Late mid-morning. You completed your exercises and
were reading BBC and came across an interesting article that has a sense of
dimension in it; a room of silence and how it is to sit in one. - Amorella
**
**
BC Future
"Inside the quietest
place on Earth"
Microsoft has built a chamber so quiet, you can hear the
grind of your bones – and it’s helping to fine-tune the next-generation of
electronic goods.
· By
Richard Gray
29
May 2017
If LeSalle
Munroe stands still for a few moments in his “office”, something unsettling can
happen – he can hear the blood rushing around his body and his eyes
squelch as they move in his skull.
While many
people work in places filled with the tip-tap of keyboards, the hubbub of
chatter from colleagues and a constant hum of computers, Munroe is surrounded
by almost total silence. His office is the quietest place on the planet.
The specially
constructed chamber is hidden in the depths of Building 87 at Microsoft’s headquarters in
Redmond, Washington, where the firm’s hardware laboratories are based. Products
like the Surface computers, Xbox and Hololens have all been developed here.
Microsoft’s engineers built the room – known as an anechoic chamber – to help
them test new equipment they were developing and in 2015 it set the official
world record for silence when the background noise level inside was measured at an
ear-straining -20.6 decibels.
To put that in
context, a human whisper is about 30 decibels while the sound of someone
breathing normally comes in at just 10 decibels. It gets close to the limit of
what should be possible to achieve without creating a vacuum – the noise
produced by air molecules colliding with each other at room temperature is
estimated to be about -24 decibels. The limit of human hearing is thought to be
around 0 decibels, although just because our ears cannot pick it up, it does
not mean no sound present, hence it is possible to get a negative value.
“It is a very
unique experience inside with the door closed,” says Munroe. “When you stop
breathing, you can hear your heart beating and the blood flowing in your veins.
I don’t stay inside with the door closed very often.”
It took almost two years to design and build the chamber where Munroe’s
team now spend their days putting Microsoft’s technology through its paces.
Even finding a suitable building took nearly eight months of testing to find
one quiet enough to house it.
The chamber sits at the heart of six concrete onion layers that help to
block out sounds from the outside world. This nest of rooms within rooms – each
with walls up to 12 inches thick – helps to cut the noise reaching the
chamber by around 110 decibels. If a jet was taking off just outside the
building, you would hear little more than a whisper inside the final concrete
bunker where the chamber is.
“This insulation makes a huge difference,” explains Hundraj Gopal,
principal human factors engineer at Microsoft who led the team that built the
anechoic chamber. The chamber itself floats on top of 68 vibration damping
springs mounted on its own separate foundation slab.
“This means the chamber doesn’t make direct contact with the building
around it at any point,” says Gopal. “It is why it took us more than a year and
a half to build this thing. I often joke that I aged six years in that
time.”
The anechoic chamber is a cube measuring 21ft (6.36m) in each direction.
Each of its six surfaces is lined with clusters of 4ft-long (1.2m) wedges of
sound absorbing foam, helping to prevent any echoes bouncing off the walls from
any sound produced inside. A floor made from steel cables – the same kind used
to stop fighter jets as they land on aircraft carriers – are knitted together
like a trampoline net above the foam wedges on the bottom of the chamber.
Seals around the doors of the chamber and the rooms surrounding it also
help to keep noise from leaking in. Gopal and his team even suspended a
specially designed air conditioning system and sprinkler system in the 4ft
(1.2m) gap between the chamber and the concrete wall of the room it sits
within.
“The chamber
itself is one that is commercially available so anyone can buy it,” says Gopal.
But they paid extra attention to any minor feature that might bring unwanted
sounds into the room. “The secret is in the extra time and energy we put into
isolating the sprinkler system, putting in door seals, a specialised air supply,
staggering the openings and the way cables go in. There is a lot that went
around this chamber that makes it unique.”
The result is
a spot that is staggeringly quiet. Before officials from the Guinness Book of
Records arrived to take measurements in Gopal’s anechoic chamber the world
record for the quietest spot on Earth was held by Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, which had an anechoic
chamber that had noise levels of -9.4 decibels. The Microsoft lab smashed that. “We didn’t set out to build the quietest chamber on the
planet,” says Gopal. “My intention was to have something that was at least zero
decibels, which is the lowest the average human can hear.”
You would
think that a place so quiet would also be peaceful. But for those who spend any
time in there, it is far from the case. Gopal often gives visitors to Microsoft
a tour of the audio laboratories, which includes a trip inside the anechoic chamber – and most find the experience very
uncomfortable. “Some people want out within a few seconds,” he confides. “They
say they just can’t be in there. It unsettles almost everybody. They can hear
people breathing on the other side of the room and hear stomachs gurgling. A
small number of people feel dizzy.”
This might
seem like a strange reaction when most of us spend our lives seeking a bit of
respite from the noise we are bombarded with every day. But Peter Suedfeld, a
psychologist at the University of British Columbia who has studied sensory
deprivation, compares stepping into one of these chambers to being like
entering a dark room. “We are used to every sound producing a small echo from
the world around us,” he points out. “In these chambers, there is just dead
sound. It is just like going into a dark room, at first you cannot see anything
but over time your eyes adapt.”
Cut off
from the daily noises that usually drown out our body functions, it becomes
possible to hear the grind of bones as your joints move, the ringing of
tinnitus can become deafening. But Gopal says there are some people who enjoy
the experience of being inside his chamber.
“There
are people who do love it and say it is meditative,” he reveals. “They find it
relaxing. But the longest I’ve seen someone stay inside for is an hour, and that
was to raise money for charity. I think if you
spent too much time in there it would drive you crazy. Every swallow you make
is really loud.”
For Munroe,
this silence has a far more constructive use than simply eavesdropping on the
grumblings and gurglings of the human body. Instead, they listen in on
electronic equipment while it is in use. They are looking for tiny vibrations
that are produced by capacitors on electronic circuit boards as current passes
through them. These can make the components on the board produce annoying hums
that can be off-putting for consumers.
“We try to
find out where on the board a noise is coming from and what strategies we can
use to mitigate it,” explains Munroe. “For example, we have tried putting
capacitors in different configurations so the vibrations cancel each other
out.”
They also look
at other components on computers that can make noises – from the power supply
to the cooling fan and the sound from your display as you increase the
backlighting. But not all of their work is about trying to find unpleasant
noises. They also help to tune the sound that different components should make.
“We look at keyboard noise,” says Munroe. “Getting a keyboard to sound a
particular way is a critical thing. We do experiments on different types of
materials for the keys, different spring mechanisms – all to get the right feel
and sound from a keyboard.”
Speakers also
get put through their paces in the laboratory as it allows the team to use the
sensitive equipment to look for any distortion or clipping of frequencies. The
performance of microphones in products can also be tested in a similar way.
Recently,
engineers have also been using the chamber to test the performance of new
technologies such as Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant Cortana and
developing techniques to replicate three-dimensional sound for its virtual
reality HoloLens display.
The team has
also had a number of applications from researchers who want to use the chamber
to conduct biomedical research. There is some research, for example, that
suggests short-term sensory deprivation can induce temporary psychotic episodes and hallucinations, which could help in the study of
schizophrenia.
Gopal is
reluctant to branch into medical and behavioural studies. Putting patients into
such an unusual environment would likely require volumes of special legal
clearance. The laboratory’s busy testing schedule also makes it difficult to
find time for such studies. On a personal level, however, the real power of the
chamber for Munroe and Gopal comes when they leave after a spell inside.
“When you open the door it is almost like a waterfall
of sound hitting your ears,” says Munroe. “It is like stepping out into a
different world. You hear things that you wouldn’t normally notice. It gives
you a new perspective.”
Selected and
edited from http://www.bbc dot com/future/story/20170526-inside-the-quietest-place-on-earth?ocid
= ww.social.link.facebook
[Underlining
for my reference]
** **
Carol
had you out cleaning critters and leaves from under the deck. So, is the above
an example of a dimension? - Amorella
1134 hours. No, it is an aspect of a perspective. I
need to go to the dictionary once again. I should have come up with a
definition of a dimension first, certainly one in reference to quantum physics
and 'The Grand Design'.
**
**
The Grand
Design, take a philosophical position to support a
view of the universe as a multiverse, and define it in the book as
model-dependent realism which
along with a sum-over-histories approach (see path integral formulation of
quantum mechanics) to the universe as a whole, is used to claim that M-theory
is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe, mainly due to lack
of viable alternatives.
From Wikipedia - M-theory
**
**
Post.
- Amorella
You
had a mid-afternoon lunch at Olive Garden. Tim mowed your lawn and his own
earlier. You took him some ice water and had a nice chat on the front porch
after which he continued. - Amorella
1647 hours. I was always great to be out of school for the summer.
Different hours and a different focus, some times less reading, some times
more. Always travel time for two or three weeks at Carol's parents at Sun City,
Center after Dad's retirement from Washington and a variety of embassies.
Dusk.
You watched NBC and ABC News and the last new "Elementary". Carol is
presently watching one of her favorites as a catch-up. Let's work on Chapter
Twenty-two. - Amorella
2112 hours. Sounds good to me.
2145 hours. We have made corrections
mostly in clarity and grammar. Tomorrow we can work on Soki's additions.
Post.
- Amorella
Tomorrow Soki is going to listen to a conversation between
Onesixanzero and Ship and it is going to remind him that he does not have complete
control of the storyline and neither does the machinery. Both machinery and
Soki feel there are eleven dimensional aspects to reality but that when the
eleven are added together there is one more, twelve. - Amorella
2158 hours. I don't know how this will be. I only
have five dimensions so far not eleven and even so, with eleven by tomorrow I
don't see how eleven total adds up to twelve, not with any plausibility anyway.
I don't want to move the book into a fantasy category -- literary science
fiction will do just fine.
The book is literature, boy, not science fiction and not speculative
fiction either. All for tonight. Post. - Amorella
2204 hours. I don't like not knowing how this
chapter is going to play out.
You are kidding, right? - Amorella
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