If you ever want to get away from hustle and bustle of this world, and tune into to the inner world of your body — like the sound of your lungs taking in the air, and your heart beating (without a stethoscope that is!) — then book a ticket to Microsoft’s Building 87 in Redmond, Washington.
Quiet becomes an allegory if you were to define the threshold of silence once you’re inside the chamber, which now has the distinction of being the quietest place on Earth as per the Guinness Book of Records. This anechoic chamber currently holds the record for achieving a -20.6 dbA sound level, way ahead of the previous record of -13dbA.
In fact, this is the closest we can get to near emptiness of sound, as per the Brownian motion, which is the sound that is made by the movement of particles in a gas or liquid at -23dB.
Thinking why does Microsoft need a chamber that sits on top of springs and has the potential to knock a human out cold within an hour in the first place ? Well, the tech giant uses this highly complicated chamber to test its hardware such as its Surface tablets, for precise measurements of the sounds generated by the devices.
The lucky few or call them the unlucky few, who get to experience the void inside the room are part of Microsoft’s Audio Lab, which has worked on Surface tablet’s microphones and speakers, and Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana.
The chamber was built for Microsoft by Eckel Industries, which happens to have designed a similar chamber at Steve Orfield’s lab in Minneapolis, also recognized by Guinness as the quietest place on earth.
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