If you’ve ever wondered might where the quietest place in the world is, The Guinness Book of World Records can tell you.
The answer is, inside the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond,Washington.
In 2015, they created what is known as the anechoic chamber. Anechoic means “without echo”. Ultra-sensitive testing in the room produced an average background noise reading of -20.35 dBA.
And how quiet is that? It’s so quiet that only a few individuals have been able to stay inside the room for up to an hour.
It’s so quiet that someone inside the room will soon hear their own heartbeat. Soon after that, they will start hearing their blood flowing and their bones grinding.
Hundraj Gopal, principal designer of the chamber said, “When you turn your head, you can even hear that motion. You can hear yourself breathing and it sounds somewhat loud.”
The complete and absolute quiet will eventually give way to an intolerable ringing in the ears because there is no sound coming in from the outer world.
Due to the lack of reverberation in the room and the resulting impairment of ones spatial awareness, this will probably cause the person to lose their equilibrium.
Typically, environments that we consider to be extremely quiet are louder than the human hearing threshold, which is approximately 0 decibels.
For example, a library reading room can be around 40 dB.
It took two years to design the space. It’s made of six layers of steel and concrete and has vibration-damping springs underneath. To prevent sound waves from reflecting back into the space, fiberglass wedges are afixed to the walls, ceiling, and floor inside the room.
The Guiness Book of World Records may soon have a new winner for the world’s quietest room as Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis has designed something similar. Their room has a “legitimate measurement” of “–24.9 dBA”.
A representative for Guinness has said they had received a submission from Steven J. Orfield, the person who designed Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber, and were reviewing “his evidence and their testing criteria.”
