Searching for peace? There is a place truly meant for you. To escape the clickety-clack sound of heels, tap-tap of keyboards, and the chitter-chatter of your colleagues, you always look for a serene destination. It’s Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington – Building 87! Let’s take you inside this anechoic chamber that happens to be the world’s quietest place!
Taking a tour
Building 87 is an echo-free chamber that resonates the message loud and clear “RIP sound.” As you enter the space, the daunting silence in the room will drive you CRAZY. It’s definitely not the place where you wish to go because it’s so quiet that noise is even measured in negative decibels.
This Microsoft Research Lab holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place as it measures sounds as low as -20.35 dBA (decibels A-weighted), far below the human threshold of hearing (i.e. 0 dB). All you can listen to are physiological sounds like blood rushing in your ears or your head-turning or your breath or your eyes squelching.
Interesting facts about Building 87
You would be surprised to know that Building 87 took almost two years to be constructed! It offers an overwhelming sensory experience. Here are some facts that you might find interesting!
- It was built with a purpose to ensure an acoustically controlled environment. The chamber is for making scientific and engineering measurements for design, development and testing of audio technologies in Microsoft products.
- Even if you wish to visit the place as a tourist, you can’t! The building is not open for public visits.
- The chamber provides an optimal environment for audio testing and is based on Brownian motion (movement of particles in gas or liquid). To go further, the next step would be vacuum, a space with a complete absence of sound.
- Since it does not experiment on how long humans can stay in the chamber, Microsoft has not tested how people react to the silence.
The second-quietest place – Orfield Laboratories
Before Building 87, the record of the world’s quietest place was previously held by Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. What’s even more interesting is that the place is publicly accessible. It has a dBA of -13, and the longest a person has stayed inside the chamber is only an hour.
In fact, Steven Orfield, the lab’s founder, challenged people to sit inside the pitch-dark room amidst utter silence with hardly any sound – except your heartbeat, or your stomach gurgling. Only one person could stay in there for 45 minutes. Now, people are warned before entering the chamber alone without a supervisor.
Remember the film “A Quiet Place”, in which a family struggles to survive in a world where all humans are killed by noise-sensitive creatures? The movie depicts a dystopian world where the only family left was communicating in sign language, and THERE WAS NO SOUND ANYWHERE. Similarly, the experience of these places with ‘too much silence’ would leave you disoriented.
