The quietest room in the world is just as eerie as you can imagine, but the way it reacted when a man made the loudest sound was quite surprising.
Who doesn’t love a bit of piece and quiet now and again? Well, this one room might prove a little too much for most people.
The anechoic chamber at South Bank University in London is considered the quietest room in the world, and is designed to minimize any and all sound within it.
YouTuber James Orgill, who runs The Action Lab channel, decided to try out a few experiments in the quietest room and documented them in a video.
In the clip he said: “The walls, floors and ceilings are designed to almost instantly absorb all the sound emitted.
“So there is no reflection of sound at all.”
He also conducted experiments in the loudest room in the world, the reverberation chamber, to help show the contrast between the two.
Popping a balloon in the reverberation chamber made it seem like a gun had gone off, whereas in the anechoic chamber it is almost as quiet as a stone dropping in a body of water.
He decided to up the ante a little and decided to get the ‘world’s loudest whistle’ and blew it in the quietest room.
For context, the whistle can get as loud as 142 decibels, making it louder than a gunshot.
After blowing the whistle in the quietest room, the sound ends abruptly after he has blown it, failing to echo at all.
Scientist Steven Orfield, who designed the chamber, explained why people are recommended to have short stays in the room.
He said: “We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark. 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.”
YouTuber and musician Callux decided to take up the challenge of staying for only 45 minutes and was able set a new world record for spending time inside the chamber at 67 minutes.
After spending just five minutes in the room, he reported feeling disoriented after experiencing an intense wave of tinnitus in both of his ears.
After 15 minutes, he said that he could see lights dancing round him, and after half an hour, he claimed that he could hear his own blood flowing round his body. Eerie stuff.
