The other night, I went to my first silent disco. It was held at the museum, which felt both cultured and faintly rebellious – drinking and dancing somewhere that’s usually all about the quiet, which somehow made the silent disco feel just right.

I didn’t know quite what to expect, apart from, obviously, silence. That’s a given, right? Except it wasn’t silent. Not at all.

What I hadn’t considered is that while the music goes straight into your headphones, people still sing along. Loudly and enthusiastically. And with that special kind of headphone-singing confidence where you can’t hear yourself, so you just assume you sound like Freddie Mercury. Add to that the fact there were three different channels of music, so there were clusters of people singing the same thing, but across the room it was three different songs all tangled together. I walked into a room full of people all belting out slightly mismatched tunes, and it was amazing.

There were three colour-coded DJs up in a booth, each assigned a channel – red, green, blue. The headphones lit up to show which one you were listening to. Very efficient. But also kind of brutal. The red DJ (hip hop) spent most of the night playing to an empty room. He could literally look around and see there wasn’t a single red headphone in sight. Poor guy.

Most of the action was green (80s) or blue (90s). You’d feel these waves ripple through the crowd when a good song dropped – headphones flipping colour in unison as people switched over mid-step to join the moment. It was like witnessing silent disco telepathy.

And sometimes it was fun just to take off my headphones and listen to the whole crowd singing along: dozens of people all singing confidently, slightly off-key, and not quite together. The noise of the crowd singing easily hid a multitude of vocal crimes – which made it all the more fun.

I thought I’d be self-conscious about dancing, especially knowing I wasn’t necessarily in time with anyone else. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Everyone was too busy doing their own thing. I didn’t quite work up the nerve to sing at full volume – until The Proclaimers came on.

I’ll definitely go again. I now fully appreciate the joy of a room full of people united in music – even if it’s not the same music and everyone’s doing their own slightly out-of-sync thing.