Could You Survive the Quietest Place on Earth Where You Become the Sound?

Imagine a place so quiet that you become the sound. The quietness exceeds the thresholds of human hearing at this place. You can hear the sounds of bones crushing and blood pumping through your veins. You feel your chest move every time your heart beats and your lungs hiss. It’s so quiet, you become the sound. Experts say humans can survive less than an hour inside the room. Welcome to Microsoft’s Building 87, a three-room anechoic chamber named by Guinness World Records in 2012 as the “Quietest Place on Earth”

The Room Where Sound Goes to Die

Building 87, located in Redmond, Washington, was built by engineers to test Microsoft’s new equipment. It measures -20.35 decibels, 20 decibels below the human threshold of hearing. The anechoic chamber was meticulously built using wedge-shaped sound-absorbing materials incapable of producing echos. It has absorption levels of 99.9999%.

Microsoft touts Building 87 as “the room where sound goes to die.”

To give you a better idea of just how quiet it is inside Building 87, random air particles in space measure -23 dBa in Brownian noise. There is no quieter sound on earth.

Calm breathing measures 10dBa to give you more inclination of how quiet it is inside of Building 87.

We cannot experience or comprehend this level of quietness in the real world. We always have some sort of sound around us, thus there is pressure on the ear drums. Inside the Microsoft anechoic room, the ear pressure is gone and so are the sound reflections.

What Happens to the Body in an Anechoic Chamber?

The total silence inside Building 87’s anechoic chambers makes it nearly impossible to stay in the room for extended periods. The silence becomes an unbearable ringing inside your ears while the lack of reverberation impairs your spatial awareness, leading to loss of balance and possible hallucinations. Movement becomes difficult, if not impossible. All outside sounds are eliminated, making even the sound of clapping eerie.

Sitting down is the only way to stay inside the room for an hour or longer. Every person is unique, and some people can stay inside the room longer than others.

The longest anyone has managed to stay inside the chamber to date is 55 minutes, according to Hundraj Gopal, a speech and hearing scientist and the principal designer of the anechoic chamber at Microsoft.

“As soon as one enters the room, one immediately feels a strange and unique sensation which is hard to describe,” Gopal said in an email.

“Most people find the absence of sound deafening, feel a sense of fullness in the ears, or some ringing. Very faint sounds become clearly audible because the ambient noise is exceptionally low. When you turn your head, you can hear that motion. You can hear yourself breathing and it sounds somewhat loud,” he said.

Visiting Building 87

If you’re curious by nature, experiencing the deafening sounds inside Building 87’s anechoic chamber could be of interest. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not opened the building to the public.

All hope is not lost, however. Orfield Laboratories has a similar anechoic chamber open to the public if you’re willing to cough up an exorbitant amount of cash for a short experience.

What is Orfield Laboratories?

Like Building 87, Orfield Labs uses its anechoic chambers to test sound equipment. Both Whirlpool and Harley-Davidson use the chambers to test the sounds of their products. NASA even sent astronauts to the chambers to help them adjust before departing into space.

Orfield Laboratories held the title of ‘world’s quietest place’ until 2015 when Microsoft developed Building 87.

When Orfield Labs entered the GWR in 2004, their anechoic chambers registered -9.64 dBa. Inside this chamber, sounds are muffled, and psychological effects can occur. It’s described as a feeling similar to that when your ears need to pop on an airplane.

Visiting Orfield Labs costs $200 for a 20-minute experience. There is a two-person, $400 minimum. Tours must be scheduled weeks in advance.

Or, test your skills inside the anechoic chamber in the Orfield Challenge. The current record to break is two hours. An alternative to the 20-minute tour, the Orfield Challenge allows you to stay inside the chamber as long as your body allows, and potentially break a record.

Steven Orfield, the chamber’s creator, said:

“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.”