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.
"You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound." Amazingly, one of our former reporters crushed the World Record for time spent inside the room back in 2016 by sitting in there for a whopping 67 minutes.
Only very few people have been able to withstand being in the room for a long period of time — at most an hour. After a few minutes, you'll already start to hear your own heartbeat. A few minutes after that, you can hear your own bones grinding and blood flowing.
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.
The entry fee is $200 per person, with a $400 minimum. There's also an option to reserve the chamber for $600 an hour in order to take the Orfield Challenge and see how long you can last. As of June 2022, the record to beat is two hours.
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.
Sometimes, you need a little peace and quiet to stay sane. But it turns out too much quiet can drive you crazy- or at least make you hallucinate. That's what scientists at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis have found by studying how subjects react in their anechoic chamber, also known as the world's quietest room.
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.
In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound." But the room isn't just for torturing people. Companies test their products in it to find out just how loud they are. And NASA has sent astronauts to help them adapt to the silence of space.
To soundproof your room and reduce noise you need to absorb the sound. You can accomplish this by adding acoustic foam and acoustic panels on walls, hang blankets over sound entry points, and position furniture and rugs to help absorb sound.
The body requires a quiet and peaceful environment to fall asleep and avoid any disturbances that might wake you up in the middle. Experts believe that unexpected noises and sounds tend to wake up the body as you transition through the various stages of sleep.
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.
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.
Being in extreme silence has an interesting effect. With no sound to distract you, your body becomes the sound field. If you spend some time in an anechoic chamber you will hear: Your stomach rumbling and gurgling loudly.
In a silence where some people could hear a pin drop, people with tinnitus hear a constant ringing in their ears. Or the sound may be a popping, rushing, pinging, chirping, whistling, or roaring.
The Brazilian study, which consisted of 66 people with normal hearing and no tinnitus, found that among subjects placed in a quiet environment where they were asked to focus on their hearing senses, 68 percent experienced phantom ringing noises similar to that of tinnitus.
That's what we learned from neuroscientist Dr. Seth Horowitz of Brown University; true silence is non-existent. "In truly quiet areas," he writes in his book, The Universal Sense, "you can even hear the sound of air molecules vibrating inside your ear canals or the fluid in your ears themselves."
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.
Common Sources of Noise and Decibel Levels
Noise above 70 dB over a prolonged period of time may start to damage your hearing. Loud noise above 120 dB can cause immediate harm to your ears.
Sound is measured in units called decibels. Sounds at or below 70 A-weighted decibels (dBA) are generally safe. Long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 dBA can cause hearing loss.
In 2004, Guinness World Records certified the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories as the quietest place on Earth, with an ambient sound level of –9.4 decibels A-weighted.
A physicist will say there is no such thing as “absolute” silence. The lowest sound level in the natural world is that of particles moving through gas or liquid, known as Brownian motion. But tech companies have tried to top this, creating sound-sealed rooms known as anechoic chambers.