The quietest place on earth will drive you insane
- Volunteers see hallucinations after a short while
Some say that silence is golden. However, this will certainly not be the case if you find yourself in the quietest room in the world - no one can survive for more than an hour.
In 2015, Microsoft built a room that is now officially designated in the Guinness Book of Records as the quietest place on Earth. Dubbed the anechoic chamber, it is located at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Only very few people managed to survive in this room for a long period of time - at most an hour. After a few minutes, you will start to hear your heartbeat. A few minutes later, you can hear your bones creaking and the blood flowing through your body.
The point of the anechoic chamber is not that you cannot hear anything, but that it removes all other external noises and allows you to hear the endless sounds of your body. Only in death is the body completely still.
Environments that we think of as exceptionally quiet are usually louder than the human hearing threshold, which is around 0 decibels. Noise in a quiet library, for example, may reach around 40 decibels.
A 360 degree photo of the anechoic chamber at University of Salford, UK (credit: DANIEL WONG-SWEENEY/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)“When you turn your head, you can even hear that movement. You can hear yourself breathing and it sounds pretty loud.”
Hondaraj Gopal, lead project designer
Without any sounds from the outside world to get in the way, absolute silence will gradually turn into an unbearable ringing in the ears. This will likely cause you to lose your balance due to the lack of reverberation in the room, which will impair your spatial awareness.
"When you turn your head, you can even hear that movement. You can hear yourself breathing and it sounds pretty loud," Hondaraj Gopal, the project's lead designer at Microsoft, said.
It took two years to design the space; it consists of six layers of concrete and steel and is slightly detached from the surrounding buildings. An array of shock-absorbing springs was installed below it. Inside, fiberglass wedges are installed on the floor, ceiling and walls to break up the sound waves before they have a chance to travel into the room.
A competitor for the anechoic title
Another anechoic room is hoping to win the title of the quietest room in the world. The room is located at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis and was designed by scientist Steven J. Orfield, who held the record for the quietest room before Microsoft broke it in 2015.
Orfield told The New York Times that he has applied for his room to get the title back and is currently awaiting a response from the Guinness World Records management team. A Guinness representative confirmed receipt of Orfield's referral and added that the Guinness World Records team is in the "process of evaluating his evidence and their review criteria."
Inside the quietest room in the world: Microsoft reveals the $1.5m ‘chamber of silence’ it uses to tune everything from headphones to the click of your mouse button - that's so quiet no one has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside
- Microsoft spent $1.5m building quietest place on Earth at its Redmond campus
- Small room is housed within six concrete layers on vibration damping springs
- Walls, floor, ceiling are covered in giant wedges of fiberglass foam to stop echo
- It's so quiet that nobody has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside
The record-breaking room is used by the tech giant to do everything from tuning its headphones to making your mouse clicks sound perfect.
However, the firm has found is it too quiet for most people - and nobody has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside.
The few outsiders who have entered it have complained of everything from becoming disturbed by the loudness of their own breathing to ringing in the ears and deafening stomach gurgles.
‘Some people come in for a minute and want out immediately,’ Hundraj Gopal, Microsoft’s principal human factors engineer, and the man who led the team that built the anechoic chamber, told Dailymail.com.
‘People can’t handle it, it rattles their brains, it’s sensory deprivation.’
Gopal said the record for staying in the room, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the quietest on Earth, is short.
‘This is the quietest place on the planet, and the most someone has been able to stay in is 45 minutes.’
‘Just the chamber cost us $1.5m, which shows you how serious we are about audio.’
Known as an anechoic chamber, it is a small room measuring 21ft (6.36m) in each direction.
The few outsiders who have entered the room have complained of everything from becoming disturbed by the loudness of their own breathing to ringing in the ears and deafening stomach gurgles
It is designed to be as perfectly quiet as possible, to allow engineers to tune audio devices and sound in perfect conditions.
The chamber is within six concrete layers, each up to 12 inches thick, that help to block out sounds from the outside world.
The walls, floor and ceiling are covered in giant wedges of fiberglass foam to eradicate any echoes.
The chamber floats on 68 vibration damping springs and is mounted on its own separate foundation slab to cut it off from the rest of the building.
Inside the chamber, the floor is made from the same steel cables used to stop fighter jets as they land on aircraft carriers, arranged like a net above the foam wedges underneath.
‘This chamber blocks 120db, so if you had a jet engine taking off just outside, you would barely hear it,’ said Gopal.
‘We work with engineers on everything from mouse clicks to the sound your laptop makes when the latch closes, those sounds are very important to us.
‘We obsess over this minutiae other companies ignore. We have seven sound chambers in this building, and over 25 in the company.'
Chris Kujawski, Principal Designer in Microsoft’s Device Team, said the audio chamber was crucial to the firm’s hardware, said it showed ‘the level of craftsmanship and nuance in our products very few people know about.’
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