How my visit to an anechoic chamber changed the way I understand sound

Get you someone who looks at you the way I look at an anechoic chamber

We live in a very loud world. All around us is ambient noise: cars honking, people talking, phones ringing. One can achieve a sort of quiet by escaping to nature, yes, but even nature offers its own background sounds: birds chirping, brooks babbling, branches rustled by gusts of wind. It is hard for us to imagine what a truly soundless existence is like.

But it is no longer hard for me. For last weekend, when I was in Nashville, Tennessee, I visited the anechoic chamber at Vanderbilt University. Break down the word into its roots and you'll understand what it means: "an" - Greek: "without," (see also, anaerobic, "without air); "echo" - sound feedback, or reverberation. If that still doesn't make sense, here's a simpler explanation: An anechoic chamber is a room specially designed to eliminate the reflection and refraction of sound after its origination. In the world outside anechoic chambers, if you clap, you don't merely hear the clap: You hear the clap as it bounces off the wall, the air, the objects around you. And ditto for every other sound you make.

This is not the case in an anechoic chamber. You hear only the sound itself. The chamber "captures" the echo, killing subsequent resounding. This creates a quietude unlike virtually any we can experience in the real world. In fact, the first I heard of such a chamber was in a news story that went semi-viral a few years ago, which claimed that spending 45 minutes in such a room will drive you insane. The reason? Being in a room that quiet allows you to hear noises your own body makes that are usually inaudible, like the movement of your blood, and the functioning of your organs. It also heightens the typically feint sound of the beating heart. And, above all, it cancels out the din of existence itself, the default level of noise that we've accustomed ourselves to living today. Some people, apparently, just can't handle it.

I have been desperate to find out whether I was one of those people ever since first reading about anechoic chambers. And just before leaving last weekend on my trip to Nashville, a piece of long-forgotten information resurfaced in my brain: Somewhere in the city, there was an anechoic chamber. So I did a bit of research and discovered that the chamber was housed at Vanderbilt University. A bit more digging, and I managed to find the Vanderbilt faculty member in charge of the thing. On a lark, I sent him an email, asking if it would be possible for me to go inside while I was there, on account of my longtime interest. He said yes, and I was set.

A friend accompanied me to the chamber that day, ostensibly because he was interested as well, but perhaps also to keep me from going insane; or, failing that, to manage my insanity upon its inception. As far as I could tell, only he, myself, and the Vanderbilt faculty member who agreed to let me inside were on the floor of its location when we arrived. It was quiet on that floor--or so I thought--when the unassuming man led us to the deceptively modest door of the chamber. Just outside the room itself was a set of diodes, control panels, monitors, and other such equipment, similar in array (if not in exact function) to what one would expect outside of a recording studio. But I did not come here for that. And soon, my guide brought me into what I had come all this way for: the chamber itself.

Abandon all sound, ye who enter here 

The anechoic chamber was unlike any room I have ever been in. From the moment I entered it, and without the door to the room even being closed, the sonic landscape I perceived was completely different. The ambient buzzing of lights, the scattered scuffing of shoes on floor--all vanished, replaced with nothing except perhaps a very light ringing in my ears that could have been how my auditory organs chose to register the extreme soundlessness. The room itself was huge: its dimensions stretched both above us, surely to the next floor, and under us, surely to the floor below. Between us and the lower portion of the room was a mat of thin yet springy wire, almost like mattress springs. What I can only describe as foam spikes, always in pairs, covered all four walls of the room, pointing out at us as though at any moment I would enter an Indiana Jones movie and they would start to close in on me. In the middle of the room was a single chair, surrounded by a large metallic ring*, off of which hung a circular array of small speakers. I would never dare to say such a place had a nefarious purpose, but this setup made it look like a place where James Bond might be tortured. It also reminded me, for reasons I can't quite explain, of something out of Inception. You'll notice that I keep reaching for fictional analogues to describe this place; that is because I can find no nonfictional analogue to it in my own experience--save perhaps a recording studio, albeit one on steroids.

A narrow view

Our Vanderbilt guide explained why the room was made the way it was. It extended to the floors both above and below it to minimize the amount of sounds that could seep in from the building itself: air conditioning, the functioning of other equipment, etc. The wire floor was enough to keep us from falling below while also not being substantial enough in its own right to provide an alternative source of sound refraction. The foam spikes, arrayed in outward-facing pairs, both absorbed sound and captured it, reducing echo by forcing it into the point between the spikes until it dissipated entirely. Think of it as a sort of reverse feedback. And the single chair surrounded by speakers was its primary research manifestation. In a room so thoroughly soundproofed, researchers could build an auditory landscape from scratch. You could sit in the chair in the dark and in complete silence and have sounds issued at you from any combination of the speakers, or all of them at once. In such an environment, you could convince your ears that you were in a location of entirely different spatial dimensions from the one you actually occupied, like a giant cathedral. There were no true medicinal purposes to this room; it was for research alone. Sometimes, they even accept requests from local music acts to record in it. Manufacturers of notoriously loud objects, such as airplanes, have rooms many times its size but identical in nature so they can test the sound generation of their equipment, as basically sonic wind tunnels. There are all sorts of thing one can do with an anechoic chamber.

The chair of sound

Which may be part of why this room entranced me from the moment I entered it. And the more our guide told me, the more fascinated I became. I could already notice a difference in the sound (or lack thereof) around us when we walked in, even though he hadn't even closed the door. Once he did that, all the eerie silence of the room kicked up a notch. Just talking sounded weird. In a few moments of silence, I could hear my heart beating, my blood moving, and my stomach noisily squelching and digesting my lunch. And clapping--oh, clapping! I struggle even to describe what it sounds like to clap in such a place. It was as though my hands were made of sponge. We don't realize, outside of such a place, how much of the noise of a clap is actually its echo. But in the anechoic chamber, you realize it by its absence. Never did I think something so simple as a clap could be so mindblowing.

Yet all this was a mere prelude to the peak of my experience in the anechoic chamber. On two occasions, our Vanderbilt guide allowed me in the room alone, with the door closed, in the dark. I would soon get the answer as to whether such an environment could actually drive me insane. On the first stint, I sat in the chair, preparing myself. First, the door closed. Then, the lights went off. I closed my eyes. After only a few seconds, I felt completely weightless, like I was floating in a pool, or perhaps in space. In the essence of quiescence that I experienced, I heard nothing at all, and I began to lose spatial orientation: up, down, right, left--all of this lost its typical meaning. My thoughts quickly drifted to where they usually only go on the edge of sleep, a twilight wasteland of fragmented cogitations. I felt like I could stay there forever.

Me, in my element 

Then the lights came back on, the door opened, and our Vanderbilt guide returned me to reality. It had somehow only been a minute. But I had experienced something more powerful than my deepest sleeps. And I had an identical experience when, as we were about to leave, I begged for another time in the chamber alone. The main difference between the first and second times was that, on the second time, I felt like I could have fallen asleep almost instantly; that, in fact, I may never be able to sleep anywhere else.

Alas, my time at the anechoic chamber had come to a close. Before we left, though, I had to ask our Vanderbilt guide whether what I had heard was true: Could prolonged exposure to this environment really make people go insane? Can we sound-accustomed humans really not handle such a deprivation? He said no: Indeed, he sometimes spends consecutive hours in it alone, with only a lunchbreak, and his sanity is still fully intact. He seemed like a pretty sane fellow, so I guess I have to take him at his word, for now.

And so we left the most incredible room I have ever entered. This despite the fact that I had so much left that I still wanted to do in there. I wanted to sit in there until I heard all of my organs churning. I wanted to wait and see if I really did go insane. I wanted to take a nap, because I've never been anywhere quieter and more conducive to sleep for the light sleeper than I am. I wanted to whistle in there, which I wish I'd had the presence of mind to think of doing. And, above all, I wanted to sit in the chair, turn off the lights, and blast Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon from all the speakers surrounding me and listen to the whole thing, which I think is how the band actually meant for it to be experienced. For now, these desires will have to wait until my next trip to an anechoic chamber. For rest assured, there will be another trip. I didn't even go to the one that inspired all of those viral stories; it's in Minneapolis. I will return to this kind of room while I have time left to do so. This kind of experience is not the sort of thing you only do once.

Me, laying down some sick tracks

As my friend and I left the building that housed the chamber, the sounds of the world began to creep back in: the cars, the people, the birds, the wind. But I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that they all sounded a little bit...different. If it's true that you can only truly appreciate a thing by experiencing its absence, then perhaps the chamber heightened my perception of the sounds I usually hear. It got me unused to them, if only briefly, making my reintroduction to them all the more noticeable. A week later, I don't think the experience of being in a soundless room has made me permanently unable to tolerate sound (a la Rick and Morty's "absolute level"), insane, or unable to sleep. Yet I do have some evidence it had an effect on me. As my friend and I walked around Vanderbilt's campus after leaving the chamber, I heard a light ringing on the ground. I stopped, turned around, and scanned the ground, discovering that I had kicked a penny. I joked to my friend that the fact that I had heard it and he had not meant that the anechoic chamber had improved my hearing to Daredevil-esque levels (we had joked beforehand that some bizarre mishap in the chamber would occur while I was inside that would give me sound-based superpowers). And when I picked the penny up, I noticed something strange: It was minted in the year of my birth.

Had my chamber-enhanced hearing not only allowed me to hear the penny itself, but also the slight variations in its grooves and etchings that would distinguish a penny minted in 1993 from one minted in 1992 or 1994? Who is to say? All I can say is that I must return to an anechoic chamber as soon as possible, and that I highly recommend you take a visit as well. In a loud world, they offer a quiet unlike anything you've ever experienced.

Unless, that is, you've already been in one.

*They are planning to add another ring, circling vertically, for maximum auditory landscape manipulation.