Soundproof booth, sound isolation enclosure, free acoustic space, screaming chamber, or even “the strange contraption in the library cafe,” as one student called it. It has finally happened — technological progress and the Library’s funds have come together to bring us our first ever completely silent space on campus which is a dire need, especially for those of us that are introverts or have roommates.

Whether you need to let out an earth-shattering scream to get on with your day, or just experience a reprieve from how constantly abused our poor eardrums are, the soundproof booth is for you. I don’t even have to tell you this, apparently, seeing as how the booth is never empty, we’ve already been making good use of it. (Girl who left her belongings in the booth for three hours yesterday, I am looking at you.)

I’ve heard many people saying they want to go in and see how it feels to be washed in a silence more complete than anything else in our lives. And such was my initial reaction too, but would you like to know what immediately followed my wish to go in? Dread. Uneasiness. I imagined what it would feel like inside the booth and several images came to mind — the contortionists’ box at the circus. Animals at the zoo. A Barbie doll inside its neat plastic packaging. The shrinking walls from bad nightmares where all you feel is panic, claustrophobia, and a feeling of being caged. Because that’s what it is, after all, isn’t it? A glass cage. Very thoughtfully, precisely, artistically designed, but a glass cage nonetheless.

And maybe I’m being overly cynical about this, maybe there really is no need to overthink it. Maybe I should just be grateful for the opportunity to vent out my stress without causing an earthquake with soundwaves that could make the Richter scale look like child's play. Yet, I can’t help questioning whether this really is the future of living spaces.

Why do we, as a society, love enclosures so much? Smaller and smaller ones at that. NYU Abu Dhabi is a walled, secure community with buildings that have multiple floors divided into even smaller rooms, and now there’s even these booths — made for one person, alone and restricted to a tiny space. What is this commitment to putting ourselves in steadily smaller spaces? There’s a line between cozy and simply being trapped, and being able to see outside of a cage doesn’t mean you're not in it.

Isn’t complete silence so disconcerting sometimes? There is a reason people use white noise or Lo-Fi playlists as background music — sometimes we just need to give a soundtrack to our lives to not feel alone. I’m not saying the booth is useless. I would have just preferred for it to be bigger, or maybe the existing library rooms to do better. Instead of bringing in more booths I would much rather prefer the administration establish a booking system for the library rooms, make them more sound-proof, and even somehow increase the number of library rooms. What is the purpose of making the sound booths so small?

A university whose essence is so embedded with the value of community living has no need for so many individual spaces. Coming from a highly collectivistic culture, and knowing that a lot of my peers do too, I would prefer to have more silent group spaces. Plus, there’s no better contemporary representation of being ‘alone in a crowd’ than being perched inside the booth while people talk, laugh, eat, and make awkward eye contact with you from outside. I don’t like the extra division, the added barriers, the increased individualistic enclosed spaces. I think NYUAD, with its focus on self-advancement and individual agency, is already sufficiently individualistic; we don’t need another alternative to escape a group space and be alone.

At least I personally would much rather be in silence with someone in the peaceful fourth floor of the library, rather than being in a cramped space in the library cafe on transparent display to my noisy surroundings.