The room, known as the anechoic chamber, was registered as the "world's quietest place" in Guinness World Records in 2015. The room has an onion-like construction that isolates it from the rest of the building. All of us love some peace and quiet.
The quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes. Inside the room it's silent. So silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels, -9.4 dBA.
Members of the public must book a tour to visit the room, and are only allowed in for a short, supervised stay. According to the lab's website, only members of the media are permitted to stay in the chamber alone for prolonged periods of time.
Made up of six layers of concrete and steel, it's a bit disconnected from the surrounding building. An array of vibration-damping springs are situated below. Inside, fiberglass wedges are mounted on the floor, ceiling, and walls to break up sound waves before they have a chance to bounce back into the room.
A human can normally hear sounds between 0 and 130 dB. 0 decibels represent the human hearing or auditory threshold (the level we can start hearing sounds from). 130 dB is the pain threshold (the maximum level of sound we can hear without feeling intense pain and instantly damaging our hearing).
A whisper is between 20-30 dB. On the other hand, a human scream can reach decibel levels between 80 and 125 dB.
The brain creates noise to fill the silence, and we hear this as tinnitus. Perhaps only someone with profound deafness can achieve this level of silence, so paradoxically loud.
These speakers, driven by pressurised nitrogen gas, can saturate the room with 163 dB of continuous noise for up to 10 minutes. The biggest speakers generate a tone at 25 Hz, which is just above the lowest note humans can hear, while the smaller speakers go as high as 250 Hz.
Steve Orfield explained: “what the chamber tends to do is it tends to scare people because when you get in the chamber, everything gets tremendously quiet. You feel like there's pressure on your ears – but it's actually pressure moving away from your ears.
Wish you could sit in the quietest room just to get some peace and quiet? Be careful what you wish for; it may drive you crazy. The quietest place on earth is an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. The space is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it was an entire 45 minutes.
This room at Microsoft's headquarters in Washington holds a Guinness World Record — and no one has been able to stay inside longer than an hour.
“The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth's Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room's soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.
The room, known as the anechoic chamber, is located in the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US. It took two years to build the room and it is completely soundproof from outside noise and any internal noise is completely silenced.
Over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered evidence that immersive sounds like white, brown and pink noise may help the brain to focus, sleep or relax — especially for people with A.D.H.D.
Inside the world's quietest room
If you stand in it for long enough, you start to hear your heartbeat. A ringing in your ears becomes deafening. When you move, your bones make a grinding noise. Eventually you lose your balance, because the absolute lack of reverberation sabotages your spatial awareness.
Any sounds below the threshold of 0 dBA is undetectable by the human ear. And at such a low decibal level, the environment becomes so disconcerting that people have actually started to hallucinate. "When it's quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear.
A quiet bedroom for example will usually get a dB reading between 25 and 30. Why, you ask? It's because even though a room may seem quiet to you, there will still be sounds in the room with values above 0 dB.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis is the quietest place in the world, with a background noise reading of –9.4 decibels. If you chatted with someone, your speech would measure around 60 decibels on a sound-level meter.
At 194 dB, the energy in the sound waves starts distorting and they create a complete vacuum between themselves. The sound is no longer moving through the air, but is in fact pushing the air along with it, forming a pressurized wall of moving air.
But what about the loudest sound ever heard? On the morning of 27 August 1883, on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, a volcanic eruption produced what scientists believe to be the loudest sound produced on the surface of the planet, estimated at 310 decibels (dB).
The Krakatoa volcanic eruption: Not only did it cause serious damage to the island, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 created the loudest sound ever reported at 180 dB.
Many people who are profoundly deaf can still hear planes, dogs barking, etc. Hearing a sound does not mean that Deaf people can understand speech. A person with a significant hearing loss generally has difficulty or inability to hear speech even when aided.
Yet, silence can be dangerous. Speaking up and advocating for issues that matter to the world is paramount. Being a bystander in a situation that can potentially change someone's life [for the worse] and staying mute about it is not acceptable. If opinions are not voiced, then they are not heard.
Nearly everyone has, even if it was just for a short time, such as that “ringing” or hum you hear after attending a loud workout class or concert. Tinnitus that lasts longer than six months is called chronic tinnitus. Tinnitus is common and affects about one in every six people.