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The anechoic chamber at University College London has the clutter of a space shared by many people: styrofoam cups, defunct pieces of equipment in the long purgatory between the days of their use and their removal to the skip, and an accretion of still-living technical apparatus – amps, speakers and laptops – perched on narrow shelves The inner, soundproof room is sparser, with a long-barrelled microphone and wedges of foam jagging out from every wall; these severe surfaces are counterpoised by an old wingback chair that sags as you sit in it When the experimenter settles you and leaves, shutting the double doors firmly behind her, a feeling of numbness grows with the silence When the lights are turned out, a thick skin of darkness settles The chamber has a wholly pragmatic function for psychologists and language researchers, as a place to record stimuli free from contaminating noise; my visit, however, was for a different purpose I was poet-in-residence with the Speech Communication Laboratory at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and in June 2012 I spent an hour in the anechoic room I had come for the silence, wanting to experience one of the quietest places in the city, but Nadine, one of the lab members, had said that plunging me into darkness for twenty minutes might help me to focus And so she shut the double doors, and as I sat in the pitch black, trying to quieten my breathing, a world of sound flowered between my ears   I have the recording I made inside the chamber when the twenty minutes was up It’s a rambling monologue flecked with slip-ups, corrections and silences, as I try to gather up more scraps of the vanishing experience I’m trying to describe, caught by the way speech forces the silence it aims to document back into the realm of memory     I know, because I can hear myself saying it, that I thought I heard a sound ‘like sand being thrown onto something metallic’ phasing in and out in my right ear; something like a persistent, twittering birdcall