Nice article describing how disorienting it can be when you are in such a place. It has a negative decibel background!
I described a similar experience in message #5 in this post. Although not the same degree of quiet it was still disorienting:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=859301&highlight=chamber
A place where I could hear nothing but my deafening tinnitus.
I’d pay a lot to spend some time in a room where I really could hear nothing.
Yea, I have seen that chamber (and others) talked about before. I just don’t see how being super quiet is that special from a human experience.
If I:
It is so quiet, that my ears can literally hear absolutely nothing coming from outside my body. Maybe a sensitive microphone could easily tell that my basement is much louder than that chamber, but if my human ears hear nothing different, what is the difference to me?
Yes!!
At my first job, the company had a couple anechoic chambers and I needed to work in one for a time. I was warned about losing my balance, getting dizzy. I was pretty skeptical and was more just intrigued by the experience. But the more I worked in there, the more I noticed the effects - mostly the loss of balance.
There is something about the lack of reflected sound that messes you up. Like your basement situation, I’ve also been in caves way deep and isolated and not experienced the same phenomenon (no issues with loss of balance). But your brain is able to utilize very subtle (almost inaudible) “cues” to help orient you. Removing those does have an effect.
I’ve worked in anechoic chambers used for RF & microwave testing. While they’re not designed to be “quiet rooms” for sound waves, they seem to be good at absorbing them. It’s a bit weird when you talk in them… it’s hard to hear yourself.
From the article:
“Veritasium” stayed in an anechoic chamber for almost an hour. No ill effects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI
Thank you! I was trying to remember who it was that tested this claim.
I have worked in a smaller less efficient anechoic chamber. I thing ours went down to less than 5 dB. The lack of reflections, noise, and any background sound is very disorienting. You don’t realize how much noise a building’s HVAC makes until it it gone.
Regular old everyday HVAC-going-out silence has on occasion caused nearly everyone in my office to wonder out loud, “What happened?” I can’t imagine what it would be like to not hear anything else either.
(Our workroom is, I believe, directly below some critical element of our building’s HVAC, which tends to run nonstop. But every so often, it will switch off, possibly because they’re doing maintenance, and it’s wildly eerie.)
And yet I’m convinced I’d *still *hear my wife yakkin’ about some story she heard on NPR.
I got to play in anechoic chammbers one summer when I guinea pigged for the US Navy’s sound lab, I was listening for sounds embedded in white and pink noise [to refine how their sonar girls hear the product of sonar sensors] It was interesting, and very relaxing, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Dim lighting, comfortable temperature, comfortable chair … and getting paid =)
I always thought the quietest place–outside of an anechoic chamber–was in WA state’s Olympic Peninsula.