The Colours of Noise - Black

The sound of silence.

Black noise is an informal term used to describe the sound of silence.

What’s interesting about black noise is that it’s still noise – we just can’t hear it.

Black noise is classed as infrasound, meaning that it resonates below the frequency range the human ear can perceive. Our ears can generally pick up frequencies between 20 and 20,000hz, but black noise resonates just under that threshold.

To us this sounds like nothing, or like silence with a few random spikes of sound here and there. Think about what you hear in the middle of the night when there is no one else around – it’s not that there’s no sound, but the overall impression is one of extreme silence.

Bowie and the black noise bomb.

Would you believe that black noise found its way into the limelight thanks to David Bowie?

As the story goes, Bowie first heard about black noise when he got chatting to writer William S. Burroughs sometime in the early 1970s about the world of infrasound. Infrasonic technology had a particular mystique in the context of the Cold War, with many people speculating that Russian and American engineers were secretly developing infrasonic technologies that could be used for both militant and psychological warfare. The idea was that sound could be harnessed to develop something like a noise bomb.

Bowie later explained it on national television with talk show host Dick Cavett. Think of the opera singer and the wine glass, said Bowie. If a high-pitched note can alter the makeup of glass enough to make it shatter, couldn’t there be a frequency at which it was possible to shatter an entire city? According to Bowie, this frequency was black noise.

The power of sound.

Conspiracies aside, this unlikely story gives us an insight into the cultural history of noise. In the age of rock n roll, musicians and fans were interested in the power of noise as a cultural tool which could be used for protest and to create social change.

Conversely, people feared that sound could be used as a form of control, as the paranoia surrounding this idea of a noise bomb suggests.

But there are also instances in which it is beneficial to control unwanted noise - no one wants to listen to the annoying hum of an air conditioner all day. Our silencers ensure that listeners are free to enjoy other things, like their favourite albums.