The world’s quietest location was created by Microsoft in 2015 after two years of design.
The anechoic chamber, which is housed at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, may sound like a paradise for those of us who have noisy neighbours or the ideal location for yoga practise, but few people can endure the silence for very long.
No one has managed to last a full hour in the world’s quietest room. Watch the video below for a look inside:
You’ll also experience ringing in your ears as a result of the absolute silence in the space.
According to Hundraj Gopal at Microsoft, “the longest continuous duration someone has stayed inside the chamber is roughly 55 minutes.”
The body starts to adjust to silence, according to Steve Orfield, who also runs Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota and has an aneochoic chamber, who told The Daily Mail: “You can sometimes hear your lungs and stomach gurgling, as well as your heart pumping. You turn into the sound in the anechoic chamber.”
Even moving around becomes difficult because there are no outside sounds: “If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”
The absence of sensation in thin air can cause the body to produce hallucinations, therefore NASA astronauts begin their space training in a tank of water since the sensory deprivation can occasionally be crippling.
Gopal Gopal, a principal human factors engineer at Microsoft, gives visitors a tour of their chamber in a video posted to their YouTube account.
The 80Hz anechoic chamber’s operation is described by the speech and hearing scientist.
Six layers of concrete and steel were used in the construction of the soundproof chamber to keep outside noise out.
With a sound level 20 decibels below what humans can hear, it also holds the Guinness World Record for Quietest Place.
The walls, ceiling, and floor are all lined with fibreglass wedges that disperse sound waves before they can bounce back into the room.
The wedges absorb 99.999 percent of the sound from the chamber and have the aesthetic appeal of a great set piece from a sci-fi movie from the future. Higher frequencies are “fully absorbed,” but low frequencies are “stuck” further back.
Additionally, springs that reduce vibration are atop the chamber.
Gopal stands on steel cables rather than a floor. Incredibly, as he moves around the room while speaking directly to the camera, the sound of his voice diminishes.
In another mind-blowing moment, Gopal educates viewers on how the chamber blocks out sound from the outside by opening a door.
We can hear the engineer working in the adjacent room while listening to loud heavy metal music with the door open. Once the door was shut, all the noise—or audio art for the metal lovers—was silenced inside the chamber.
The chamber has a fantastic function in the development of new audio technology.
Gopal explains: “From measuring Xbox console fan noise for instance, or the components in a surface – some of the components make sounds – very low level – but they are they, we measure them in this clean environment which is the purest form of recording without being influenced by the walls or from the outside.
“So, we better our products for audio performance. Anything to do with audio where we have microphones, loudspeakers to measure distortion, or for surface products, our consoles – these types of chambers become extremely important for us.”
