In Minneapolis Lies The Quietest Room On Earth, And You Can Hear The Sound Of Your Own Blood Pumping Through Your Veins

Libraries are quiet, but this room located in Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis is the quietest room on Earth.

The chamber is echo-less and so eerily noiseless that you can hear the sound of your own body, such as the blinking of your eyes and the blood pumping through your veins.

The room is silent and lacks any audible background noise. The background noise is actually measured in negative decibels.

In 2004, the room was at -9.4 A-weighted decibels (dBA). After improvements were made to the space eight years later, it had a measurement of -13 dBA.

In 2015, a chamber in Redmond, Washington, stole the title of quietest place on Earth when it set a new record at -20.35 dBA.

However, Orfield Laboratories managed to take back its spot with a reading of -24.9 dBA in 2021. While in the room, visitors have reported hearing bodily functions they would never be able to detect anywhere else.

“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt,” Steven Orfield, the founder of Orfield Laboratories, said in 2012. “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.”

The chamber is referred to as “anechoic” because sound waves do not reflect off the walls, preventing echoes from occurring.

The room is designed as a box with steel walls inside a larger box with steel walls. It is located deep inside the laboratory, which has concrete walls about that are a foot thick. Fiberglass wedges in the space absorb all the sound.

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