Featured Image Credit: Transcendental Media/YouTube
How well would you survive in a room that's so quiet, the silence is practically deafening?
If you're tempted to try it out, head to a specific chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Orfield Laboratories describes itself as a 'multi-sensory design research laboratory', and it's home to an 'anechoic chamber' - which is designed to stop reflections of sound waves, meaning it's as quiet as you can get.
It's got the Guinness World Record to prove it, and was named the quietest place on Earth back in 2021.
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According to Guinness: 'In tests conducted on 19 November 2021, the ambient sound level inside the room was measured at -24.9 decibels.'
It's built very specifically to reduce any noise reverberations inside. Guinness notes that it's a masonry and concrete chamber lined with 10.5-cm-thick steel plates, with a smaller steel chamber inside, supported by vibration absorbing springs.
All this, and there's also a layer of heavy insulation - glass-fibre wedges that extend 85cm into the room.
This means the room isn't actually very big, and if you go in you need to stand on a suspended mesh over these wedges.
If you did want to try it out for yourself, it's not cheap - an hour inside the chamber will set you back $400, which is currently reduced from $600.
Or you could just watch a YouTuber give it a go instead. Back in 2021, American creator Ryan Trahan headed to Orfield Laboratories, where he tried two of the rooms there.
The first was built from reflective metal surfaces, meaning it was incredibly echoey and loud, and then he headed into the complete opposite: the anechoic chamber, which is 99.99% absorbent of sound.
Trahan swiftly realized that being in a room entirely devoid of sound is a rather unsettling experience. While we're all used to hearing at least some amount of noise in our day-to-day lives, Trahan found in the anechoic chamber his senses were heightened, and he could even clearly hear the noises of his body.
"The silence is loud, like I feel like I'm screaming right now," he filmed himself saying in the YouTube video, which has clocked up 24m views since it was posted.
According to Trahan, the previous record for time spent in the room was 41 minutes - and he smashed through that by lasting a full hour. Even more strangely, he completely lost track of time in there, and thought he'd been in the room for around 27 minutes when he'd actually reached the full 60.
