Quiet, Please!

Joe Louis' muscles are not merely bulgy; they are noisy. For, no matter how softly he moves, man in motion is audible: to a sufficiently delicate ear, his muscles rustle and rumble. In the current issue of the Acoustical Society of America's Journal, two audio-scientists, Drs. Wilfred J. Brogden and George A. Miller, describe these minute muscular sounds and how they were first heard.

At Harvard's psycho-acoustic laboratory, the two doctors were working on earphones for the Navy. The listeners began to report strange, crunching sounds whenever they wore special earphones enclosing a small cavity. The sounds were at first discounted as mere heart thumps and breathing wheezes. But the investigators contrived a homemade gadget to clamp the earphones in place.

By holding their breaths and disregarding the pistoning of their hearts, they were able to isolate the mysterious sounds and pin them on their noisy muscles. When they wiggled their ears, flexed their neck muscles or worked their jaws, they produced crescendos of noise. It was the first time human ears had ever heard the sound of human muscles.

Last week whole symphonies of physiological sound were within earshot--as if the world wasn't already so noisy that a man could hardly hear himself think.

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