I was once in an acoustically dead chamber at a university lab. The room was a cube, the walls covered entirely in sound-absorbing material. The floor was a suspended mesh that divided the cube in half vertically. Virtually no sound could reflect in this chamber, so all you could hear was what reached the ear directly from the source. The person showing me the chamber fired a starter’s pistol, and it made just the slightest pop.
It made me very conscious of my ears, as if my brain was sending up a dozen red flags that something was terribly wrong with them, and they needed my urgent attention