The World’s Quietest Room: A Place So Silent, It Can Drive You Crazy

Imagine a place so quiet that the only sounds you hear are the ones your own body makes—your heartbeat, your breathing, even the blood flowing through your veins. Welcome to the world’s quietest room, a space so silent it holds the Guinness World Record.

In 2015, Microsoft created this unique room, known as an anechoic chamber, at their headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The chamber was designed to block out all external noise, and the results were astonishing. Tests revealed that the room had an average background noise level of -20.35 decibels A-weighted (dBA), which is quieter than any other place on Earth.

What makes this room so unsettling is the experience of being inside it. After just a few minutes, you start to hear sounds you never noticed before—your own heartbeat, the grinding of your bones, and the flow of your blood. The room doesn’t just silence the outside world; it amplifies the internal noises of your body.

This eerie silence is achieved through careful design. The chamber is built with six layers of concrete and steel to keep outside noise at bay. The walls, ceiling, and floor are lined with fiberglass wedges that absorb sound, preventing it from bouncing around. The floor is even supported by special springs to dampen vibrations.

Only a few people have managed to stay in the room for more than an hour. The absence of sound becomes overwhelming, causing a ringing in your ears and a feeling of pressure in your head. Some describe the experience as unsettling, even maddening.

Interestingly, there’s another room in Minneapolis that’s vying for the title of the world’s quietest room. Located at Orfield Laboratories, this chamber once held the record with a noise level of -24.9 dBA. Its designer, Steven J. Orfield, has applied to reclaim the title from Guinness World Records.

Whether or not it reclaims the title, the experience of these rooms remains the same: total silence that borders on the unbearable. As one expert put it, the sound level in these rooms is as close as you can get to the “absolute zero of sound” without being in a vacuum. It’s an experience so rare and intense that most people can’t handle it for long.