What Does It Feel Like To Be In The Quietest (and darkest) Place on Earth?

In that extremely quiet room, there would probably be around 30dBA of ambient noise. This measurement refers to A-weighted decibels, or the relative volume that is heard by most people. Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, and for every 10dBA of sound, the volume is halved or doubled. When there is 0dBA, the human ear cannot perceive sound.

Chamber of Silence

In the American city of Minneapolis, there is a concrete structure known as Orfield Laboratories which contains a room that has been certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the most silent place on this planet. It is an anechoic chamber, which is a room which has been designed to absorb all electromagnetic or sound waves, and sound is blocked from entering. This noise control results in a room where a person inside hears only direct, or reverberant, sound. In a chamber of this type, sound will move away from its source, and almost none of it will be reflected back.

Guinness measured the sounds levels at the Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber and found it to be -13dBA over 30 minutes in 2013. Over shorter periods, the sound level has decreased up to –23dBA.
Once a room hits 0dBA, a human being can no longer tell if the room is quieter, as they won’t hear anything, and the difference between -9dBA and -23dBA is irrelevant. However, for one curious aural adventurer, this disparity did make a difference.

Stillness in a Noisy World

Someone with an incredibly active mind can become slightly obsessed with the idea of complete stillness and a perfectly silent environment. If you are the type whose mind is hard to quiet on going to bed, who requires audio stimulation more or less constantly or gets a song stuck in their brain that plays over and over again, then total silence might seem attractive.

Being inside that chamber is almost complete sensory deprivation, as it is dark as well as silent. It is probably the closest experience to an environment of nothing that is possible. You can hear yourself talk, but with no echo. It is tranquil and quiet, and while your body may make some sound if you move, you may not hear yourself breathing either. After about ten minutes in the chamber, you could feel detached and weightless and that your body was stretching out in every direction in order to fill up the surrounding void. It might even seem hallucinatory.

While sound will return on leaving the chamber, the memory can live on as a place of perfect quiet in the mind.

The chamber has practical uses too. It has been used as a recording studio and for conducting vital research. Developing technology to combat noise can help those sensitive to sound, such as the elderly, autistic people and sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Unlike its competitors, the HomePod is an omnidirectional device. That means there’s an array of speakers placed around the cylindrical shape that are designed to pick up noise from anywhere. But that innovation also meant that the HomePod had to undergo special acoustic testing to make sure that it would function and sound great, whatever the environment.

Gary Geaves, who serves as Apple’s senior director in audio design and engineering, knew that meant using an anechoic chamber, which is the standard tool for loudspeaker development. In addition, it was the perfect place to test how well the omnidirectional design would stand up. After all, Apple weren’t just interested in seeing how the HomePod performed in one direction but in all possible directions. Apple were then able to take the HomePod into the real world, gathering test data from employees’ houses to improve Siri’s algorithms for flawless performance, even when loud music is playing. The HomePod is the latest example of Apple’s almost obsessive pursuit of perfection.