The Quietest Room in the World
The total absence of sound outside your body makes you keenly aware of what’s going on inside your body. Your heart pumps. Your lungs inflate and deflate. Your ears buzz. Your blood pulses. In an anechoic chamber, you are one noisy organism. With no reverberation in the room, you have no spatial orientation cues. After about half an hour in the dark, you can become disoriented. Eventually, you might experience visual and aural hallucinations.
The anechoic chamber doesn’t exist as a kind of engineering curiosity. The researchers at Orfield Labs use it to test products such as hearing aids, automotive parts, heart valves, hard drives, and sleep-apnea machines.
