3: In Silence
3 things that unnerve us about silence.
- The Anechoic Chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota is the world's quietest place. The quietness of the room is measured to be a negative decibel, below the threshold humans can hear. The ear's need to register anything allows people in this room to hear their own organs working and their eyeballs moving in their sockets.
- Solitary Confinement, a form of torture where a person is forced to live with little or no human contact, causes critical psychological and, somehow, physical trauma.
- Silent films have always unnerved me. Especially those produced before the 1900s. Thomas Edison's lab developed equipment for filming and projecting film, which would be used by the same lab to create some of the first silent shorts and movies. The U.S. Library of Congress preserves many of these works. Watching through the lot of them a few days ago, I was entranced by the uncanny silence and the almost alien mannerisms of each individual filmed. I thought they may not have the same idea of fame as we do when being filmed. I thought these people know nothing of the horrors of World War. I thought many of these people's grandchildren may already have passed. They look into a bulky, wooden camera lens and have no idea that I stare back at them over 100 years later from my MacBook Air Laptop on YouTube.
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Best,
Edgar
Editor in Chief of Fright.