The Sunday Read: ‘Could I Survive the “Quietest Place on Earth”?’
The Daily
The Madness of the Orfield Chamber
Earlier this year, members of the public began, apparently spontaneously, and via TikTok and YouTube, convincing one another that the room was created as an invitation to compete, that spending a few hours alone inside it entitled a person to a cash prize./nBut the value of this cash prize was up to $7 million, and that anyone could attempt to win it./nOrfield Labs was bombarded with phone calls and emails from people demanding a shot at winning money./nThere was no contest. But the mystique of the twoquiet room, if construed by outsiders, has perhaps been bolstered by the company's website, which advertises an experience called the Orfield Challenge, whereby, for $600 an hour, a person can attempt to set a new record for time spent in the chamber./nA person inside an anechoic chamber will not hear nothing. The human body is in constant motion, inhaling and expelling air, settling limbs into new positions, pumping blood./nAnd so, constantly creating sounds, although usually we cannot hear them. Environments we think of as ultraquiet are typically quite a bit louder than the floor of the human hearing threshold, which is around zero decibels. A library reading room, for instance, might clock in at 40 decibels. An anechoic chamber does not sharpen hearing. It removes the noise that otherwise drowns out the soft, ceaseless sounds of a body,.
