Cracklecreep: Opening a Noisy Wrapper Very Slowly in a Quiet Room

Cracklecreep (n.): the painfully slow opening of a noisy wrapper in a quiet room, carried out in the firm belief that slow means silent. It happens in cinemas, libraries, concert halls and the back row of any school assembly. The sweet is in your pocket, the room is hushed, and you have decided that if you just go gently enough, nobody will ever know.

A cracklecreep has stages. First comes the scout: one tiny tug at the corner, to see how loud the wrapper intends to be. It is always louder than you remembered. Then comes the long middle, in which you peel a millimetre, stop, look straight ahead with an innocent face, and peel another millimetre. A sweet that could have been unwrapped in one second is now a four-minute project.

Experienced cracklecreepers wait for cover. A loud bit of music, a round of applause, a cough from three rows back, and they make their move. The trouble is that quiet rooms are quiet for long stretches, and the loud moment never lasts as long as the wrapper does. The applause ends. You are left holding a half-open toffee in total silence, like someone caught halfway over a garden fence.

Everyone nearby knows exactly what is going on. Nobody turns round, because they have all done it themselves, and because turning round would make their seat creak. The person next to you is not annoyed that you are eating a sweet. They are simply waiting, with their whole body, for you to finish, the way you wait for the second shoe to drop upstairs.

The cracklecreep ends in one of two ways. Either you lose your nerve and tear the thing open in a single brave rip, which is over at once and which you should have done at the start. Or you finish the long way, put the sweet in your mouth with great dignity, and then discover that you still have to do something with the empty wrapper.

The real idea behind it

Sadly for all of us, physics has looked into this, and the slow method does not work. In 2000, two physicists recorded the sound of crumpled plastic wrappers being pulled open and presented the results at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. They found that the rustle is not one smooth noise. It is made of many separate little pops and clicks, each one given off when a tiny crease in the stiff plastic suddenly snaps from one shape to another.

The loudness of each click depends on the crease, not on how fast your fingers are moving. Open the wrapper quickly and the clicks arrive in one short burst. Open it slowly and you get exactly the same clicks, just spread out over a much longer time. Their conclusion was that the only real fix is a different kind of wrapper. So the kindest thing you can do for the room is the thing that feels rudest: open it in one go, or better still, unwrap your sweets before the lights go down.