A kind of hush all over the place
Anechoic chamber lets you hear your blood flow and your inner ear buzz
MINNEAPOLIS — Inside this small room — lined on all six sides with deep, fiberglass spikes — there is no background noise. No sounds from the street, the vents, the outside world. Only silence. But in that silence, many visitors find their own bodies become quite noisy.
Sitting in this anechoic chamber, they suddenly hear their blood flow, their inner ears buzz, their artificial heart valves click.
“Oh my goodness,” says Rita Dibble, after just four minutes in the chamber alone, “I could actually hear every vertebra. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” “Or heard,” says RickAllen Meek, a lab technician who, on this afternoon, was playing tour guide. “Or not heard,” Dibble replies, grinning. This room, within Orfield Laboratories Inc. in south Minneapolis, is so quiet that it measures negative 13 decibels. So quiet that Guinness World Records called it “the quietest place on Earth.” So quiet that film crews, acoustics nerds and curious kids journey here just to sit inside it.
“This is a room within a room within a room,” says Steve Orfield, 69, the lab’s longtime owner, “which is why it’s so quiet.”
The anechoic chamber — one of several testing spaces within the building — feels small: 8 by 10 by 12 feet. But surrounding that space, on all six sides, are fiberglass wedges, 3 feet deep. The chamber floats on vibration-damping springs. The outermost
room is made of 12-inchthick solid concrete.
For nearly five decades, Orfield has helped companies from 3M to Medtronic understand how people experience the look and sound of their products. Having a quiet room means that Orfield and his team can test quiet things. Heart valves, CPAP machines, cellphones.
But these days, Orfield is more interested in talking about how the room might help people with post-traumatic stress disorder, autism and other hypersensitivities. Those who have sat in the chamber’s silence described how it “reset their brains,” he said. “We think there’s great potential for therapeutic uses.”
Soon after installing the anechoic chamber in the addition to this building Orfield set up $20,000 microphones that could measure up to minus 2.5 decibels.