The official quietest place on earth is a chamber on the Microsoft campus
In order to test equipment and work on voice recognition projects, Microsoft needed to build an incredibly quiet anechoic chamber on its campus in Redmond, Washington. It turned out the room they made was so quiet it shattered a world record.
Guinness has verified that the chamber, which is lined with wedge-shaped sound absorbers, reaches -20.3 decibels, an amazing feat considering the fact that when air molecules bounce off of each other, the noise barely registers -23 decibels. The chamber is in Building 87, but it's far away from the other rooms in order to keep vibrations out. The previous record of -13 decibels was set at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, NBC News reports. Catherine Garcia
The Week
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