and how were you raised. Were you raised in a deaf family - which I was not. I'm not culturally deaf, but there are many deaf kids who were. And sign language is their primary, their first language. But for me, I am a very, very good lip reader. I probably functioned more like a hard of hearing person even though on paper the scores were just horrible. They were profoundly deaf. And my family was very - it wasn't something we ever talked about.

Really?

Rebecca: Considered a normal thing. I don't think I ever once had a conversation with my parents about hearing loss. It was just what we did. It was just what was there. It was what it was. And we just went on with life.

How would you describe your relationship with sound growing up? I feel like that would be a really weird question to ask someone with the typical hearing capabilities, but as someone who had atypical hearing capabilities do you think that you related to sound differently?

Rebecca: I do. I did and I do. I would say I'm neutral on sound.

(Laughter) Huh.

Rebecca: I think that people with - people - I don't dislike sound. But I do think that people who would be considered to be hearing people are very pro sound. And they romanticize it and have very complex emotions about sound. And I'm neutral. I personally couldn't care less whether I experienced the world through audio or visual. Frankly, I prefer visual because that's just less work for me. And I'm used to that. That's normal to me. So I really - I am just neutral on the concept of sound. I am anti-noise (laughter) but sound in general is - it's not something that I feel a longing for or really care about in any way.

Rebecca’s TED TALK: Hearing people assume that the Deaf live in a perpetual state of wanting to hear, because they can't imagine any other way. But I've never once wished to be hearing. I just wanted to be part of a community like me. I think that sense of belonging is what ultimately connects our stories and mine felt incomplete.

When cochlear implants first got going, back in the '80s, the operation was Frankenstein-monster scary. By 2001, the procedure had evolved considerably, but it still wiped out any natural hearing that you had. The success rate then for speech comprehension was low, maybe 50 percent. So if it didn't work, you couldn't go back. At that time, implants were also controversial in the Deaf culture. Basically, it was considered the equivalent of changing the color of your skin.

I held off for a while, but my hearing was going downhill fast, and hearing aids were no longer helping. So in 2003, I made the tough decision to have the cochlear implant. I just needed to stop that soul-sucking cycle of loss, regardless of whether the operation worked, and I really didn't think that it would. I saw it as one last box to check off before I made the transition to being completely deaf, which a part of me wanted.

Can you explain that?

[TRH music in]

Rebecca: You know, for me it wasn't so much about hearing but it was about authenticity. I felt like I was getting to the point where, you know, my hearing loss really had eroded so much. And to be honest, it was much easier to live as a deaf person at least in my job. I felt I was more my authentic self as I stopped using the voice telephone and stopped having to work so hard to hear. The possibility of being completely deaf was not threatening. It wasn't, again, anti-hearing or not wanting it to work, but it was just the idea that I could be myself.

Rebecca’s TED Talk: Complete silence is very addictive. Maybe you've spent time in a sensory deprivation tank, and you know what I mean. Silence has mind-expanding capabilities. In silence, I see sound. When I watch a music video without sound, I can hear music. In the absence of sound, my brain fills in the gaps based on the movement I see. My mind is no longer competing with the distraction of sound. It's freed up to think more creatively.

I’m so intrigued by this idea that you sometimes prefer to be in complete silence And I know you can switch your device off whenever you want, right?

Rebecca: Yes, that's the beauty of it. And I turn it off a lot. I do. I call it being unplugged. And it's something I look forward to. And I even crave it like an addiction to chocolate. I keep it on for work and when I go out. But my favorite part of the day is turning it off at home and just enjoying the silence. And again, when I travel, you know, there's always a screaming baby on the plane. And I would turn it off for that or if the work is too noisy when we were at the office I would turn it off for that. And I would pull a little sign in front of my desk that just said unplugged so people would know.

(Laughter)

Rebecca: And it's the best of both worlds, I think.

[TRH music out]

[music in]

Auditory technology has come so far in just a few decades, but our attitudes about deafness still have some catching up to do. That’s coming up, along with a familiar story from yours truly, after the break.

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MIDROLL 2

[music in]

Rebecca Knill grew up profoundly deaf, and eventually decided to get a cochlear implant. Fortunately, the procedure was a success. Now, Rebecca says that her device allows her to do just about anything a hearing person can… with a few extra perks.

[music out]

Rebecca’s TED Talk: With the cochlear implant, I can stream music from my iPod into my head without earbuds. Recently, I went to a friend's long, tedious concert ... and unknown to anyone else, I listened to the Beatles for three hours instead.

Technology has come so far so fast. The biggest obstacle I face as a deaf person is no longer a physical barrier. It's the way that people respond to my deafness, the outdated way people respond to my deafness -- pity, patronization, even anger -- because that just cancels out the human connection that technology achieves.

You might know a play, later a movie, called "Children of a Lesser God," by Mark Medoff. That play, that title, actually comes from a poem by Alfred Tennyson, and I interpret both the play and title to say that humans who are perceived as defective were made by a lesser God and live an inferior existence, while those made by the real God are a superior class, because God doesn't make mistakes.

The world is not that far removed from Tennyson's poem.

That tendency to make assumptions about people based on ability comes out in sentences like "You're so special," "I couldn't live like that" or "Thank God that's not me."

Rebecca you talk about how people presume that someone like you won’t have a full life without being able to hear and I can imagine that’s prett upsetting to you.

Rebecca: Right. But it’s true, people do make that assumption. And you know, it kind of annoys me I have to say, because it betrays a little bit of a sense of entitlement, that their state of being is better than mine. The reality is, every function in life can be performed multiple ways. But people get very narrow-minded. I think 40 to even 20 years ago, people had a very specific impression of deafness as being, you know, a lesser way of life being maybe not as smart, not having opportunities. When you talk to parents who have newborns who are deaf, the first thought is oh my child won't have any opportunities. And all of that, none of that is true anymore because you have so much technology that can bridge those gaps.

[TRH music in]

*Rebecca’s TED Talk: So I am on a mission now. As a consumer of technology, I want visual options whenever there's audio. It doesn't matter whether I'm deaf or don't want to wake the baby. Both are equally valid. Apple did this recently. On my iPhone, it automatically displays a visual transcript of my voice mail, right next to the audio button. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted to. You know what else? Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime no longer say "Closed-captioned for the hearing impaired." They say "subtitles," "on" or "off," with a list of languages underneath, including English.

Technology has come so far. Our mindset just needs to catch up. "Resistance is futile.”*

Thank you.

That’s Rebecca Knill, you can see her full talk at TED.com.

[TRH music out]

[SFX clip:Acura commercial plays throughout the below tape]

Dallas: So a lot of what I do in sound design is, like, try to elicit the emotion off of the visuals in order to sell it more.

Dallas: Now, it's something you probably don't ever notice, which is great about sound design is that you don't really ever think about it.

Dallas: Like, we do, like, a lot of car commercials. And you'd think that the engine in the car commercial was just the engine they recorded right there when they shot the commercial, but it just doesn't work like that to make an engine sound incredible.

Dallas: Sometimes we have to re-record that or borrow from a similar car that's been recorded well in order to fake it.

[TRH music in]

Dallas: Anything that's not dialogue is completely rebuilt 98% of the time in sound design.

This is Dallas Taylor.

Dallas: I am a sound designer and the host of 20,000 Hertz.

Which is a podcast all about sound.

And the car you were just hearing? That was from an Acura commercial that Dallas made with the company he founded in 2009: Defacto Sound.

Dallas: Really with the goal of bringing, like, cinematic, super-high-end sound design to short content, like advertising and trailers.

Dallas: A lot of these things on the sound front go so much deeper than just the music score or the dialogue, but people are building entire worlds from scratch through sound effects and recording. And these sound effects could sway people emotionally. Like, you can make wind sound eerie or you can make wind sound comforting. And I got - I became really fascinated with this whole idea of building worlds in a way that you could also help tell stories with.

And so how did that lead you to start a podcast all about how sound actually works?

Dallas: It was a slow process but it started with my career in, like, the visual world where, to tell a story, the only two human senses that we have in that world is our sense of sight and our sense of hearing. And even in that world, it's always been kind of shocking how little people would think about the sound aspect of something. But I was thinking, if my entire industry where we only have two senses to work with creatively still undercuts and diminishes our sense of hearing and the impact that it can have, I can only imagine what the rest of the world thinks about sound. And so I got to thinking about that more and I started thinking, well, let's think about, like, our - the five senses we have. And in reality we have, like, 20 senses, but for our purposes - like, what we learned in school is, like, you know, sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. And so, um as humans, we're incredibly visual creatures and that's amazing. You know, we have art galleries, we have beautiful images, photography, you know, we design our homes in a specific way to match our style. With touch, you know, we curate our clothes, we curate our furniture, our shoes, our HVAC. If we hurt, we take ibuprofen. Sense of taste - you know, all day I'm thinking about food.

Yeah, all day.

Dallas: And then, finally, before hearing, our sense of smell. There's a whole fragrance industry, there's soaps, there's sewage. But when it comes to hearing we've really made that about music. And music is amazing, but music is only a small part of the sonic world, and I'd love for people to start to curate that sense and be more critical of that sense in their everyday lives, just like they do with sight, touch, taste and smell.

I LOVE the idea that we can more carefully curate the sounds around us better if we just start to pay more attention but it’s interesting we were just talking with Rebecca Knill who has a cochlear implant. And she talks about looking forward to turning it off and just being in complete silence. And I’m wondering, for the rest of us, do you think it’s actually rare to experience pure silence?

Dallas: Uh yeah, so uh, a lot of times when we think about silence as humans, we're just thinking of quiet. But none of this, none of us with our sense of hearing have experienced true silence. And when I went into the anechoic chamber, my perception of what sound is, the definition of quiet, the definition of silence... that’s when a lot of things changed in my mind.

[TRH music in]

Dallas: So an anechoic chamber's design is to reduce the amount of sound to close to absolute zero as possible. And it’s used for scientific testing to see if components vibrate or if they can catch things that maybe they couldn't hear or - in a noisier environment. But I was fascinated with it because I really want to go in and just have all of the sound of life just completely sucked away to see what that would be like. And so I went down to the Georgia Tech Research Institute and they had this big anechoic chamber where they could put me, like, on a lift in the middle of this giant room that has, like, I don't know, five layers of wall and then this giant door that's terrifying to close and - when - especially when you're in there alone. And then these huge, like, pyramid foam shaped things in every direction.

[TRH music out]

Dallas: And so they put me in there and you hear noise, whatever. As soon as you shut the door, it's just like the entire world of sound just disappears, and it is more terrifying than anything. Now, I've spent most of my professional career in recording studios, so I'm a little bit more accustomed to the quietness. But for many people, it's kind of, like, a shocking feeling to just take all sound away and just realize that, even in your most quiet moments, how much sound is actually there. But in the chamber, what was really fascinating is that about 20 to 30 seconds in I started to hear my blood pushing through my body and I heard my digestion and I heard a very light, like, tinnitus ring in my ears - things I've never heard before. And so that - in that moment I could really truly hear the earth and its movement go away. And so I really became interested in what John Cage was talking about with 4’33.

[TRH music in]

4’33m if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a piece by composer John Cage. And Dallas tells the story in his TED talk.

Dallas’ TED Talk: This piece is actually not very typical of John Cage's writing. He's more known for his innovations and avant garde techniques. But despite his reputation no one was prepared for what he did in 1952 when he created the most daring piece of his career.

[TRH music out]

Dallas’ TED Talk: It was called 4 minutes and 33 seconds and it was a piece that some critics even refused to call music because for the entire duration of the piece the performer plays nothing at all. Well to be technical the performer is actually playing rest. But to the audience it looks like nothing's happening John Cage's 433 was performed for the first time in the summer of 1952 by renowned pianist David Tudor. It was at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock New York. This is a beautiful wooden building with huge openings to the outdoors. So David Tudor walked out on stage, sat down with the piano then closed the piano lid. He then sat in silence only moving to open and closed the piano lid. Between each of the three movements. After the time was up he got up and walked off the stage.

[TRH music in]

I mean, four minutes and 33 seconds is a long time to sit in silence when you're not in a church or meditating. I can only assume that people felt extremely uncomfortable.

Dallas: I would suspect that as well. A lot of people thought he was throwing away his career for a stunt. He got letters from family members saying what are you doing? But what John Cage's "433" does, is it forces you to listen to what's happening around you in the most - in one of the most brilliant ways I could imagine, and that's being, like, in a classical music setup where someone comes out and they sit down. And there's generally a couple reactions to it. One - oh, this is a joke. You know, why is somebody coming out, sitting down and doing nothing? But on the other side it's a powerful experience to really feel your ears vibrating and feel the world interacting with your ears.

Dallas’ TED Talk: John Cage realized, that creating an environment with no distractions wasn't about creating silence. It wasn't even about controlling noise. It was about the sounds that were already there, but you suddenly hear for the first time when you're really ready to listen. That’s what's so often misunderstood about "4'33''." It sounds different everywhere you play it. And that's the point. What John Cage really wanted us to hear is the beauty of the sonic world around us.

[SFX: nature sounds]

[TRH music out]

Dallas: Our ears are incredibly special because even from, like, a universal aspect, light can travel from one point in the universe all the way to the other point - another point in the universe. You know, we have light hitting our eyes - photons hitting our eyes that are billions of years old. But sound - you just travel up a few miles and it's gone, like, forever the way that we perceive it. I mean, sure, you could fall into Jupiter and have a moment of sonic, you know, understanding, but the gases are going to be different. So even if we interacted with, like, another living organism, they're not going to really hear like we have. They may have a completely different sense.

Dallas: But I think that's important to understand that, like, our ears are so in tune with our atmosphere right here on Earth, and I think that's why it's special.

Dallas: And I think John Cage was trying to get people to really open up that sense and curate it and understand that, like, everything can be music if you think of it that way. Everything can sound beautiful. And if we curate our world, there's so many things that we can make sound better.

All right. I would love to say that we’re going to leave the audience with four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, but I feel like that might be a little much … How about we do 10 seconds? What do you think?

Dallas: I think that's great.

OK. Let's do it. Three, two, one.

[10 seconds of silence]

MZ: That was good.

Dallas: Did you hear anything that you may have not heard otherwise?

I did. It's a little embarrassing but I heard my lunch being digested. It's slightly alarming actually.

Dallas: I heard the hum of my computer, very distant heard the chatter of my kids far in another room. It was nice.

It's life. Thanks so much Dallas.

CREDITS

These stories came from the TED Radio Hour, an NPR podcast that explores the biggest questions of our time with some of the world's most remarkable thinkers. Subscribe to the TED Radio Hour right here in your podcast player.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound.com.

Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkinpour, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Mohtasham, James Delahoussayee, J.C. Howard, Katie Monteleone, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Cala and Matthew Cloutier with help from Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Farrah Safari. A special thanks this week to Defacto Sound.

Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan and Michelle Quint.

If you have any stories about your unique relationship with sound, you can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, on our subreddit, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

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