The social environments most people call “echo chambers” map entirely incorrectly to the metaphor of acoustic physics, whereas true “echo chambers” have the structure of something like a large cathedral…
…true sound absorption/anti-echo materials in contrast by definition include highly manifold structures with many internal divisions.
How does acoustic foam work? All we have to do to understand how does acoustic foam works is to look at the individual cell structure of the foam. You can see that the cell structure is open or porous in nature. This cell structure type allows for air to flow into the foam and enter the individual cells. Once it is in the cells, it moves around and this movement creates friction. We all know that friction can produce heat. If you have ever rubbed sticks together when camping to create a fire, you realize how friction works. Once the friction starts to produce heat, an energy transformation occurs. We do not lose energy, we change its form to heat.
https://www.acousticfields.com/how-does-acoustic-foam-work/
It is well known that the acoustic absorption capacity depends on the acoustic porosity content (open porosity). Indeed, scientists have focused on materials with interconnected porosity, especially foams made from polyurethane [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. It is essential to determine parameters such as the airflow resistivity, tortuosity and acoustic porosity to understand acoustic phenomena.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167577X14000779
this is a structure that deadens echos
The fuck are you doing in your shower?
Clearly I am singing.
Honestly the shower is the best echo chamber
I agree though sometimes stairwells come out of nowhere and surprise with crazy good echoes, doesn’t beat the accessibility of a shower however and people tend to look at you weird if you hang out in a random stairwell.
The metaphorical echo chamber is referring to you being in a space where your viewers are endlessly echoed- completely different from an acoustic echo chamber.
Yes and my point is that the architecture that is most conducive to countering that tendency in physical acoustics suggests the opposite conclusion people come to about echo chambers in abstracted metaphorical application to communities and systems of people in conversation.
I genuinely think it muddles discussion around human topics when the phrase “echo chamber” is used as the association people make is so backwards it hurts more than it helps.
An echo chamber is inherently a closed space because open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.
Echo Chambers’s defining characteristics are walls that cut them off from the outside world, being large voids with little substance inside, and hearing what you say repeated back to you.
Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.
open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.
You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.
Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.
Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?
You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.
Go out to a field and try to produce an echo. They literally require walls to bounce off of.
Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?
You need some space yes, ideally the inside of your chamber needs to be mostly empty and insubstantive.
However, echo chambers can not be filled with too much space, because echoes don’t work at infinite scale. Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall. To be truly echoey and hear multiple echoes of the same sound bouncing back and forth on the walls in front of and behind you, you need those walls even closer together, for not just the extra distance travelled, but also how much energy is lost during each reflection.
Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall.
It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.
The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction, what sound deadening structures such as acoustic foam do is increase that friction per unit of space.
The background effect of sound slowly losing energy simply from being conveyed through the air represents a minimum sound deadening capacity in terms of space not a maximum.
It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.
The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction
Reflection doesn’t induce energy, it dissipates it because it does not reflect perfectly.
You were reading research papers in the shower?
Singing them! It is only natural, they are full of notes.
Ha, how does a foot note sound?
Funny thing about is I thought you talking about the term being one who shuts-out other information, for paying attention to only small percentage & agrees with already achieved information. Most use that term in politics especially in The USA & political Right-Far Right.
I think it depends on the type of sound: a canyon echoes shouts, while a cathedral echoes sermons. But a canyon won’t echo regular speaking voices like a cathedral does, and I think that’s what the metaphor is drawing on: the cathedral is an echo chamber relative to an open public square.
But a canyon won’t echo regular speaking voices like a cathedral does
…because a Cathedral echoes more than a Canyon does! Which is my point! When people apply the metaphor of the echo chamber they almost always use it in precisely the incorrect mapping and speak of mitigating the “echo chamber effect” by creating large, enclosed spaces with huge unbroken internal voids where even whispers cascade all the way across the volume in a cacophony.
Conversely when people speak of systems of communication that are most like open celled or closed celled acoustic foam with many smaller spaces separated by manifold barriers and divisions, they are likely to refer to it as being prone to the “echo chamber effect” and I think it seriously hurts rational thinking on the subject.
I have never seen someone criticize a human communication system with the structure of a Cathedral as an “echo chamber” while gesturing to the structure of a Canyon as superior in that it lets echoes proliferate but doesn’t concentrate them. Rather, it seems to be used almost without exception to argue in favor of making systems MORE like a Cathedral and less like acoustic deadening foam in structure.