March 9, 2019
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Inside the quietest room in the world
If you crave peace and quiet, it could be the ultimate destination. Deep within Microsoft’s Redmond campus is the quietest place on the planet – and Dailymail.com was able to step inside.
The record-breaking room is used by the tech giant to do everything from tuning its headphones to making your mouse clicks sound perfect. However, the firm has found is it too quiet for most people - and nobody has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside.
The few outsiders who have entered it have complained of everything from becoming disturbed by the loudness of their own breathing to ringing in the ears and deafening stomach gurgles.
Hundraj Gopal, Microsoft’s principal human factors engineer, and the man who led the team that built the anechoic chamber, told Dailymail.com: ‘Some people come in for a minute and want out immediately. People cannot handle it, it rattles their brains, it is sensory deprivation.’
Gopal said the record for staying in the room, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the quietest on Earth, is short.
‘This is the quietest place on the planet, and the most someone has been able to stay in is 45 minutes. Just the chamber cost us $1.5m, which shows you how serious we are about audio.’
Known as an anechoic chamber, it is a small room measuring 21ft (6.36m) in each direction. It is designed to be as perfectly quiet as possible, to allow engineers to tune audio devices and sound in perfect conditions.
The chamber is within six concrete layers, each up to 12 inches thick, which help to block out sounds from the outside world. The walls, floor and ceiling are covered in giant wedges of fiberglass foam to eradicate any echoes. The chamber floats on 68 vibration damping springs and is mounted on its own separate foundation slab to cut it off from the rest of the building.
Inside the chamber, the floor is made from the same steel cables used to stop fighter jets as they land on aircraft carriers, arranged like a net above the foam wedges underneath.
Gopal said: ‘This chamber blocks 120db, so if you had a jet engine taking off just outside, you would barely hear it. We work with engineers on everything from mouse clicks to the sound your laptop makes when the latch closes, those sounds are very important to us. We obsess over these minutiae other companies ignore. We have seven sound chambers in this building, and over 25 in the company.'
Chris Kujawski, Principal Designer in Microsoft’s Device Team, said the audio chamber was crucial to the firm’s hardware, and it showed ‘the level of craftsmanship and nuance in our products very few people know about.’
Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk
