Which Version Of The Sound Of Silence Is Better
Giulia Satmary
When there is a long trailing silence, SilenceFinder adds a label after the final sound.
The position of this final label looks odd to me as all of the other labels are relative to the end of the silence, but this one is relative to the beginning of the silence
It does so by creating a redundant silent file. The redundant file is not simply a byproduct, it is the mechanism for trimming silence from the end and the way that it does so is contrary to the description in the GUI.
I doubt that naive users really understand what Silence Finder does, but rather blunder through with it until they achieve a result that is close enough. I did not know what was happening with trailing silence until I looked at the code so I doubt that many new users will.
I thought that you were against documentation in the ;info, preferring an interface that is more consistent with built-in effects. I agreed with you, on the basis that bundled plug-ins are documented in the manual.
Ironically, the way that SilenceFinder works (under the covers) is that it detects sounds, but if there is no leading silence then the first detected sound to be labelled is discarded - exactly the opposite of what most users would want.
I think that we get few complaints because, as you say, it is well documented, including workarounds that may be necessary and the issues have only come to light because developing an advanced version required examining the small details of what the effect does. The code in Silence Finder (and Sound Finder) is rather convoluted and it is not easy to work out exactly what it is doing, but when unravelled it is not actually doing what it should be doing or what it implies that it is doing.
OK so the last point is rather abstract, but I do like the simplicity of a consistent label placement method. If the label placement is set to (say) 50% then it is easy to predict the label positions because they will always be in the centre of the detected silences. With a fixed number of seconds and special rules to handle the first and last labels and now the proposed rule to prevent overlapping sounds it becomes far more difficult to predict where the labels will be placed.
Whichever version you like best, there is no denying the brilliance of the song. There are an abundance of covers and I have listed them below. Maybe there is one you like better, if so, let me know which ones you prefer. Thanks and have a great day.
Silence might not be deafening, but it's something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people's perception of time.
The team adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was. In the team's new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was.
"Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn't been a scientific study aimed directly at this question," said Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. "Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all."
Like optical illusions that trick what people see, auditory illusions can make people hear periods of time as being longer or shorter than they actually are. One example is known as the one-is-more illusion, where one long beep seems longer than two short consecutive beeps even when the two sequences are equally long.
In tests involving 1,000 participants, the team swapped the sounds in the one-is-more illusion with moments of silence, reworking the auditory illusion into what they dubbed the one-silence-is-more illusion. They found the same results: People thought one long moment of silence was longer than two short moments of silence. Other silence illusions yielded the same outcomes as sound illusions.
Participants were asked to listen to soundscapes that simulated the din of busy restaurants, markets, and train stations. They then listened for periods within those audio tracks when all sound stopped abruptly, creating brief silences. The idea wasn't simply that these silences made people experience illusions, the researchers said. It was that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be triggered with sounds worked just as well when the sounds were replaced by silences.
"There's at least one thing that we hear that isn't a sound, and that's the silence that happens when sounds go away," said co-author Ian Phillips, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. "The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too."
The researchers plan to keep exploring the extent to which people hear silence, including whether we hear silences that are not preceded by sound. They also plan to investigate visual disappearances and other examples of things people can perceive as being absent.
"The Sound of Silence" (originally "The Sounds of Silence") is a song by the American folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, written by Paul Simon. The duo's studio audition of the song led to a record deal with Columbia Records, and the original acoustic version was recorded in March 1964 at Columbia's 7th Avenue Recording Studios in New York City for their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., released that October to disappointing sales. An overdubbed electric remix was released the following year and went to number one on the Billboard singles chart.
In 1965, the song began to attract airplay at radio stations in Boston and throughout Florida. The growing airplay led Tom Wilson, the song's producer, to remix the track, overdubbing electric instruments and drums. This remixed version was released as a single in September 1965. Simon & Garfunkel were not informed of the song's remix until after its release. The remix hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, leading the duo to reunite and hastily record their second album, which Columbia titled Sounds of Silence in an attempt to capitalize on the song's success. The remixed single version of the song was included on this follow-up album. Later, it was featured in the 1967 film The Graduate and was included on the film's soundtrack album. It was additionally released on the Mrs. Robinson EP in 1968, along with three other songs from the film: "Mrs. Robinson", "April Come She Will", and "Scarborough Fair/Canticle".
"The Sound of Silence" was a top-ten hit in multiple countries worldwide, among them Australia, Austria, West Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. Generally considered a classic folk rock song, the song was added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important" in 2012, along with the rest of the Sounds of Silence album. Since its release, the song was included in later compilations, beginning with the 1972 compilation album Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits.[2]
Simon and Garfunkel had become interested in folk music and the growing counterculture movement separately in the early 1960s. Having performed together previously under the name Tom and Jerry in the late 1950s, their partnership had dissolved by the time they began attending college. In 1963, they regrouped and began performing Simon's original compositions locally in Queens. They billed themselves "Kane & Garr", after old recording pseudonyms, and signed up for Gerde's Folk City, a Greenwich Village club that hosted Monday night performances.[3] In September 1963, the duo's performances caught the attention of Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson, a young African-American jazz musician who was also helping to guide Bob Dylan's transition from folk to rock.[4][3][5] Simon convinced Wilson to let him and his partner have a studio audition; their performance of "The Sound of Silence" got the duo signed to Columbia.[6]
The song's origin and basis are unclear, with some thinking that the song commented on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as the song was recorded three months after the assassination, although Simon & Garfunkel had performed the song live as Kane & Garr two months before the assassination.[7] Simon wrote "The Sound of Silence" when he was 21 years old,[8][9] later explaining that the song was written in his bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate.[5] "The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run (I like that sound, it's very soothing to me) and I'd play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again.'"[10] According to Garfunkel, the song was first developed in November 1963, but Simon took three months to perfect the lyrics, which were entirely written on February 19, 1964.[11] Garfunkel, introducing the song at a live performance (with Simon) in Haarlem (Netherlands), in June 1966, summed up the song's meaning as "the inability of people to communicate with each other, and not particularly internationally but especially emotionally, so that what you see around you is people who are unable to love each other."[5]
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