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The quietest places in the world are the so-called “anechoic rooms” (anechoic chambers). These are special laboratory rooms, deliberately designed to be as quiet as possible.
The thick steel and concrete exterior walls ensure that no extraneous noise enters the room. And the construction of the interior walls is even more special: they protrude from many special panels arranged in a certain order, covered with sound-absorbing material.
The walls of such a room absorb 99.99 percent. sound from inside the room.
Although, say, in your house or some underground hideout, even in complete silence, you would still hear a loud echo, there is no echo here. Sound waves seem to propagate to infinity.
Photo by Vida Press / Homeless room
The defenseless rooms are used both by research scientists who want to expand our knowledge of the silence we know and by electronics corporations.
Because measurements of the sound emitted by various devices (for example, how loud the phone can ring or how loud the hum of the computer processor is) are most reliable when done in complete silence.
The quietest room in the world, absorbing the best sound, belongs to Microsoft Corporation, but the company uses this room only to test its products and does not allow outsiders. Apple and other major companies have similar rooms.
Those who cannot install such rooms themselves rent them. NASA has a similar room; after all, space is like a gigantic defenseless room.
One of these rooms, Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, USA, is distinguished by the fact that anyone can book a pre-booked tour.
Photo by Vida Press / Orfield Laboratories Airless Room
It is true that a visit to a room costs a person really cheap – $ 125. Visitors have the opportunity to briefly sit in a room in complete darkness and silence.
However, they can only spend a few minutes in the room and are not left unattended. Because sitting like this can alter the human psyche.
However, the usual quiet room, for example your bedroom late at night, is not completely silent. The background sound level in such a room is about 30 decibels: the sound is caused by noise from the distant street, a crisp sheet, pipes, and similar silent sound sources.
And in the Orfield Laboratories room, the sound level is -9 decibels. Do you think that total silence also means peace? No way.
Human ears are not used to total silence. Under natural circumstances, there is always, even in the quietest moment, some kind of background noise that can be heard when listening.
It is not in the room. This means that the ears and brain have to adapt. And the body adapts by listening to the only sound it can hear: its own sound.
This means that after a couple of minutes you start to hear your heart beat, your breathing swells and your lungs contract and so on. Some sounds are even very strange; for example, when you move your hand, you can hear the bones rubbing against each other. This is probably the closest thing that can be heard in the lyrics of the song “Foje” “Maybe not the sound sounds silent, but silence in the sound …”
Still, while it may seem interesting, being in a room like this indicates that it is not a pleasant feeling.
Some people start to panic and leave the room immediately, others stay for about 20 minutes, they stay longer. Among those who have stayed longer, a large number begin to hear hallucinations.
The record of how long the man was able to stay alone in such a room in complete silence is 45 minutes.
Sigismund Gedvila / 15min photo / A room without a room created by VU physicists
By the way, it is difficult to even walk in such a room. When we walk or stand for balance, we generally orient ourselves in terms of sound as well, although we may not be aware of it.
In such a room, we can no longer navigate the sound, and it suddenly becomes much more difficult to keep our balance. Therefore, to stay longer in the room, you need to sit down.
Trying to make a sound yourself won’t necessarily help either. Due to the absence of an echo, they sound differently when they make even short, loud sounds in an anechoic room.
For example, a sound that sounds like a bang in a normal room will sound like a loud bang in a room without a room.
“Homeless rooms” may one day bring medical benefits. Researchers are investigating whether “silence therapy” can be used to treat autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and some mental illnesses.
By the way, in 2018. A similar laboratory was opened in Lithuania at the Faculty of Physics of Vilnius University. Its objective is to study the physical parameters of modern radio antennas, which will allow to improve these antennas. Read more about it here 15 minutes texts.
Based on Now I Know, Atlas Obscura.
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