A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it

Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by SeanLuke on Friday June 01, 2012 @04:43PM (#4055652)

I cannot speak to partial deafness, but I used to work in an anechoic chamber. It is indeed soul-suckingly disturbing after short periods of time. Even a totally "silent" environment has tremendous amounts of reverb and low-level reflected noise: you just filter it out automatically. In an anechoic chamber, this noise is gone, and your filter goes haywire. It starts filtering things that aren't there. You start hearing your own blood vessels in your eardrum, yes, but you also perceive a kind of disturbing anti-noise. It's very hard to describe.

Top it off with the fact that usually such rooms are entirely sealed off and that you're standing or sitting on a big mesh trampoline floating in the center of the room, and it all comes to one seriously creepy experience after about ten minutes.

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by terangdom on Friday June 01, 2012 @04:52PM (#4055706)

How does it compare to using earplugs in a silent room?

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by raverbashing on Friday June 01, 2012 @05:53PM (#4056022)

I must assume it's quite different

Even though some of the sound travels through the facial bone structure (like when you hear your own voice) I guess most sounds come from outside

Also, earplugs add pressure to the ear canal so I guess this muffles somethings

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by silentbicycle on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:35PM (#4056404)

How does it compare to an isolation tank?

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by SeanLuke on Friday June 01, 2012 @10:08PM (#4056734)

In comparison, isolation tanks are extremely noisy.

You got to try an anechoic chamber to believe it. BTW: many universities have one. The one I worked at (BYU, long ago) has this one:

http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/acoustics/facilities.asp...

http://vimeo.com/15855229 (a corny advertisement, but shows the room well)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PGF_cGS8ts

It's a very good facility. Interestingly, I believe the main anechoic chamber used to be an echo chamber!

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by Timst on Saturday June 02, 2012 @06:24AM (#4057721)

Huh, the vimeo one is weird. I'd think we wouldn't be able to hear them talk, let alone move boxes (at around the 1:00 mark).

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by SeanLuke on Saturday June 02, 2012 @09:06AM (#4057980)

Of course you can hear sounds: but you can only hear direct sounds. All reflected sounds are gone. And that's actually a high percentage of the sounds you normally hear.

An anechoic chamber is used to test acoustics in an environment with absolutely no reflection (reverb, echo, etc.).

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by silentbicycle on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:01PM (#4056860)

Thanks!

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by caf on Saturday June 02, 2012 @04:58AM (#4057605)

Nobody tell the State Department - it'll be the new waterboarding.

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Re:A room so quiet, no one can spend more than 45 minutes in it by sidww2 on Saturday June 02, 2012 @10:18AM (#4058103)

Sensory deprivation has already been used as a form of torture by the US. See the case of Jose Padilla for instance.

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