Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes - Inside the room it’s so silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels
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Everybody seems to be looking for a little peace and quiet these days. But even such a reasonable idea can go too far. The quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes.
Inside the room it's silent. So silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels, -9.4 dBA. Steven Orfield, the lab's founder, told Hearing Aid Know: “We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes. 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."
A typical quiet bedroom at night measures about 30 decibels; this chamber measures at -9 decibels. It is made of 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges and double walls of insulated steel and foot-thick concrete.
Manufacturers use the lab for product testing and development. Companies like Harley Davidson use the lab to create quieter bikes that still sound like a Harley, for instance. Other products like LED displays are tested to make sure their volume is not too loud. NASA, in fact, uses a similar lab to test its astronauts, given that space is like one giant anechoic chamber, explains Steven Orfield, president of Orfield Labs.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...tes-180948160/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/...-quiet-chamber