The taste of water

Woah this is my screenshot

that's crazy

It's neat how much the image has degraded

Edit: original image

xkcd 1683
Title text: â€œIf you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
- Close but the whole thing needs to be a progression of screen grab of phone cam shot of desktop monitor with full moire interference lines
Fun fact: what that audio guy was describing is called "room tone" and correct it's used for both patching and as a base sitting under all the other audio elements for the mix (music, dialogue, sound FX) and is a common practice after a on location shoot is wrapped to have the whole set "hold for tone".
The reasoning being it captures the 3D soundscape of the ambient noise in the space and how those noises bounce off surfaces and people that our ears definitely notice when it's missing like your post says! The reverb of a small office room and a gym would have very different room tones for example. And an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing and it's why you almost never have absolute 0dB in a sound mix unless intentional.
Source: work in professional production
- This is also why all online meeting tools and teleconference systems also have a background tone. It tells you that you're still connected, you're live.
- an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing
  “Here, can you handle this?”
  — Alanis Morissette
- Genuine question, what do you do for outer space? I know what you mean by a complete audio void being unsettling, and I’ve seen sci-fi movies where using complete audio void for space enhances the anxiety of the scene very well. But when it’s not a complete audio void, what simulates space silence?
- Is it not also useful to record the ambiant noise in order to subtract the noise from a record you want as clean as possible?
- Im confused. How exactly is the room tone used? Is replayed in the background during something like an A roll?
They say you can count the jpg artifacts to determine a memes age.
- There's always an xkcd
  https://xkcd.com/1683/
Got any proof ?
/s
- You can tell by the pixels.
Degraded and censored. Thanks for showing the original.
Ouch, 181 KB.
OP’s 117 KB version loaded much faster over my BAUD.* (Now there’s a noise nothing like silence… brrrmmm dadung dadung)

Sparkling water tastes like when your foot falls asleep.

It also tastes like TV static
- My buddy once bought a few cans of Space Coke for us to try. I told him it tasted like TV static. He said "well technically, TV static is interference from space, so it literally tastes like space".
Instructions unclear; foot stuck in mouth
- Just like me on a date!
  Heyyoooo!
Sparkling water tastes like coins to me.
You mean when your foot wakes up?
I love the raspberry & lime foot falling asleep

As someone who has done plenty of sound recordist work, it's known as 'room tone.'

Also, I feel seen because I've had to explain that so many times. Even to people who really should know.

Ditto. We call it 'atmos' here.
- Conclusion of a stupid brain: Dolby sells nothing, their top cinema technology
I don't work in a sound recording space, but I know this because I had to do a voice recording for a project in middle school.
The recording picked up some extraneous noise in between a couple sentences, so I opened Audacity, took the noisy chunk, and deleted it outright so that there was empty space. It sounded very weird for some reason... so I simply recorded over the gap with me doing nothing, as if I were in between sentences. It worked! And I had no idea why...
Granted, this was less 'room tone' than 'white noise from the amount of gain on my shitty mic', but same concept.

Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.

He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.

I used to live right next to a big ol' belltower. It'd chime every hour and on special days, it'd be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
- I grew up half a block from elevated railroad tracks and it's the same. People visiting kept noticing the trains going by regularly, but I'd been tuning it out all my life and had to work to consciously hear it.
  Later in life I visited my childhood home as an adult, and spent the night. It had been long enough since I'd left that I began noticing the damn trains, and I had trouble getting to sleep.

True silence is usually not an issue though, but there might be other reasons to record the silent room. Like getting the impulse response data, aligning the DC offset or getting the noise profile for noise reduction.

In other words: It's mostly used a reference rather than the explanation given in the post.

Yeah, what this person is referring to is called "room tone", it's not silence.
Their metaphor still works though. The length of the wild sound tells me the OP might be talking about an older process before digital noise reduction was as common as it is now where less than half minute is enough. The idea that a "silent" room has a recognizable unique sound or even that a recording setup has a unique sound like internal mic noise is still valid for the metaphor of basically something that is perceptible to humans but difficult to give a well rounded answer as to the multiple variations that exist because they are generally so very subtle.
Like in regards to water and sound humans can tell hot liquid from cold when it is being poured or moved by sound. Actually explaining the difference in words requires a more complicated use of language but you basically know the differences when you hear it.
Since actual silence is very rare (Edit: on Earth before one considers the vacuum of space) and requires tech to purposefully create one can assume they mean just "a room where no one is talking" which weirdly itself is a more antiquated definition of silence .
- 'Silence' is a highly contextually defined word, with many social, physical, and metaphorical uses, each of which shifts, depending on your intent.
  Three versions of the word are running through the recordist's mind at this point: silence as in hold your tongue and twitches, as an artifact captured as 'room tone', and as the absence of unwanted electromagnetic signals in the toolset.
  If you want to be fussy about usage of the word, you really have to pin down the intent of both speaker and audience.
  To be fair, a simple word like 'set' is similar in complexity of usage. 'Silence', however, carries a lot of baggage wherever it is used.
Most places are not perfectly silent but have some small level of background. Wind, the distant sound of cars, the hum of lights, that kind of thing.
I know you're referring to true silence as a patch over in movies, but https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/worlds-quietest-room-microsoft-anechoic-chamber/ it seems like people have a real struggle with true silence in that it's very difficult for anyone to even have an hour of true silence.
I just found this interesting is all
- Yes it's fascinating for sure, but a "scientifically silent room" is a very different phenomenon from someone watching a TV show on a TV not producing fake silence in their living room, where there is already noise and reverberation.
  You can turn the volume down already if you want to experience the non-phenomen of not having a TV produce noise. It will not upset you, I promise.
  The reason why people get disoriented in silent rooms is the lack of response from reverb and/or lack of sensory input at all.
  Addition of ambient noise to an audio signal is for other reasons. With proper mixing and envelope control you will not experience cutting in and out of silence. However, audio production is a lot more complicated than just cutting audio together. It makes sense to create or simulate an entire "enviroment" at which to throw audio at, sort of like priming a canvas before painting.

I don't drink bottled water simply because all I can taste is the plastic of the bottle, filtered water is so much better

Plastic from reused plastic bottles can oeech into water and give you headaches

The different sounds of "silence" are the same as the different flavors of "water."

You're not hearing the silence, you're still hearing the absence of it caused by different things making little noises. (Or in some cases hallucinating)

You're not tasting the water but the non-water that's in the water.

Ahh, water. The room tone of beverages. Lol.
This is very very true. I have a decent water filtration system at home. I use a stainless steel water container both when I'm home and when I leave. Always highly filtered water. I've gotten so used to the fairly pure water from my filtration system that tap water, doesn't taste right anymore. If someone gives me tap water or something, it kind of shocks me how badly it tastes.
My water filtration stuff isn't the best, so I'm sure my water is filthy compared to some of the stuff you can get, but it's clean enough that I notice when there's a significant drop in quality and purity now.
- Meanwhile, I think a lot of purified water tastes kind of bitter and metallic compared to my own tap water. I generally don't like purified water unless it's ice cold. I can taste the minerals in tap water of course but it's not unpleasant to me. It probably just depends on the area. I've noticed the tap water in some states tastes really bad by comparison to mine
- I once asked how to make the purest water and just have 100% pure H2O to drink and know what water itself finally tastes like, and was told even if you could do it, drinking it would probably be lethal as it just rips molecules apart binding with everything.

That person totally farted their loudest fart during those 20 seconds.

An omega level fart
- An avengers-level fart
- The background static noise of a 150dB.

Tap water tastes different from bottled water, and the bottled water from Brazil tastes different from the bottled water I had in Chile, which came from glaciers.

And yeah it's the minerals that give taste to the water, but I don't think you're supposed to drink completely distilled water in the first place.

but I don't think you're supposed to drink completely distilled water in the first place.
It'll harm you a bit over time if you're not getting those minerals elsewhere in your diet, but otherwise it's not that big of a deal.
I have some on hand for other stuff and I've drank it in a pinch when I didn't have other water (my tap tastes horrid and purifiers that don't cost shit tons of money don't filter out the reason why) and I'm still hydrated as fuck
Distilled water tastes empty, like the flavor is being removed from my mouth. Quite odd
- The reason I've heard repeatedly is that distilled water isn't just harmful because it doesn't provide minerals, it's that it strips needed minerals from your body.
  I don't know the exact mechanism and can't be bothered to look it up, but there was a WHO study years ago that reported this finding.
Reverse osmosis filters produce pretty much distilled water that usually goes through remineraliser to add back some minerals. Fun fact is many of those remineralisers are sold as "improving water taste and smell", probably because they do improve taste and smell, but also not to make users too suspicious about adding back minerals after they just filtered the minerals out 😅
supposedly the only downside to drinking distilled water is lack of electrolytes and taste
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317698#risks
I drink predominantly distilled water at home since I have a tabletop distiller. Makes custom mineral water easier to mix up since you're starting from ~0 total dissolved solids. I'm often too lazy to add the minerals though, and the straight distilled water doesn't cause any digestive discomfort or anything
I have prescription fluoride toothpaste so I'm not too worried
- Completely distilled tap water also leeches minerals from your body
When I visited Massachusetts and tried tap water, I couldn't even drink it because it tasted evil.
Distilled water tastes like someone cooked pasta in it.

Silence is almost never silent.

I used to live in a pretty decently sized city. The quietest I ever experienced was in an old high-rise apartment after the power went out. I climbed up the seven or so flights of stairs because I needed to get into my unit to grab something, nearly all the residents of the building had vacated or were out of the building for one reason or another, so I was probably only one of about a dozen people inside during the power outage. I don't really know how many were still inside, but I'm sure it wasn't many.

Anyways, after I got into my unit I had to stop and listen for a minute. The windows were all closed and there was nothing. It was so quiet that I couldn't hear anything. At least to my ears that were numbed from the droning of the city. It was a marvelous experience. Normally you hear the buzzing of transformers, rumbles from steps and wheels and other things being moved around, the feint trumming of someone listening to music, and the constant mechanical whirr of the elevators working away. All of that was quiet. It was so still and calm.

I didn't experience that again until I moved into my current residence away from the city. Here I'm so used to the much quieter silence that I can hear the rush of air when the fans from the furnace turn on, I am acutely aware of the bubbling from the pet water fountain we have for our cat in the next room. Even the familiar pattering of my cats paws as he trots down the hallway.

Silence is almost never silent.

There are lots of things dissolved in our water that give it "flavour", but the goal of all utilities is to minimize this as much as possible. Some water objectively tastes better than others, and a common segment of local drinking water conferences is a taste test. That said, for normal people usually the water they prefer is what their palette is used to. Someone who grew up drinking groundwater with very high alkalinity and pH will prefer that over surface water that is actually more "pure". Similarly, if you normally drink water from a private well that you don't add chlorine to, you likely dislike the taste of "city water".

The common offenders for bad tasting water are excessive chlorine and some specific organic compounds. Both of these flavours can be removed using a granular activated carbon filter (e.g., a Britta), but you can actually remove the chlorine by just letting your water sit in the fridge for a while.

Aliens come to earth and are immediately escorted to meeting with all leaders. Glasses of water are offered to all guests.

Alien trys a sip

Alien: ew, yuck, oh my zorb it taste like spaceship fuel.

I can't describe the taste but if I can tell the difference between spring, purified, and distilled, there's a taste.

It's the minerals, Marie

Aaaaand I can hear my Tinnitus again

A bit related a few months before me and my wife beame parents a friend of ours stayed by us for a few days with her very active toddler. I will never forget the moment they all left and I was chilling on my couch and it felt like negative sound. Like I would have to hear something just to break even.

Or ambient noise

Wrong warm water tastes smoother and smells weirder

Cold water tastes spikier and doesnt smell weird

After we got a reverse osmosis filter our water tasted like nothing. We had to get a remineralization filter to put minerals back into it. Now it tastes good.

Yeah it's important that you re-mineralise water otherwise it will leach minerals from your body
- Yes, this also.
I kinda love how you filter water to get rid of its other contents and then basically add them right back in

This is a special kind of pedantic. You literally said the same thing as them but with mostly unnecessary specificity and explanation and acted like THEY were the idiot for assuming people would appreciate and understand their metaphor. Nah dude, they explained it the way it was explained to them and they understood it and so did most people.
- I believe when he said this is a special kind of stupid he was referring to himself and prefacing his own comment with a little warning.
- It's Tumblr. Make no assumptions, work with what they have literally said, and you will rarely be disappointed by their actual meaning.
It is sometimes misleadingly called silence in the biz, though room tone is more appropriate.
- I was wondering how far I had to scroll to see somebody say "room tone" THANK YOU!
I think in context it is clear what the person was saying. When we talk about silence we mean the resting noises of the room. We don't mean if you cut the audio feed what you are left with.
And yes it is true. You get a sense of space from those tiny noises and how they echo and get absorbed.
Can I have the other half of the hair?
This is a special kind of stupid.
Yes, I believe it's called Tumblr
- The only place where they will stan for teachers and then ask why they need to fail to learn algebra in the same breath

This is why I'd actually really like to hear a live performance of John Cage's 4'33.

No two performances are ever the same

Water is lightly sweet and a tiny bit astringent.

I learned all about this from comedy bang bang the podcast.

Water is flavorless. You are tasting the salts in the water.

That's kinda the point though. Outside of a true vacuum or a literally perfect anechoic chamber, you won't get true silence anywhere. There's always something, even if you can't consciously perceive it.
Getting pure water is easier than true silence, but it's still not something most people will encounter in their life - and basically anywhere else you can get water on Earth will have some level of minerals in it, as such that background flavour is the flavour of water...
And like with sound, everywhere has it's own flavour of water.
- Filtered or purified water is flavorless. I use a ZeroWater filter, and the water has no taste.
You're flavorless
- Found the spicy one!
  /j
100% correct. If you think purified water tastes funny, it’s probably time to brush your teeth or see the dentist.