Interesting fact of the day: the quietest place on Earth can drive you crazy. The most peaceful places to relax and find inspiration Queenstown, New Zealand
They say that “silence is golden”, but there is a room in Minnesota in the USA that is so quiet that after a while you will become unbearable there. The room blocks out 99.99 percent of external sounds, and no one has yet been able to endure more than 45 minutes being in it. quiet place in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records is located in South Minneapolis Laboratories Orfield (Orfield Laboratories). To achieve exceptional silence, the room used meter-thick fiberglass acoustic platforms, double walls of insulated steel, and 30cm-thick concrete. 
The company's founder and president, Steven Orfield, said that when it gets so quiet, your hearing starts to adapt.
“The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You begin to hear your heart beat, sometimes your lungs move, or your stomach growls. In an anechoic chamber, you yourself become the sound,” he explained.
Orfield explained that this is very confusing and forces you to sit in one place. We focus on the sounds we hear when we walk. In an anechoic chamber, you don't have any signals that allow you to balance and maneuver. If you're here for half an hour, it's best to stay in your chair. 
This camera is used by many manufacturers to test the volume of their products, such as heart valves, mobile phone display sound, car dashboard switch sound. It is also used to determine the sound quality.
But for a person, such a room can be a severe test. After a few minutes of being in it, you get used to the absence of sounds, starting to pick up fainter sounds. NASA astronauts who are trained by being placed in a tank filled with water in a room experience hallucinations after a while as our bodies try to create sounds out of nothing. 
With the lights off, the longest time a person could endure in this room was 45 minutes. The founder himself could endure only half an hour. According to him, the most distracting person is not noise, but silence.
The proverb says that silence is golden. However, it depends on how you use it. There is a place on our planet that can drive any person crazy with its silence. This is an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratory in Minneapolis (USA).
The Orfield Anechoic Chamber is the quietest place in the world. Find out all the details about this state of the art torture device and sound research tool here.
The word "anechoic" comes from the phrase "without echo". That is, this is a room that does not create an echo, the walls of which do not reflect sound. In addition, the walls of such a chamber are designed in such a way that they do not let in sounds from the outside. Complete isolation.
Thus, an anechoic chamber is acoustically isolated from appearance space. And the quietest anechoic chamber is the one at the Orfield Laboratory. According to the Guinness Book of Records, this is the quietest place in the world.
Orfield Anechoic Chamber Facts
- Orfila's anechoic chamber is the quietest place in the world. USA, Minneapolis.
- The camera absorbs 99.9% of sounds.
- A person can stay in an anechoic chamber for about 20 minutes. Stephen Orfield was able to stay there for half an hour. The record is 45 minutes.
- Staying in such a quiet room for a long time causes discomfort, confusion, and auditory hallucinations.
- The Orfield chamber is used to test the noise emission of computer, medical and other equipment, as well as to evaluate the sound quality.
The quietest place in the world
Orfield Laboratories, which houses the world's quietest anechoic chamber, is located in Minneapolis, USA. According to developer Stephen Orfield, the camera absorbs 99.9% of all sound.
Perfect silence in the room is achieved through the use of sound-absorbing panels, as well as 30 cm walls of steel and concrete. As a result, no sound comes from outside. There are no objects inside that could make sounds. Orfield's anechoic chamber is hidden behind two sturdy soundproof doors.
The quietest place in the world is crazy. The rumble of the closing door is the last sound that a person visiting the cell will hear. After a few minutes, the hearing begins to adapt to perfect silence, and the brain catches the beating of its own heart, the sound of blood flow, the rumbling of the stomach and other body sounds that are normally inaudible.
A person who is accustomed to mostly navigate in space by the surrounding sound begins to feel uncomfortable. After about 20 minutes, the brain begins to make sounds, and auditory hallucinations appear. Imagine, because there is still no light in the room, since the lighting fixtures inside can become an additional source of sound. Over time, moving around in such a room and navigating it becomes impossible.
The creator of the camera, Stephen Orfield, was able to stay in his super quiet room for half an hour and still hasn't broken his own record. The absolute record is 45 minutes of being in total silence.
Imagine you are sitting in a room all alone. Your household is asleep, the TV and computer are off, and there is not a single car on the deserted streets. There seems to be 100% silence around. But this is not so: electrical appliances connected to power sources (primarily a refrigerator), fish in an aquarium and the building itself emit crackling and noise. And even your breathing is about 10 dB (if anyone forgot, the noise is measured in decibels). Now imagine: in the USA there is a special room in which the noise level reaches -20 dB. We talk about it and about other quietest places on our planet.
Anechoic chamber, Minnesota (USA)
The first object to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as "the quietest place on Earth" was a unique anechoic room developed in the laboratory of Orfield, Minnesota. According to the company, tests showed a background noise level of -9.4 dB - a development about 16 times quieter than a bedroom. This miracle of the scientific world was built from drywall, laid in 5 layers, and other materials with an absorbent capacity of 99.5%. The anechoic chamber is literally suspended in an armored safe room that blocks electromagnetic radiation in both directions. It’s just that spending time in a room is still a pleasure: the reigning silence fills your ears, and you can hear how your joints creak.
Washington (USA)
New record holder is an anechoic chamber located in the state of Washington. The noise level in the room is -20.3 dB - you can hear the movement of air particles here. Like the Minnesota cell, the room is built of soundproof materials, with oddly shaped walls and floors. Microsoft uses it to test new technologies where sound quality is paramount.
The North American Mojave Desert does not differ in size, but in its heart are the dunes of Kelso, whose height in some places reaches 200 meters. It is forbidden to drive up to them on cars, planes do not fly over them, and the cries of birds rarely break the silence - in this place, which inspired fear in the Indian tribes, the singing of the sands is heard. The dunes move non-stop under the influence of the wind, changing their shape and emitting a low-frequency rumble, which is compared either with the crackling of wires, or with a drum roll. A unique acoustic effect is created by sand particles rubbing against each other, but scientists have not been able to establish why some deserts remain "dumb" while others are endowed with voices.
Negev Desert (Israel)
Describing their impressions of traveling through the Promised Land, tourists and pilgrims note that the Negev is perfect place for meditation: as soon as you move away from the road, you will plunge into the world of ringing silence, interrupted only by the rare voices of pilgrims. And this despite the fact that on the territory of the dried-up desert, which occupies more than half, the Bedouin settlements have survived (the government only 7 years ago took care of the issue of their status), as well as Ben-Gurion University, opened specifically for the development of the Negev.
Haleakala Crater (USA)
On the Hawaiian island Maui is located national park Haleakala, whose main star is the inactive volcano of the same name, towering 3055 meters. The crater of the shield volcano, which the locals call only the "House of the Sun", is popular among tourists. From here they like to watch the sunrise (which is very symbolic), and at the same time the flora and fauna, which have no analogues in the whole world. The main thing is that you can do all this in absolute silence: according to the US National Park Service, the noise level inside the crateris only 10 dB (that is, approximately the same as with even breathing).
Hoh Rainforest (USA)
Hoh Rainforest Recognizedone of the wonders of Washington State , - part national park Olympic, included back in 1981. According to the US National Park Service, the absolute silence in the protected area is created by lush coniferous and deciduous trees, as well asnumerous ferns and mosses that play the role of noise insulators . But things might have been different without human intervention: 11 years ago, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hampton started the One Square Inch of Silence project to keep the rain forest quiet. He planted a small red stone among the trees and persuaded three airlines to change their routes, bypassing the “inch of silence” so that people could listen to nature, not the noise of engines.
Grand Canyon National Park (USA)
The American Grand Canyon is filled with tourists: it is visited every year
They say "silence is golden" but there is a room in Minnesota
in the USA, which is so quiet that after a while you will be there
just unbearable. The room blocks out 99.99 percent of outside sounds, and
no one has yet been able to endure more than 45 minutes being in it.
The quietest place in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records is located in the South
Minneapolis at Orfield Laboratories. To attain
exceptional silence, the room used fiberglass acoustic
meter thick platforms, double walls of insulated steel and concrete
30 cm thick.
The founder of the company and its president Steven Orfield (Steven Orfield) said,
that when it gets so quiet, your hearing starts to adapt.
“The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You start to hear
how your heart beats, sometimes how your lungs move, or how it grumbles
your stomach. In an anechoic chamber, you yourself become the sound,” he explained.
Orfield explained that it is very confusing and makes you sit
at one place. We focus on the sounds we hear when we walk.
In an anechoic chamber, you don't have any signals that let you
balance and maneuver. If you're here for half an hour,
it is better to stay on the chair.
This chamber is used by many manufacturers for loudness testing.
its products such as heart valves, mobile phone display sound,
the sound of a switch on a car dashboard. It is also used for
definition of sound quality.
But for a person, such a room can be a severe test. In a few
minutes of being in it, you get used to the absence of sounds, starting to catch
ever weaker sounds. In severe cases, this shutdown of the senses
can exhaust you. NASA astronauts who are trained by being placed in a tank,
filled with water, in a room, after a while they begin to experience
hallucinations, as our body tries to create sounds out of nothing.
With the lights off, the longest time I could stand
person in this room, was 45 minutes. The founder himself could bear only
half an hour. According to him, the most distracting person is not noise, but silence.
They say that silence and stillness are worth their weight in gold. However, staying in the quietest room on the planet becomes unbearable in a very short time.
The record for being in an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratory, in southern Minneapolis, Minnesota, is 45 minutes.
The room, which absorbs 99.99% of all sounds, occupies the first line in the Guinness Book of Records, but staying in it for too long can cause hallucinations in a person.
Steven Orfield
The founder and president of the company, Steve Orfield, in his interview with MailOnline urges people to stay in this room in complete darkness. He considers this experience very important, although scary. There are already precedents: one reporter lasted only 45 minutes there - although this meager time was a record.
“Of course, the ears will adapt to such silence. But the quieter the room, the more sounds you hear: for example, your heartbeat, the movement of your lungs, and the seemingly very loud rumbling of your stomach. In an anechoic room, you yourself become the sound,” he said.
In an anechoic room, you yourself become the sound
In a "quiet room" it's best not to move at all, Orfield advises: "You focus on the sound as you walk. In an anechoic chamber, you don't have any signals. The perception of signals that allow you to balance and maneuver disappears. So it’s better to just sit in a chair.”
Steven Orfield
The silent camera is used by companies all over America. NASA, for example, tests astronauts in it to see how soon hallucinations come.
As Orfield explained, space is one big, anechoic chamber, so it's important to make sure astronauts can stay focused and productive in those conditions.
It is also used for official sound testing by many manufacturers to measure the volume level of their product. It can be the sound of a mobile phone or a car dashboard switch, or the sound of a heart valve.
