Woah this is my screenshot
that's crazy
It's neat how much the image has degraded
Edit: original image
Title text: “If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
Fun fact: what that audio guy was describing is called "room tone" and correct it's used for both patching and as a base sitting under all the other audio elements for the mix (music, dialogue, sound FX) and is a common practice after a on location shoot is wrapped to have the whole set "hold for tone".
The reasoning being it captures the 3D soundscape of the ambient noise in the space and how those noises bounce off surfaces and people that our ears definitely notice when it's missing like your post says! The reverb of a small office room and a gym would have very different room tones for example. And an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing and it's why you almost never have absolute 0dB in a sound mix unless intentional.
Source: work in professional production
This is also why all online meeting tools and teleconference systems also have a background tone. It tells you that you're still connected, you're live.
I should know exactly what you’re talking about. But not sure I do. Will listen for the slight lack of nothing next time.
an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing
“Here, can you handle this?”
— Alanis Morissette
They say you can count the jpg artifacts to determine a memes age.
Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.
He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.
I used to live right next to a big ol' belltower. It'd chime every hour and on special days, it'd be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
As someone who has done plenty of sound recordist work, it's known as 'room tone.'
Also, I feel seen because I've had to explain that so many times. Even to people who really should know.
Ditto. We call it 'atmos' here.
Conclusion of a stupid brain: Dolby sells nothing, their top cinema technology
True silence is usually not an issue though, but there might be other reasons to record the silent room. Like getting the impulse response data, aligning the DC offset or getting the noise profile for noise reduction.
In other words: It's mostly used a reference rather than the explanation given in the post.
Yeah, what this person is referring to is called "room tone", it's not silence.
Their metaphor still works though. The length of the wild sound tells me the OP might be talking about an older process before digital noise reduction was as common as it is now where less than half minute is enough. The idea that a "silent" room has a recognizable unique sound or even that a recording setup has a unique sound like internal mic noise is still valid for the metaphor of basically something that is perceptible to humans but difficult to give a well rounded answer as to the multiple variations that exist because they are generally so very subtle.
Like in regards to water and sound humans can tell hot liquid from cold when it is being poured or moved by sound. Actually explaining the difference in words requires a more complicated use of language but you basically know the differences when you hear it.
Since actual silence is very rare (Edit: on Earth before one considers the vacuum of space) and requires tech to purposefully create one can assume they mean just "a room where no one is talking" which weirdly itself is a more antiquated definition of silence .
Most places are not perfectly silent but have some small level of background. Wind, the distant sound of cars, the hum of lights, that kind of thing.
I don't drink bottled water simply because all I can taste is the plastic of the bottle, filtered water is so much better
Plastic from reused plastic bottles can oeech into water and give you headaches
The different sounds of "silence" are the same as the different flavors of "water."
You're not hearing the silence, you're still hearing the absence of it caused by different things making little noises. (Or in some cases hallucinating)
You're not tasting the water but the non-water that's in the water.
That person totally farted their loudest fart during those 20 seconds.
Tap water tastes different from bottled water, and the bottled water from Brazil tastes different from the bottled water I had in Chile, which came from glaciers.
And yeah it's the minerals that give taste to the water, but I don't think you're supposed to drink completely distilled water in the first place.
but I don't think you're supposed to drink completely distilled water in the first place.
It'll harm you a bit over time if you're not getting those minerals elsewhere in your diet, but otherwise it's not that big of a deal.
I have some on hand for other stuff and I've drank it in a pinch when I didn't have other water (my tap tastes horrid and purifiers that don't cost shit tons of money don't filter out the reason why) and I'm still hydrated as fuck
Distilled water tastes empty, like the flavor is being removed from my mouth. Quite odd
The reason I've heard repeatedly is that distilled water isn't just harmful because it doesn't provide minerals, it's that it strips needed minerals from your body.
I don't know the exact mechanism and can't be bothered to look it up, but there was a WHO study years ago that reported this finding.
It's because of osmotic pressure, the cells try to reach equilibrium with their environment so if the difference is too big then it leaks from one side to the other (in this case out of the cells which needs the minerals). It's similar to how salt hurts snails but in the reverse direction, it seeps in when there's so much more on the outside of its membranes.
This doesn't happen just from drinking one glass of water.
Reverse osmosis filters produce pretty much distilled water that usually goes through remineraliser to add back some minerals. Fun fact is many of those remineralisers are sold as "improving water taste and smell", probably because they do improve taste and smell, but also not to make users too suspicious about adding back minerals after they just filtered the minerals out 😅
Silence is almost never silent.
I used to live in a pretty decently sized city. The quietest I ever experienced was in an old high-rise apartment after the power went out. I climbed up the seven or so flights of stairs because I needed to get into my unit to grab something, nearly all the residents of the building had vacated or were out of the building for one reason or another, so I was probably only one of about a dozen people inside during the power outage. I don't really know how many were still inside, but I'm sure it wasn't many.
Anyways, after I got into my unit I had to stop and listen for a minute. The windows were all closed and there was nothing. It was so quiet that I couldn't hear anything. At least to my ears that were numbed from the droning of the city. It was a marvelous experience. Normally you hear the buzzing of transformers, rumbles from steps and wheels and other things being moved around, the feint trumming of someone listening to music, and the constant mechanical whirr of the elevators working away. All of that was quiet. It was so still and calm.
I didn't experience that again until I moved into my current residence away from the city. Here I'm so used to the much quieter silence that I can hear the rush of air when the fans from the furnace turn on, I am acutely aware of the bubbling from the pet water fountain we have for our cat in the next room. Even the familiar pattering of my cats paws as he trots down the hallway.
Silence is almost never silent.
There are lots of things dissolved in our water that give it "flavour", but the goal of all utilities is to minimize this as much as possible. Some water objectively tastes better than others, and a common segment of local drinking water conferences is a taste test. That said, for normal people usually the water they prefer is what their palette is used to. Someone who grew up drinking groundwater with very high alkalinity and pH will prefer that over surface water that is actually more "pure". Similarly, if you normally drink water from a private well that you don't add chlorine to, you likely dislike the taste of "city water".
The common offenders for bad tasting water are excessive chlorine and some specific organic compounds. Both of these flavours can be removed using a granular activated carbon filter (e.g., a Britta), but you can actually remove the chlorine by just letting your water sit in the fridge for a while.
Aliens come to earth and are immediately escorted to meeting with all leaders. Glasses of water are offered to all guests.
Alien trys a sip
Alien: ew, yuck, oh my zorb it taste like spaceship fuel.
I can't describe the taste but if I can tell the difference between spring, purified, and distilled, there's a taste.
Aaaaand I can hear my Tinnitus again
A bit related a few months before me and my wife beame parents a friend of ours stayed by us for a few days with her very active toddler. I will never forget the moment they all left and I was chilling on my couch and it felt like negative sound. Like I would have to hear something just to break even.
Wrong warm water tastes smoother and smells weirder
Cold water tastes spikier and doesnt smell weird
After we got a reverse osmosis filter our water tasted like nothing. We had to get a remineralization filter to put minerals back into it. Now it tastes good.
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