Please Crank up the Volume, the Silence is Driving the Neighbors Crazy.

A well-known fact about our human existence is that too much noise can drive us crazy. A less known fact might be that too much silence can drive us crazier still.

The quietest place on earth is the Orfield Laboratory anechoic chamber. "Anechoic" is latin and simply means "void of any echoes". The best such chamber has a noise floor of -9.4dB. This is two times below the hearing threshold of 0dB and around 8,000 times quieter than what we would consider a comfortable silence.

The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratory that is built to test equipment in an environment that is void of any sound by eliminating all sources other than the equipment to be tested, as well as eliminating all reflections by placing absorbent cones on the walls.

And here is where a strange manifestation of human hearing takes place. We actually hear much better than we think, better than our brain lets us. After as little as 15 minutes in this complete silence, the sensitivity to sound adjusts upwards to a degree that even the most minute sounds are amplified far beyond what is usual or even imaginable to us, especially when combined with other sensory deprivation. By experiencing this most silent place on earth in complete darkness, a state of hearing soon sets in that most everybody finds disturbing.

Deprived of external sounds, the sound of our organs, the blood flow through our brain, the sounds of our lungs, our beating hearts and the growls of digestion become very audible. But worse, due to the lack of external references, these sounds are perceived as coming from the outside the listener. In an anechoic chamber such as this, we become the sound.

An environment like that also makes it apparent how much our sense of hearing and our sense of balance are linked. After a relatively short period of time in this chamber and in darkness, most people will find it difficult to stand.

While perhaps not at that level of complete silence, the anechoic chamber we use to test and improve our hi-end loudspeakers does have a similar effect and immediately upon entry, the experience is distinctly unpleasant.

Steve Orfield, the founder of the lab, has stated that no one has ever lasted longer than 45 minutes before asking to be released from what is clearly a distressing experience.

While the quietest place on earth would clearly make for an effective form of torture, its purpose is clearly technical in nature. Many equipment manufacturers go there to test different types of equipment, and while loudspeakers sound outright terrible in anechoic chambers, testing them in that type of environment is the industry standard. It certainly is not an audiophile experience, as it leaves the listener disoriented and unable to make sense to what he or she has just heard in a spatial context. The best comparision would be as if the instruments were recorded like Pink Floyd´s “two lost souls in a fish bowl” part of Wish You Were Here, if that makes any sense to anyone.

Orfield laboratories anechoic chamber has the fame of being the most quitet place on earth, but it is certainly not the worlds largest anechoic chamber. Benefield Anechoic Chamber at Edward airforce base is the largest facility and able to hold large military transport planes. This chamber, however, was not designed to be quiet at all: The echoes the chamber intends to eliminate are radar echoes or electromagnetic waves for testing the stealth charracteristics of aircraft and other military equipment.

Sensory deprivation has been the subject of scientific study beyond the dog and pony show at the Orfield Laboratory. For years scientists have been working with subjects in floatation tanks, where they are suspended in a salt-water solution giving completely neutral buoyancy, and a perfect match to the subjects body temperature. Add darkness and the complete lack of sound and within an hour, subjects enter a hallucinogenic state. When the brain is deliberately deprived of external stimuli, it creates its own. Many users of floatation tanks experience rather pleasant visual hallucinations like fractal patterns, or bouts of light.

The auditory hallucinations that I personally am more interested in are not necessarily as pleasant. While some perceive beautiful chants and arias, others report similar distress equal to that expressed by those sitting in the dark at Orfield Lab, an externalized experience of highly amplified bodily sounds and a lack of spatial orientation that may be disconcerting given the fact that you are floating in something that while designed to keep us afloat, will give us the perfect illusion to be a great place to drown.

Like most audiophiles, I do consider myself a psychonaut and will definitely turn off the light next I am in the anechoic chamber to do work on our bookshelf form factor of SoundSommeliers that we plan to launch early 2016. I will also check out a floatation tank some time soon. I'm looking forward to learning something about myself.

Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.

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