10 Minutes Inside The Quietest Room On Earth Will Make You Trip Out

Take a moment and think about the quietest room you’ve ever laid down in; the quietest, stillest place you’ve ever been. No matter how peaceful, how serene, there was still some sound: the rush of water in pipes, the hum of electricity in the walls, the breeze gently blowing, insects chirping; the ambient noise of nature, of life.

If you take a 15-minute car ride from downtown Minneapolis, you’ll find a nondescript concrete building with ivy climbing its exterior walls. Orfield Laboratories sits a block away from a bowling alley called Memory Lanes and directly across the street from Skol Liquors. Inside Orfield Laboratories is an anechoic chamber that has been certified by Guinness as the quietest place in the world.

That still bedroom you were in? The ambient noise was probably about 30 dBA, or A-weighted decibels — the relative loudness of sound perceived by the human ear. This is a logarithmic scale, so every 10 dBA, you’re either doubling or halving the loudness or quietness. At zero dBA, the human ear can no longer perceive sound. The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories was certified by Guinness at -9.4 dBA in 2004 and -13 dBA in 2013, both for one hour measurements. But over shorter periods, they’ve conducted tests on the chamber that have given readings of up to between negative 22 and negative 23 dBA.

That’s just in terms of what instruments can read in the room. The human ear has no way of telling that difference in sound (or lack thereof). If a room or chamber is 0 dBA or lower, you won’t hear anything. Nothing at all. The difference between -9.4 dBA and -23 dBA sounds the same to our pitiful flesh-ears. But it made a difference to me. I wanted to be in the quietest room on Earth.

montefisto on December 28th, 2018 at 16:30 UTC »

Just want to point out Microsoft has built a chamber at -20.6 decibels, making it the quietest place on Earth for a few years now. Here's a neat BBC article on it.

Edit: Wanted to add another link from a Microsoft blog. Worth checking out.

to_the_tenth_power on December 28th, 2018 at 14:18 UTC »

Once inside, Orfield told me that it’s been falsely reported numerous times that a record has been set for “the longest time a person can stay in the room.” There is no such record; a person can potentially stay an indefinite period of time in the chamber. But what he has done over the years is insisted that national news outlets experience 45 minutes of perfect silence in the room, in darkness, before he allows them to do a story. Because it’s very important to understand silence before you can really discuss it.

A few minutes in, I shifted slightly, and experienced a sudden revelation: Oh, my shoulder makes a sound when I move it, apparently. I had read that you can hear your own body going about its processes while in the room, and that a human can become disoriented. I experienced both sensations (although interestingly, I was mostly unable to hear myself breathe), and the latter was hardly upsetting … in fact, it was transcendent.

In the last couple of minutes in the chamber before the light came on and the door opened, I began to feel weightless and detached, as though my consciousness was separating from my body. My head began to feel elongated, like a balloon filling with air. I’ve never taken any hallucinogenic drugs, but I believe you would describe the sensations I felt as “mildly tripping balls.” I didn’t see any colors or visions; I didn’t see anything at all, of course. But I felt the perfect stillness and serenity of the room, I heard nothing, I saw nothing, and I began to feel as though I was stretching in all directions; that my being was filling the void.

That's interesting. Whenever I heard about the quietest rooms, they were always accompanied by that fact that "the longest someone could last was 45 minutes." Thank you for adding some clarification to that, OP, along with a great article.

morz-MOR-druh on December 28th, 2018 at 13:34 UTC »

I believe the only thing I would hear would be tinnitus, but it would be amplified to a higher level than anywhere else.