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The Quietest Place on Earth (bbc.com)
42 points by adammichaelc on Dec 1, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 43 comments



I can't confirm that these are the same, because I can't access this site. However, I suspect that this is the same as has been reported from many source, and submitted many times. For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3798283 The World's Quietest Room: Nobody Has Lasted More Than 45 Minutes In It (dailymail.co.uk)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781040 The Quietest Room in the World (tcbmag.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783478 The quietest room in the world (tcbmag.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802268 Quietest place on earth messes with the head. (yahoo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821238 The quietest place on earth (neatorama.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053296 A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it (timesherald.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219266 This Is The Quietest Place On Earth (bitrebels.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4565325 World’s Quietest Place Lets You Hear Your Internal Organs (odditycentral.com)


> However, I suspect that this is the same as has been reported from many source, and submitted many times

Your suspicion was correct. And it might just be technically wrong anyway as salford states its anechoic chamber is even quieter.


Any idea as to how much does it take to build such a chamber (with decibels in minus)?


I wonder if an isolation tanks decibels are in the minus? You can build one yourself for a few thousand dollars.


  "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a
   quiet room alone."

  - Blaise Pascal


Why would Companies use a chamber with a background noise of -9.4 dB to "to test the sound levels of products, such as washing machines, refrigerators and Harley Davidson motorcycles."

I would think any half decent noise chamber would do the job.


I would guess management wants the prestige of using the best facility possible, and the engineers wanted a chance to use the room.


Oh wow, and here I was thinking it would be a tie between the Google and Facebook customer service centers.


there is a chamber like this at my local university that I have been in a couple of times. its very strange to talk or hear others talk. your voice just feels weak. even when you yell the sound just stops... yet, ears seem to adjust the percieved loudness of things relative to the background, and in a chamber like this you ask your ears to divide by zero, and sometimes it feels like even the silence is louder than anything you have ever heard.


http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130607104502/http://www.bbc...


I am guessing someone who is deaf could win at the challenge.

I have spent time in Anechoic chambers for doing noise level and vibration testing on equipment. They are disconcerting for sure, but I have to imagine someone who never hears anything would not be disoriented.

The shape of the walls messes with me I think more than the sound. We aren't used to not having flat surfaces to judge distance against and not having anything that is only "one" distance away definitely works the part of the brain that does depth perception.


As per Wikipedia [0], The Acoustics Department at University of Salford has a number of Anechoic chambers, of which one is unofficially the quietest in the world with a measurement of −12.4 dBA.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber


I propose a vacuum chamber as a better candidate for the title of the quietest place on earth.


Can someone summarise? Once again, as a Brit I'm unable to access content from BBC.com.

Thanks :-)


Some choice quotes that sum it up nicely:

"The anechoic (meaning echo-free) chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records."

"While a human can normally hear sounds as low as zero decibels (an average conversation runs at about 30 decibels), the background noise in the anechoic chamber has been measured at -9.4 decibels."

"Companies use the chamber to test the sound levels of products, such as washing machines, refrigerators and Harley Davidson motorcycles. NASA uses a similar chamber to perform stress tests on astronauts."


Thanks guys.

Still baffled as to why the beeb IP restrict this. I can acknowledge it's part of BBC Worldwide, and therefore not covered in the licence fee, but what harm it would do to let Britain have the same access as the rest of the non licence paying world is beyond me.


from the BBC faq:

We have an unusual requirement when it comes to developing the BBC website - it carries advertising internationally but not in the UK, and we have to build and design for both these situations simultaneously. The site carries advertising internationally so that UK licence fee payers don't cover international costs. Some content on the site is available in the UK but not internationally - notably certain rights restricted video. Up to now we have had: A UK edition without ads, A UK edition with ads, an international edition with ads and an international edition without ads, all in addition to some content which is visible in the UK but not internationally. Managing all those combinations within our existing design framework had become impractical as well as expensive and, critically, had started to affect our ability to find the best ways of developing the site in the future.

via http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/website_changes

There's more info there about how they do it (GeoIP) and some known issues.


Interesting, thanks. It's still incredibly annoying. If you can block me based on my IP, just use the same technology and don't serve me the ads.


Thanks, I was in that same position—but after all, why would I be able to view British Broadcasting Corporation content from Britain.


This has been submitted several times already to HN, with more detailed articles. (A question, how do you dudes find these duplicates?)

tl;dr is that there exists a chamber so quiet that people find it extremely uncomfortable (for various reasons, feel free to speculate), at Orfield Labs. It works simply by reducing echo (anechoic chamber). There will be an award for anyone standing in there for more than 45 minutes. And it's in Guinness Book of Records as the most quiet place on earth.


dateline > 23 October 2012


"The anechoic (meaning echo-free) chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records." - followed by fluff and tour information.

What is the deal with BBC.com anyway?


I'd love to explain it but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Some kind of law saying that the BBC can't make profit from us in the UK, because they are funded instead by the TV licence fee[0]: we pay the government/BBC about US$250 per year to be allowed to watch television broadcast by anyone, BBC or otherwise.

The message we get when visiting this URL:

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.

"If you are looking for travel news in the UK, please visit the Travel News site."

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...


I wonder why they don't just mirror the content on the uk site without the ads.


Politics, eh.

I also wonder why Brits have to pay the BBC over $200/yr even if they only want to watch ITV (or any other channel, all funded by advertising)


The same reason you have to pay for public schools even if you do not have children.


Hm, that's interesting. I'm in the UK, and I can access bbc.com without any issues. I'm using StudentCom, though.


http://web.archive.org/web/20130607104502/http://www.bbc.com...


Beyond hearing your own heartbeat after a while, an ultimate psycho-acoustic experiment: hearing air molecules hit your eardrums.

Taken from Master Handbook of Acoustics 5th edition (page 39-40): The human ear cannot detect sounds softer than the motion of air particles on the eardrum. This is the threshold of hearing. There would be no reason to have ears more sensitive, because any lower-level sound would be drowned by the air-particle noise. This means that the ultimate sensitivity of our hearing just matches the softest sounds possible in an air medium.


There must be a subtle detail I'm missing. Isn't "air molecules hitting our eardrums" essentially hearing?


Probably softer than the motion of air particles on the eardrum means the lowest-level brownian motion of air molecules in the absence of sound.


Wait, is the 45 minute thing true?

Is there any way I can volunteer for an attempt?


From http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20121022-the-quietest-place-o... :

"Group tours of the labs are available a few times a year and include a brief stop at the anechoic chamber (call the lab for details). But the facility has had so much interest in the 45-minute challenge that the founder Steven Orfield is considering making that option available to the public within the next year, and is working with the Guinness Book of World Records to establish an official record for the longest time spent in an anechoic chamber."


I'd be interested to see what some meditating monks could do.

(Thanks for the quote. I'm in the UK and the page is, frustratingly, blocked to us.)


Probably not true.


We have exactly the same room in our Physisc Department, in Poznan, Poland. We call it "noecho room". http://www.ia.amu.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=a... Greeting from PL! (:


I'm envious of those who could hear their own heart beat. I suffer from tinnitus, and when things get quiet all I hear is a thin high pitched ringing noise.


I don't understand the challenge part. Why don't people with bad hearing go nuts in normal quiet rooms if not hearing anything is so challenging?


I think the problem is that you can hear yourself think, so to speak.


>won't come cheap

>$300-$400/hour

That doesn't sound too bad actually, I expected an order of magnitude more.


"-9.4 decibels"

erm, decibel what exactly? Decibel is a ratio between two values. If you don't state the one compared with, you're talking pretty much nonsense.


Not sure who downvoted you, as you correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel

Possible units (dropped by the article):

  dB SPL
  dB SIL
  dB SWL
  dB(A), dB(B), and dB(C)
  dB HL
  dB HL


Yeah should have included the link maybe. Possibly also lots of people don't know any better since 90% or more of the time the media reports about audio levels it's always plain 'decibel'. Even though that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like saying 'and now drive 1' without specifying a unit. Yet, I would have expected more from the average HN user with anough karma to downvote.




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