Microsoft finished building the world’s most peaceful place in 2015. The project had been in the planning stages for two years.
The anechoic chamber is at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It may sound like a haven, especially for those of us with noisy neighbors, or the perfect place to do yoga, but few people can handle the silence for a long time.
If the room is completely silent, you will also hear ringing in your ears.
The longest continuous time anyone has spent inside the chamber is about 55 minutes,
Hundraj Gopal at Microsoft said.
Steve Orfield, who works at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota and has an anechoic chamber there, says that after a while, the human body starts to get used to not hearing sounds. Continuing, he said:
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.
Also, moving around is hard because there are no sounds from outside:
If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.
Since the lack of sensation in thin air can cause hallucinations, NASA astronauts start their training in a tank of water. This is because sensory deprivation can sometimes make a person so weak that they can’t move at all.
In a video on the company’s YouTube channel, Hundraj Gopal, who is the Principal Human Factors Engineer at Microsoft, gives a tour of the company’s building.
The speech and hearing researcher describes how the 80 Hz anechoic chamber works.
The room is made of six layers of concrete and steel, which keeps outside noise from getting in.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is also the quietest place in the world, with a sound level that is 20 decibels lower than what humans can hear.
It has fiberglass wedges on the ceiling, floor, and walls. These wedges break up sound waves before they reach the chamber, so they don’t bounce back into the chamber.
Not only do the wedges look like cool props from a far-future science fiction movie, but they can also absorb 99.999 percent of the sound coming from the chamber. Low frequencies are said to be “captured” farther back, while high frequencies are said to be “completely absorbed.”
The chamber is also held up by springs, which makes it less likely to shake.
Gopal doesn’t stand on the floor; instead, steel cables hold him up. When he is talking to the camera, his voice can be heard as usual. When he moves around the room, however, the sound of his voice gets softer.
In another scene that will make you gasp, Gopal shows the audience how the room’s door can be opened to cut down on the noise from outside.
Since the door to another room where an engineer is working is open, we can hear very loud heavy metal music coming from there while we work. Once the door is closed, there won’t be any more noise, or “audio art” for metal fans, once the chamber is completely sealed off.
The chamber is a very important part of the process of making new audio technologies.
Gopal explains:
From measuring Xbox’s console fan noise for example, or the components in a surface – some of the components make sounds – very low level – but they are they, we measure them in this clean environment which is the purest form of recording without being interference from the walls or from the outside.
So, we better our products for audio performance. Anything to do with audio where we have microphones, loudspeakers to measure distortion, or for surface products, our consoles – these types of chambers become extremely important for us.
