• We all crave it, but can you stand the silence? The longest anyone can bear Earth's quietest place i
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[quote] They say silence is golden – but there’s a room in the U.S that’s so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time. The longest that anyone has survived in the ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes. It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating. [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/03/article-2124581-1274105D000005DC-638_634x421.jpg[/img] Earth's quietest place: The 'anechoic chamber' at Orfield Laboratories, which is 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and capable of giving you hallucinations [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/04/article-2124581-1274347D000005DC-212_306x494.jpg[/img] The Anechoic Test Chamber at Orfield Laboratories was deemed the quietest place on Earth in 2004 - a record it still holds to this day It achieves its ultra-quietness by virtue of 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, double walls of insulated steel and foot-thick concrete. The company’s founder and president, Steven Orfield, told MailOnline: ‘We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark - one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes. ‘When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. ‘In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.’ And this is a very disorientating experience. Mr Orfield explained that it’s so disconcerting that sitting down is a must. He said: ‘How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don't have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you're in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.’ The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, which test how loud their products are. Mr Orfield said: ‘It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things - heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard.’ [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/03/article-2124581-12741063000005DC-979_634x699.jpg[/img] Silence is not so golden: The longest anyone has lasted sitting alone in the dark in the chamber is 45 minutes It’s also put to use to determine sound quality. Mr Orfield and his team will help companies such as washing-machine maker Whirlpool develop metaphors for what sound should, well, sound like. Motorbike maker Harley-Davidson used the lab, for instance, to make their bikes quieter, while still sounding like Harley-Davidsons. ‘We record products and people listen to them based on semantic terms, like “expensive”, “low quality”, said Mr Orfield. ‘We measure their feelings and associations.’ Nasa, meanwhile, uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts. They are put in a water-filled tank inside the room to see ‘how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it’. As Mr Orfield explains, space is like one giant anechoic chamber, so it’s crucial that astronauts are able to stay focussed. Mr Orfield admits that he can last a very respectable 30 minutes in his chamber, despite having an off-putting mechanical heart valve that suddenly becomes very loud indeed once he's inside. [/quote] Read more: [url]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2124581/The-worlds-quietest-place-chamber-Orfield-Laboratories.html#ixzz1rFY7lK9t[/url] I'm pretty sure that the CIA use em.
I would love to visit this place
[QUOTE]‘We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark - one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes.[/QUOTE] Fuck that.
Sometimes when it's really quiet I start hearing ringing noises in my ears, I can totally imagine sitting in a completely silent place would fuck you up after a while.
I probably hallucinate noises and shit.
I imagine you start hallucinating since your brain wants to know if everything is alright and gives your eyes signals to test if you're awake/okay.
Sounds like fun.
It's one of those things that turns from interesting to awful in a very short time.
[QUOTE=soad_jonas;35452201]Sometimes when it's really quiet I start hearing ringing noises in my ears, I can totally imagine sitting in a completely silent place would fuck you up after a while.[/QUOTE]That's called [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus]Tinnitus[/url]. [editline]6th April 2012[/editline] [quote]It achieves its ultra-quietness by virtue of 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges[/quote] You're British, say meter.
I want to try it out. It sounds like one hell of an experience.
Think of breaking the record for 2 hours. Then it goes for 5 hours. They finally decide to go in, just to see your dead body, eyes and ears bleeding, white cold skin.
This plays on sensory deprivation doesn't it? Also, jokes on them! I have Tinnitus.
I bet I could beat that record, I love the silence
I [I]think[/I] I could take it. I mean I'd have nothing to do and all but I'm used to quiet. Where I live it's so quiet I can hear a relatively quiet clock tick in the floor below me, if no one else is home. If it's in the middle of winter there's typically no animal life around, and I live in the middle of nowhere. The house itself is quite sound proof to isolate against the cold, and the snow does that same job. So it can get [I]really[/I] quiet here. You can pretty much hear all the lamps in the house buzz, not like flourecents which are obvious, but a really quiet buzz. But most of the time the only thing I hear is me. Heart beats and all of that.
I like the Fence Floor more dark and the walls all Red and Rusted Metal like
I want to go to there.
I'd want to try it at least once. It has to be extremely strange though, hearing nothing but the sounds of your body
Thy wouldn't even hear you cry.
[QUOTE=Doctor Zedacon;35452247]That's called [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus]Tinnitus[/url]. [/QUOTE] That ringing noise happened when I went up to a really tall building in a fast elevator. Is it the same?
[quote]'Sitting' 'Dark Chamber'[/quote] Well no wonder, that's more people going stir-crazy. Give them a book or something. People who crave silence typically want it to be able to do something that's easily disrupted by sound. Few people want silence for the sake of itself. That's not so much silence than claustrophobia.
I would love to experience such thing.
I would like to try it out myself, but why does it have to be in the dark? That's going to be disorienting as fuck after a while.
Damn, imagine how loud evrything would be like when you leave the room.
"Okay sir, it's been 30 minutes, can you hear anything?" "I CAN HEAR MY HAIR GROWING" [editline]6th April 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=sami-pso;35452472]I would like to try it out myself, but why does it have to be in the dark? That's going to be disorienting as fuck after a while.[/QUOTE] Because you'd be able to hear the lights You could probably have a glowstick
For a loner like me, that doesn't seem much like a problem.
The thing about this room is that it doesn't even have the ultra low frequency sounds. Usually you can't hear them anyway but your body notices. Like from cars, trains or work in town. I had a lecture about them in university, we could show soundwaves coming from the trainstation 2 km away from us.
Imagine they make one of polished chrome metal, and they interrogate you, and everytime they are pissed they take a knife and scrap the surface. THE HORROR.
[QUOTE=shian;35452513]Imagine they make one of polished chrome metal, and they interrogate you, and everytime they are pissed they take a knife and scrap the surface. THE HORROR.[/QUOTE] Nails on a chalkboard
I hate silence. Sometimes when it's very silent at night I hear faint ringing in my ears.
So no one goes in there and tries to sleep past the record?
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