I have read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. You should read it too, it’s fantastic. I am now qualified to state: sound is weird. Hearing sound is stranger still. A florescent bulb sounds like a chainsaw to a fly. The sun would sound like a jackhammer but for the vacuum of space. This is surprising in the way that affects those people who haven’t thought about it before. There’s a line in the introduction where it’s said that to a frog, the sound of street traffic would be equivalent to a mid-range earthquake. Extended out to other animals, it’s worth considering that humanity and all the sounds our terrible machines produce are geological scale disaster volume-wise. After all, there’s been very little time for evolution to adjust to our roar. This becomes stranger when one considers the way a mammals ear works.

Sound occurs at the level f molecules. This bit of nitrogen bumps into this other bit and then oxygen and argon and whatever else is in the air between a source of noise and the apparatus that hears it. This is why it’s “silent” in space, too few molecules, at least for our ears. Think about how sound works for dolphins or whales, they hear well under water; there anatomy is adapted to it. We hear well in the atmosphere; our anatomy is adapted to it. Surely some Lovecraftian horror can hear well in space, with a hypothetical anatomy adapted to it. Consider Venice. It’s limestone buildings and low traffic streets conspire to absorb the vibrations the way that foam egg-carton stuff does in recording booths. It’s all physical, environment affecting sound at least as much as anatomy.

Technology can actively manipulate both, and that’s interesting. Sound itself can manipulate sound. If we have an audible thing and it’s particular waveform looks like peak, we hear that. If we add an audible thing to it and that things particular waveform look like a valley, an inverse of the peak, we hear nothing. That’s real, that’s how active noise cancelling works in headphones.

Now, I’m starting to conceive that anatomically someone could be missing the mechanical anatomy to hear the valley everyone else hears. Such a person wouldn’t hear silence like everyone else, they would hear something. I hope to hear nothing.