In the winter, you wouldn’t want to go for a stroll. It no doubt has silent corners – but the seasons do make things tricky. Google Earth further reveals timber operations, mining, agriculture, roads and nautical shipping routes – all, presumably, rife with noise.įollowing this logic, Antarctica immediately comes to mind as a promising candidate. Satellite images can be used to exclude all areas with artificial light. On land, scratching noisy places off the list of potentials comes easily. In water, sound travels more than four times faster than in air, and reaches further. That’s not to mention the underwater rumblings of ships, drilling and explosions that permeate the worlds’ oceans. Similarly, life underwater would be full of hardships – and in any case, you couldn’t escape man-made sounds like scuba regulators or submarine engines because you’d need them to stay alive. So while deep underground might be an option, it wouldn’t be very hospitable. So if you were seeking to escape this background buzz, where would you start? First let’s assume that you’d want somewhere reasonably pleasant to visit. Humanity’s noises are always with us in one form or another. What can you hear? Even in what seems like silence: you may soon notice the hum of your computer, the ticking of a clock, the electric burr of a refrigerator or an air conditioner, or the faint hum of a car passing by. Sit still for a moment, and prick up your ears.
Foy, for one, did find his ultimate silent spot in the end, but it wasn’t quite the peaceful refuge he anticipated – in fact, he discovered there that there’s one human noise none of us can ever escape. Yet it turns out that finding those unsullied locations is more difficult than it might seem. He joins many others, ranging from health professionals to ecologists to hobbyists, who have attempted to seek out the quietest corners in the world. “I thought, ‘If this is the craziness of noise, what is the opposite? What is absolute silence, and does it exist?’”įoy took it upon himself to seek out the world’s quietest place, detailed in his recent book, Zero Decibels. It was then that his obsession to find the quietest place on Earth began. “I started wondering why the hell I was putting up with this,” he says. He hunched over and stuck his fingers in his ears, desperately trying to block out the cacophony. “I kind of went momentarily crazy,” he says. It was on one such platform that George Foy, a journalist and New York University creative writing professor, suddenly found himself losing it one day, when four trains pulled in at once. Down there, sound levels regularly exceed 100 decibels – enough to damage a person’s hearing over time. A special kind of noisiness accosts passengers waiting for New York City subways.