Deep inside Microsoft's Redmond campus is the quietest place on earth.
The tech giant uses this special room for a variety of purposes, from fine-tuning its headphones to perfecting the sound of clicks.
However, the company found that for most people, it was too quiet and no one could tolerate being inside for more than 45 minutes.
The few outsiders who walked in reported feeling uncomfortable, from being startled by their own loud breathing to constant ringing in their ears and a thunderous rumbling in their stomachs.
Hundraj Gopal is the leader of the team responsible for constructing Microsoft's Redmond room
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Hundraj Gopal, Microsoft's principal human factors engineer and the leader of the team responsible for constructing the anechoic chamber, which has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the quietest place on Earth, mentioned that some people enter the chamber for only a minute and immediately want to leave.
According to Hundraj Gopal, Microsoft's Redmond campus overwhelms their senses; it's sensory deprivation.
He added: ‘Just the chamber cost us $1.5m, which shows you how serious we are about audio.’
Microsoft's Redmond campus is home to an anechoic chamber, which measures 21ft (6.36m) in each direction
Its purpose is to achieve the utmost level of silence, providing engineers with a pristine environment to fine-tune audio devices and sound.
The chamber consists of six layers of concrete, each up to 12 inches thick, effectively isolating it from external sounds.
The walls, floor, and ceiling are covered in oversized fiberglass foam wedges to eliminate any reverberations.
The chamber is supported by 68 vibration-damping springs and rests on its own separate foundation slab, completely detached from the rest of the building.
Inside the chamber, the floor is composed of steel cables similar to those used for arresting fighter jets during aircraft carrier landings, forming a net-like structure beneath the foam wedges.
Microsoft's anechoic chamber, blocking 120 dB of sound.
Chris Kujawski, Principal Designer in Microsoft's Device Team, asserted that the audio chamber constitutes an indispensable element of the company's, said it showed ‘the level of craftsmanship and nuance in our products very few people know about.’
‘This chamber blocks 120db, so if you had a jet engine taking off just outside, you would barely hear it,’ said Gopal.
‘We work with engineers on everything from mouse clicks to the sound your laptop makes when the latch closes, those sounds are very important to us.
‘We obsess over this minutiae other companies ignore. We have seven sound chambers in this building, and over 25 in the company.'
