NEW YORK (Web Desk) – Microsoft has created the quietest room on the planet.
No, really — the company just won the Guinness World Record for it
So how do you make a super-silent room, and why bother?
Step inside to find out…
Microsoft built its “an echoic chambers” in its hardware lab, Building 87, on its campus in Redmond, Washington.
Anechoic means “echo-free.” The company actually has three chambers, each designed to completely absorb sound.
Microsoft’s Audio Lab team uses them to test its Surface tablets and digital personal assistant Cortana.
To create an “acoustically-controlled environment,” Microsoft specifically designed the walls, ceiling, and floor of the room with sound-absorbent wedges.
Underneath the largest chamber, there’s an entirely separate foundation from the rest of Building 87: The room sits atop springs.
That means that researchers have to step across a bridge to get into the chamber.
Here’s a peek at the wedged ceiling.
A Gizmodo reporter who went into one of the chambers wrote that voices sounded clipped, because they lacked the barely perceptible echoes that normally accompany speech. “My own voice sounded like it was having trouble coming out of my head,” Wilson Rothman wrote. “For a moment, I felt genuine disorientation, like the light-headedness you can get with low blood sugar.”
