Silent CD
What is this?
A CD of silence. (Strictly not a CD of silence, of course, but audio files
of silence which one can burn to a CD-R to make a CD of silence.)
The tracks are of 2, 4, 8, 16 & 32 seconds and 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 & 32
minutes duration so they can be combined using the play list feature of a
normal compact disk player to give any duration (in even numbers of seconds)
from 2 s to an hour (well, up to 1 h 4 min 2 s, to be pedantic).
Uses
- Novelty item: This is the main reason I made it. Surreal,
silly or stupid depending on your sense of humour.
- Shutting up an irritating jukebox: If one wants peace
& quiet but someone else keeps playing CDs on a jukebox or a CD player to
which you have access, replace their CD with this one. It can similarly be used
to shut up some irritating mobile telephones by converting a silent track to an
MP3 and installing it as the ringtone.
- Inserting blanks: Sometimes one wants gaps between tracks
(for example so that one can run between a CD player & a dance floor when
one is both dance teacher & DJ, as I have been at times, using an audio
system without a remote control) and to have a track break marker between the
gap and music track (so that one can skip the blank if needed). To do that,
just insert one of these silent tracks between each music track before
recording.
- CD player noise test: It can be used to test a CD player,
amplifier & speakers for background noise. As there is no sound on the
recording, any noise one hears from the system when playing this is noise added
by the playing equipment.
- Practical joke: I had not intended it as a practical joke
but found that one of my friends to whom I gave a silent CD tried playing it in
a PC and assumed that the computer was failing when it gave no sound out
(despite the CD being clearly labelled 'Silences'). He was going to waste time
in a futile attempt to debug his music playing software.
- To silence a CD player when using it as an amplifier: If
one needs to use a CD player as a amplifier for an auxiliary input, such as
from an MP3 player, but the amplifier only works with a CD playing then this
can be used as a dummy CD to keep the CD player happy without producing
unwanted sounds. (This use was invented by a reader of this site, Kane Zhu, who
used it to fit an MP3 player to a car stereo system in addition to a CD player
when the stereo's only external input was a dedicated CD player one.)
CD Limitations
If you burn the tracks to a audio CD formatted to play in a normal old
audio CD player then there are 2 restrictions imposed by the original CD spec:
- All tracks must be >=2 s long. Therefore the 1 s second track must be
omitted. (I've included it in the download for completeness anyway though.)
- Although one need not have gaps between the tracks on a CD, it does
require a 2 s gap before the first track. This will add about 2 s to the total
timing of silence when playing in a conventional CD player (but the spin-up
time adds to that as well).
Additionally I have come across (just) one CD player that mistakenly
reported that the whole CD was of zero length. Maybe it tried to automatically
skip the silences!
CD Burning Advice
- Set the gap between tracks to zero seconds.
- Use 'Disk at once' mode rather than 'Track at once' mode (the former is
probably the default anyway on simple to use CD writing programs anyway) as the
latter does not support gaps between tracks of zero length.
- Turn off any automatic volume equalising/maximising feature. I don't know
what will happen if your particular CD writing program tries to normalise a
zero volume recording to maximum (zero divided by zero is mathematically
indeterminate). It should spot the impossibility & so either skip the
normalisation or complain. However it might produce noise, might give a
constant DC offset (poor speakers!) or might crash if badly programmed.
- Burn to CD-R not CD-RW as some audio CD players (particular those made
before CD-RW was invented, of course) cannot read CD-RW. CD-RW uses dyes that
change colour reversibly whereas CD-R uses irreversibly burnt holes which are
much more like the original CD stamped holes.
Compressing Nothing
Silence losslessly compresses very well. However the common file
compression algorithms are not designed for pathological cases like this (six
hundred million identical zero bytes!) so it needed two passes. The original
640 MB of .WAV files compressed a thousand-fold to a 640 KB .TAR.GZ file.
Compressing this again reduced it to a minuscule (by CD standards) 3.55 KB
.TAR.GZ.TAR.GZ file. This is an astounding 186 000 to 1 compression ratio
overall.
Indeed it compresses better by lossless Gnuzip or Pkzip than by lossy MP3.
At the lowest quality MP3 encoding that Apple iTunes Jukebox offers, it comes
to 3.7 MB, over a thousand times what lossless compression can do.
It is not often that one can download an hour long CD over a 56 Bit/s
modem in under half a second!
Warning
In trying to hear sound from this CD, one is likely to turn the volume up
high. Remember to turn it back down to a sensible level before later playing a
normal CD!
Copyright Issue
I think it is okay for me to give away this silence for free (released
under Gnu Public Licence). There has been one notorious case of the estate of
J. Cage suing M. Batt for selling a silent recording, Cage having been an avant
garde composer who had previously published a famous silent piece. However it
was reported that the suing was because Batt had jokingly credited Cage with
joint composership of the track without asking permission first & profited
from the publicity of that creditation without paying royalties. The suing was
not merely because it was silent as the general concept of silences in
performances & broadcasts pre-dates both Cage & Batt.
Furthermore, both Cage's & Batt's silences were both based on the
specific novelty of being 'performed' on classical musical instruments whereas
the silences downloadable here are purely computer generated (in Syntrillium
Cool Edit) loads of zeros.
My actual inspiration for a joke silent recording came from David Nobb's
'The Return of Reginald Perrin' in 1977. In that humorous story, a fictional
company included in its deliberately useless product range silent vinyl records
with titles such as 'Trappist Monastery Chants' & 'Laryngitis from Many
Lands'. It was twenty six years before I got around to making one!
Download
Download silent tracks in WAV format Silence.tar.gz.tar.gz (4 KB).