Absolute Quiet?

by Kristina Chew, PhD on May 17th, 2007

“…. [S]ound-absorbing plaster systems; … lead-lined Sheetrock and plywood (and …. rubber clips and braces that “float” them); …. fiberglass-lined ducts; and the range of resilient ceiling materials”: These are some of the “treatments” that can be use to create a “sonic ambience” in a house, as noted in a The Dream of Absolute Quiet. The article describes some admittedly high-end homes with home theaters, kickboxing studios, bowling alleys (just the kinds of home improvements most of us parents of autistic children worry about…… not that we don’t have to worry about drywalling the occasional hole in the wall, painting away wall-long finger smudges due to one’s child liking to run his hand, clean or unwashed, on the paint, new windows…..). In particular, it profiles the sound sensitivites of comedian Jonathan Prager: “‘I’m sensitive to noise, emotions, electromagnetic vibrations. You name it, I’m sensitive to it,’” he says. Further:

Mr. Prager, the comedian, tells jokes about how the sound of hard candy being unwrapped makes him crazy and why a white-noise machine could never be a tolerable remedy for what ails him.

“I have jokes about that,” he said, “because you know how they use those in therapists’ offices? I have to ask the therapist to turn them off, along with their computers — there’s a little fan inside most computers that goes on and that’s annoying — and their air-conditioners. And then I can’t concentrate because there is always construction noise.”

His statements make me wonder what sounds my son Charlie—who especially has an ear for gradations in pitch and vibration—hears that are inaudible to me. No wonder, in the past, even a muffled cough has irked him, and the repeated high-pitched screams of a classmate having a tough afternoon have been nearly unbearable.

For myself, I am glad to have a house whose “sonic ambience” is less than quiet—I can often tell where Charlie is, and what he is doing, based on the thump and speed and location of his footprints, and the happy noise of his voice. Silence is less than golden in our house.