Life with a toddler is loud. Mostly it is a good loud � yelling, cheering, shrieks of delight. Occasionally it�s a wail of despair. But it is rarely silent.

Often in my quest for silence, I go for solo walks in the woods near my home. Really these are not silent at all, just noisy in a different way. Yesterday morning, the woods sounded like spring. It wasn�t the temperature � still frigid. It must have been the sunshine. Birds were everywhere. I heard a flock of mourning doves bathing between floes of ice in the semi-frozen stream. I heard woodpeckers squawking and hammering tree trunks. Numerous others were twittering away at top voice.

And I wondered if I would really want silence.

A number of years ago when I was a student at a conservatory in France, I spent a couple of days at IRCAM in Paris. Briefly stated, IRCAM, or the Institut pour R�cherche et Co�rdination Acoustique/Musique, gathers engineers and musicians together to experiment with sound. They have traditionally been pioneers in the field of electronic music composition and materials and also in the development of acoustical materials and structures. Composer/conductor Pierre Boulez is probably its best-known inmate; he was IRCAM�s director until 1992.

IRCAM is located more or less underneath the Centre George Pompidou. Along with my fellow composition students, we spent our time touring the facilities and talking with the composers and engineers in residence. The most arresting part of the visit was the anechoic chamber. An anechoic chamber is a room that absorbs sound. This is accomplished by covering the inside of a room with materials that suck up sounds. In IRCAM�s version, the inside of the chamber � floor, ceiling, walls � was covered in spikes of fiberglass foam several feet long. You enter the room by a small door and stand on narrow planks laid across some of the spikes. They say sound absorption in the room is at 99%. In practical terms, this means that you have to strain to hear yourself scream, and when you do hear yourself, it sounds like it�s coming from inside your own head. There is nothing to bounce the sound back to your ears, which forces your ears to turn inward to find a context. The loudest sounds you hear are your heart beating, the sound of your blood being forced through your veins, and a high-pitched, almost electronic whine that we were told was the sound of our neurological system at work. There is no silence, it would seem, even in the definitive absence of sound.

The experience made me consider the possibility that we are, in fact, made of sound. Our bodies are built of sound. If there were no sound, we would not exist.

After we all had a turn in the chamber, there were, of course, the requisite jokes about the �Sound of Silence.�

I am convinced that anyone who stays alone in an anechoic chamber for more than 15 minutes would go stark raving mad. When you go in, they tell you how long it will be before they come to let you out. It seems far longer. After a mere five minutes I felt on the verge of panic and hallucination. When all there is to listen to is your blood and your nerves, when you can hear each millisecond of increased heart rate as if your ear were pressed to a kettle drum. For a long time afterward I could feel that experience palpably, could relive it as the moment I have felt most alone.

As a musician, my life has been about building things out of sound. For me, the anechoic chamber in its absence of sound offered me the paradoxical glimpse of what it would be like to experience my own non-existence.

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