Inside quietest place on Earth where you can hear your blood pumping and eyes blinking
The quietest place on Earth is so silent you can hear yourself blinking.
The record is held by the anechoic test chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where an ambient sound level of -24.9 dBA (decibels A-weighted) was recorded.
Visitors to the room, which is specially designed to suppress sound, have reported being able to hear blood moving through their veins, hearing their eyelids closing as they blink, and feeling sick and disorientated.
The Orfield Labs room first broke the record in 2004 with a background noise reading of -9.4 dBA.
Did you know? “The Quietest Place on Earth” is the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories Inc. in #Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/Fsk7E2pPW2
— realPRO (@realPROmpls) February 13, 2015
Even lower sound levels of -13 dBA were recorded there in 2012 after some improvements, but the room lost its record for a little while in 2015, when an anechoic chamber at Microsoft Headquarters in Washington, USA, recorded levels of -20.35 dBA.
Orfield Labs took the record back again in 2021 and has held it ever since.
The room supresses 99.99% of sound thanks to its 3.3-foot-thick fibreglass acoustic wedges, as well as the double walls of insulated steel and a foot of concrete.
Company founder, Steven Orfield, told MailOnline: “When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. 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.”
The chamber is used primarily for product testing and research.
An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. This is the difference between bursting a ballon outside and inside a anechoic chamber https://t.co/idYuaOHwzn [full video by dydxlnx: https://t.co/tvGVQbK4wr] pic.twitter.com/xwIpoeHv78
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 17, 2022
The lab has been used by motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson to make their bikes quieter while retaining their signature sound and by washing machine manufacturer Whirlpool to develop metaphors for what sounds should sound like.
Steven explained: “We record products and people listen to them based on semantic terms, like ‘expensive’, ‘low quality’. We measure their feelings and associations.”
He himself once said that after spending 30 minutes inside the chamber, he could hear the mechanical valve inside his heart working very loudly.
Header image: Alamy
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