masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Go out to a field and try to produce an echo. They literally require walls to bounce off of.
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
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.
The background effect of sound slowly losing energy simply from being conveyed through the air is minimal sound deadening by definition.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Reflection doesn’t induce energy, it dissipates it because it does not reflect perfectly.