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.
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.
by Walla! Health, Jerusalem Post | Read more
Image: University of Salford, UK; Daniel Wong-Sweeny/Wikimedia Commons
Image: University of Salford, UK; Daniel Wong-Sweeny/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. I've had the opportunity to visit an anechoic chamber and, while you wouldn't expect it, the experience is deeply unsettling. Perhaps because any sounds you make (or don't) are unmoored from their normal context. Flattened, claustrophobic. I'm not sure what the applications are for these things. As Ted Gioia notes in his essay My Lifelong Quest for Silence:
More from Wikipedia: 4′33″ (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three") is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, 4′33″ being the total length of the first public performance. (...)"So we now have moved from praising silence to considering that entire spectrum from quiet to noise, with various kinds of sounds and music placed somewhere in the middle. Or perhaps it’s better to view this as a hierarchy, with music operating at some higher stage than noise, but still below the pure ideal of silence.
The average music fan might be surprised to learn how controversial such a hierarchy can be to certain academic mindsets. At first blush, noise seems to operate beyond the realm of music, perhaps even defining the very boundary where it ends. But that hasn’t stopped influential people from trying to aestheticize noise—just as John Cage aestheticized silence in his 4 ’33’."
In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″.
